Networking and security company Cisco has announced that its Webex Calling and Webex Contact Centre cloud-based services have been made generally available in South Africa, and that it has launched a local Point of Presence (PoP) in partnership with and hosted by cloud services company Amazon Web Services.

The PoP enables voice and video calling traffic for Webex Calling to reside within South Africa, which helps to enhance call quality, reduce latency and strengthen security resilience for customers in the country.

The new PoP is part of Cisco’s ongoing investments in infrastructure in South Africa and the wider sub-Saharan Africa region.

For Webex Contact Centre customers, the PoP provides an AI-powered platform that integrates with Cisco's cloud calling solutions, as well as providing a variety of cloud-based services, backed by Cisco's robust communication infrastructure.

“The aim of Webex Contact Centre and the AI agent is to boost customer experience by combining the whole contact centre into a customer experience platform,” Cisco Middle East and Africa Collaboration Solutions director Ahmad Zureiki said at the launch of the PoP, in Randburg, on January 29.

The AI platform brings all the typically fragmented data on a customer together and places it in front of the human customer service agent.

The AI assistant will summarise the call or message, highlight how many times a topic or person has been mentioned and record the information for future use. All of this has been built into the Webex platform.

This means that, after a customer has engaged with a customer service digitally on any channel, the system will circulate all the data and then recognise the customer and his or her past interactions, and reflect these for the agent as well, he explained.

“While engaging with the client with full knowledge of their past communications, including sentiment analysis of their interactions, the system can advise the human agent and suggest answers, based on the customer's profile and experiences, and his or her engagement with the company's customer services,” he said.

Bringing together this information lets the AI platform to learn and then advise the agent on what may be the correct answer to the customer's query, which would differ between individual customers, he added.

Additionally, the Webex Contact Centre AI agent performs sentiment analysis on all communications, removing the need for customers to participate in surveys and automatically assigning the interaction a customer satisfaction score.

“We have found that this has helped one of our large utility company customers immensely, including automatically generating the customer satisfaction reports,” noted Zureiki.

Further, the AI agent is embedded within Cisco's Webex Contact Centre platform and accessed through the cloud, and customers can leverage components of it using their existing devices.

Businesses will be able to transition to cloud calling confidently with an enterprise-grade experience, he added.

“As South Africa’s contact centre landscape evolves, expanding our capabilities allows us to support businesses of all sizes and strengthen our capacity to serve multinational customers based in the country and operating throughout sub-Saharan Africa.

“With this local PoP, we are providing our customers with the opportunity to streamline their infrastructure and costs, while delivering a comprehensive and flexible customer and employee experience,” he said.

Meanwhile, Cisco Africa MD Shane Heraty highlighted that AI is a significant part of Cisco's global investment strategy and acquisitions. The company invests about $5-billion to $6-billion in research, development and digital architecture, and AI is a part of this investment.

“AI is part of our Webex platform, but also of our infrastructure, network, data centre and security plans. AI is end-to-end part of our investment,” he said.

He emphasised the significance of the PoP in South Africa to serve the sub-Saharan African markets, noting that it was one of only eight other such PoPs in the world outside of the US.

“I have only been in this role for six months, but every country I visit and each customer I speak to creates new opportunities, whether for technology, skills or partnerships. In many cases, we help to accelerate digitalisation programmes, and partner with enterprises and governments to help them achieve their digital ambitions.”

Additionally, when looking at the potential to increase connectivity on the continent, there are exponential opportunities.

Although this represents significant amounts of work to make Africa more connected, connectivity for children, individuals and businesses gives them access to opportunities to educate themselves and drive their businesses to create further opportunities going forward, he said.

Cisco is also seeing demand - different from many of its other markets - for smart city technologies, Heraty said.

There are challenges with water, utilities, transport, healthcare and access to connectivity in remote rural areas.

“We have seen a real uptake from our customers in the ability to transition to smart and digital cities, where the valuable and scarce resources can be delivered as effectively as possible to the citizens and organisations,” he said.

Meanwhile, in terms of security, there is also similarly vast amounts of work that need to be done, with one estimate placing the GDP loss for countries in Africa from cyberattacks at about 10% of GDP, which translates to about $4-billion lost a year, he highlighted.

“In the next four to six weeks, we will make another announcement of a platform that we will launch to address the need for security. This also represents a massive opportunity with lots of work to be done to support our customers to improve their security,” said Heraty.

Companies in Africa are spending on average 10% to 30% of their budgets on AI developments and Cisco's platform provides it with the opportunity to tap into this demand in Africa, said Cisco South Africa country leader Smangele Nkosi.