Customer experience improvement remains a top initiative for business and information technology leaders. The stakes are high in CX. My research has found that 95% of companies now compete on CX and, last year, two-thirds of millennials admitted to switching brands because of a single bad experience. Contact centers and the customer experience professionals who staff them are the unsung heroes of many businesses.
Cisco Live was held last week in what has become my second home, Las Vegas. I had dubbed this the most important Cisco Live in the Chuck Robbins era, as the company is looking to put a stake in the artificial intelligence ground. Simultaneously, Cisco Systems Inc. is integrating its Splunk acquisitions and reshaping the security business in real time. For most companies, doing one of these things would be all-encompassing, but these are not typical times.
This week marks the 10th anniversary of Arista Networks Inc. as a publicly traded company, and to celebrate, the company held a special event at the New York Stock Exchange, which is not only the exchange that trades ANET stock but also one of the early Arista customers. However, the shindig at the NYSE wasn’t the only way the company marked the IPOiversary. Arista also announced some artificial intelligence-related news.
Customer Contact Week, being held in Las Vegas this week, has evolved from focusing on hard-core contact centers to a broader customer experience event. This aligns with the contact-center-as-a-service or CCaaS providers’ direction, where their products have expanded beyond the traditional agent to other customer-facing roles.
The 2024 edition of Cisco Systems Inc.’s global user event Cisco Live is particularly important, as artificial intelligence has redefined networking, security, observability and collaboration. The fundamental tenet of my research is that share shifts happen when markets transition, putting the incumbent vendors at risk if they don’t evolve with the industry. In the past, Cisco has leveraged market transitions to grow its share in switching, voice-over-internet-protocol, Wi-Fi, security and other areas.