Cisco to buy customer experience platform CloudCherry

IT and networking hardware major Cisco has announced its intent to acquire customer experience platform CloudCherry to take its contact centre business forward. 

Vasili Triant, general manager and vice president of customer care at Cisco, also mentioned in his blog that the company was on course to acquire Utah-based CloudCherry. 

CloudCherry is a Cisco Investments portfolio company. Triant said CloudCherry would help Cisco by providing rich APIs, predictive analytics and customer journey mapping, along with sentimental analysis of customers. 

“For the past 20 years, we’ve been delivering leading contact center technology globally through an extensive partner network, driving better customer experiences,” said Triant. 

Cisco’s partner network currently consists of three million agents working in over 30,000+ enterprises, and the company said it collaborates with 95% of the Fortune 500 companies.  

Cisco pointed out that the company was looking towards beefing up its contact centre portfolio with the addition of advanced analytics, journey mapping and better surveying methods. The acquisition, when completed, would showcase Cisco’s vision of Cognitive Collaboration, an environment where tools and technologies come together as one and create a new approach to work and productivity.

“This new approach integrates intelligence and context throughout all collaboration experiences, including the contact center,” the official release stated. 

CloudCherry’s most recent funding was $9 million in September 2018 from US-based venture capital firm Pelion Venture Partners. The $9 million was an extension of its Series A funding after the first round in September 2016 for $6 million from Vertex Ventures, Chiratae Ventures and Cisco Investments. 

Founded in 2014 by Sriram Subramanian and Vinod Muthukrishnan, CloudCherry had raised its seed funding of close to $1 million, led by US-based early-stage venture capital firm Pelion Venture Partners. Chiratae Ventures and Chennai Angels also participated in the round. 

CloudCherry has been built to work on on-premise, hosted servers or Webex contact centres in the cloud, which makes it versatile, and also has more than 17 feedback channels that can provide critical insights. 

“Predictive analytics help agents make journey modifications in real-time such as up and cross-selling and enabling discounting or couponing to meet customer needs during the interaction, to improve first contact resolution and customer happiness,” said Triant. 

CloudCherry’s open API platform built on a microservices architecture is also said to complement Oracle’s approach towards open and flexible cloud architectures.  

Triant pointed out that the transaction would most probably be completed by the first quarter of Cisco’s fiscal year, post which Cisco will integrate CloudCherry into its products.