What an amazing week at #CiscoPS22, the first Cisco Partner Summit to be hosted in the last 3 years!

As a Cisco investment company, Acqueon was honored to be part of an elite group of technology partners invited to attend the in-person event in Las Vegas last week. And of course, I was honored to represent Acqueon at Partner Summit ‘22. Cisco has long counted Acqueon as a trusted vendor who rounds out their Customer Experience (CX) solutions; we’re a Cisco Solutions Plus (S+) technology partner and Cisco reseller partners count on us to meet the outbound and advanced campaign management needs for their Cisco contact center customers. The Acqueon + Cisco alliance has been a high-performing and well-oiled partnership for years and our joint customer wins are success stories envied and admired across the Contact Center industry. Like I said, it was truly an honor to be the guy shaking hands, story-telling & knowledge-sharing in person at this year’s event!

I tend to think an exclusive invitation to an invite-only event is never to be taken lightly and a Cisco invite, especially to Partner Summit, is an event not to be missed. I’ve spent the last several days either summarizing or deep-diving into last week’s Summit for many of my colleagues and I could keep talking about my experience for weeks. There were so many memorable moments at #ciscops2022, but these four top my list:

  1. The energy was SUPERB from start to finish, but when @Oliver Tuszik kicked off the event for me and the 2000 peers who joined, then honed in on areas of CX excellence, the energy was palpable. This is indeed the “age of the partner” and we must “own it” together!
  2. Overall, Cisco just simply did an incredible job of re-energizing partners with announcements about new products and services, sales and marketing initiatives with partners and double-downing on customer experience. We all got an enhanced look at content added to Portfolio Explorer, and new ideas around the Partner Self-Service (PSS) motion most definitely commanded everyone’s attention.
  3. I know I’m not the only who left Partner Summit beyond buzzing about Cisco’s brand-new sales and marketing initiatives for partners! Need I say more? And this spirit of “better together” started right at Partner Summit, with partner appreciation events, premium entertainment and inspiring award ceremonies for partners who achieved new co-selling routes with Cisco. Electric energy, through and through.
  4. A vibrant feeling of community and support and appreciation to match. I like to think that in-person events bring out the best in our industry peers; for a few short days or hours we get to hit pause on the daily must-dos and focus (almost) exclusively on learning and relationship-building. When it comes to “work”, there’s little better than these opportunities for live connection. I’m grateful for all of it. I appreciate Debbie Clausen, Director of Transformation Amplification and Pradeep Paniyadi, Portfolio Investments Development Manager, (and their teams!) for leading the partner marketing efforts and supporting us in joint co-selling motions. I’m grateful and thankful for all the partners who could invest 1:1 time with us in executive meetings. Thank you, Cisco, for enabling that for us.

As we look towards year-end in a year that’s ending in anything but a “normal” way for so many of our peers, former colleagues and partners, I’m grateful for the ongoing strength and momentum of Acqueon’s Cisco partnership. No crystal balls are in sight, but the nature of our partnership is one that withstands macro influences. Our Conversational Engagement platform transforms Cisco Contact Centers into AI-powered customer, patient & citizen engagement hubs. Acqueon offers Cisco contact center customers an easy path to a proactive, omnichannel consumer engagement that will keep them in a position of strength for years and years to come.

This year, Acqueon turned up the heat on our Cisco integration, now providing Cisco a new path to satisfying their customers’ end-to-end consumer engagement needs. With new real-time Agent Guidance, Coaching and QM, all build right into the seamless platform integration, customers are massively improving every contact center KPI from Average Handle Time to sales conversion rates to Total Payments Collected to and First Contact Resolution. We’re already helping Cisco customers add these capabilities which we call Acqueon AiQ® (which we believe is the fastest way to fuel growth and customer retention). With so much innovation happening inside Acqueon right now (with no signs or intention of slowing), it’s a beautiful thing to know Cisco is all-in on their partner ecosystem.

Here are a handful of use cases showing how Acqueon & new AiQ® translate fast into tangible benefits:

  • Collections agents for Consumer Banking customers
  • Airline agents fielding calls from flustered customers who just received an automated flight-change notification
  • Outbound sales reps dialing customers about refinance deals at mortgage lending offices
  • Health insurance agents helping members who can’t navigate self-service options successfully, a use case that drives big improvements to patient experience KPIs all the way to/through measurable revenue cycle management impact

I’m calling out some of the real low hanging fruit use cases here, but if you think about any contact center customer with Sales, Service, Collections, Patient/Customer Engagement or Compliance needs, I would urge you to look at Acqueon’s integration for Cisco UCCE, UCCX & Webex solutions. Real-time is the here and now of customer engagement and it’s how contact centers are driving measurable ROI & cost-efficiencies. If you need a way to improve agent performance, agent experience, net new/upsell win-rates, CSAT or revenue generation, it’s undeniable that real-time agent guidance and coaching capabilities are a fast path to results.

On the heels of an incredible Cisco event, I’m more bullish than ever about the road ahead for Acqueon and Cisco. And if you’re excited, curious or in need of the most forward/future-ready, highly innovative customer engagement solutions for you or your customers, I’d be happy to show you! Drop a note on our website here or send me a message on LinkedIn and let’s talk soon!