Cisco and Salesforce.com Partnership: A Complete Contact Center in the Cloud
50. That’s the number that today inspires me to relentlessly drive Cisco’s Customer Contact business forward into the future. While email and phone interactions of traditional call centers are still growing, 50% of all customers are now using social media technologies (think Facebook, Google or Twitter) to find answers to questions and solve their problems rather than calling or emailing your agents.
During this market disruption, Cisco’s vision is to include your organization in those conversations happening in the cloud right now as you read this—and ultimately help you proactively turn your customers into your most passionate advocates. This is the next step in customer care—what we call Customer Collaboration—a strategy based on the knowledge that customer interactions can take place anywhere: online, in social media, blogs, wikis, forums and online search. Customer Collaboration reaches customers in those networks, delivers proactive services where the customer is already comfortable—and defines the next frontier of a customer retention strategy.
Many of our groundbreaking products such as Cisco Unified Contact Center and Cisco Expert Advisor solutions have led the way in expanding the scope of customer care. And now there is a new and exponentially more powerful model that will blow the doors off the concept of the traditional customer contact center.
To begin bringing our vision of Customer Collaboration to market, Cisco and salesforce.com are partnering to deliver a complete contact center in the cloud by combining the salesforce.com Service Cloud with Cisco Unified Contact Center solutions. With the new Cisco and Salesforce.com Customer Interaction Cloud solution, customers will benefit from an increase in operational productivity, flexible scalability and improved total cost of ownership. Companies are empowered to deliver the expertise of the community to customers, agents and partners, regardless of location or device—ensuring that the quality of customer service can be consistent across every channel.
Customer Collaboration is revolutionary, groundbreaking and compelling. Sure, the call center with a traditional market niche and conventional structure is still growing and Cisco will always be there for those customers. Yet companies with customer service centers that target the exploding numbers of social media users now have two clear choices. They can either maintain a focus only on a traditional call center while competitors are two steps ahead—or they can bridge the divide between traditional contacts and social media and be at the front of the pack.
For more information on Customer Collaboration and the salesforce.com Customer Interaction Cloud, visit the Collaboration Community.
Posted by John Hernandez at 03:22PM PST
Spyros Oct 5, 2009
Let’s hope something good will come out of that partnership. Cisco provides state of the art machinery and it is important if it gets even better.