Like a lot of us in IT, I’m into electronics. I enjoy visiting stores to get the actual hands-on experience of the product – but I admit I rarely buy on the spot. Why? I want to make sure I know what I’m buying, and frankly, that I’m getting the best deal. I either have to do research beforehand – read reviews, check prices, and clip coupons -- or search on my mobile device while I’m in the store. Depending on the results, I could either be heading to another store or heading home to make the purchase online.
This week, Cisco introduced a new way to transform that in-venue experience through Connected Mobile Experiences Web engagement. This enables organizations to communicate with opt-in mobile users – shoppers, guests, visitors -- through their mobile browser, right there in the venue.
Location-aware menus, banners, and icons as well as content-aware search enable organizations to provide venue-specific information – such as nearby dining or amenities -- as well as any information the user may find valuable based on their context: where they are, how long they are there, whether they are a new or repeat visitor, or even what sites they are visiting. This customized communication can dynamically change when the user’s context changes.
Imagine merging the online with the brick and mortar shopping experience – if I’m standing in a particular area looking at a product, the location-aware menu can provide me a link to user reviews of that particular product. And if I’m searching online for the best price, imagine the store issuing a web notification for a price match minus 5% -- I’m sold! Read More »
Planning your summer travel and vacation destinations? Where are you headed and what kind of resort experience will you consider ideal? At this year’s Interop Conference in Las Vegas, the Cisco Enterprise Networking Group unveiled its new marquee customer – MGM Resorts International – who has upped the wireless ante to ensure its visitors have access to the information they need, literally at their fingertips.
At MGM Resorts, they continue to push the boundaries of creativity and innovation to deliver the best possible experience for their guests. John Bollen, MGM Resort’s Senior Vice President and Chief Digital Officer, is always looking for ways to take what they do and make it even better. Read More »
This morning at Interop Las Vegas Cisco SVP/GM Rob Soderbery introduced the crowd to his vision for the Cisco ONE Architecture, played some hoops with NBA All Star @kyrieirving, and introduced the new Cisco Global IT Impact Survey.The Cisco Global IT Impact Survey was taken by more than 1,300 IT decision makers in 13 countries, and was commissioned to measure the impact of IT professionals on the decisions that shape their businesses. It also delved in to how those IT professionals viewed some of the big trends the industry is facing -- SDN, IoT, BYOD, etc. - while also measuring the relevance of the network itself to businesses. Read More »
Cisco’s Financial Services Industry Marketing team is pleased to welcome a monthly contribution from industry professionals sharing their insights and observations on key trends in the Financial Services industry. The opinions expressed in these posts are those of our welcomed guests and may not reflect the opinions of Cisco.
Jerry Silva, Principal at PG Silva Consulting, is a 25 year industry veteran and thought leader in retail banking. He recently had the opportunity to discuss what comprises a high quality customer experience with Kelly McSwain-Campbell, Customer Experience Director at US Bank. In this role, Kelly is responsible for working across the enterprise with all lines of business and channels to help ensure teams deliver a differentiated customer experience that builds stronger and deeper relationships.
Delighting the Customer: Simple Works
As a banker and technologist, I’ve spent a lot of time dealing with systems that manage customer self-service channels like the ATMs and online banking, or with the systems that bank staff uses to interact with the customer. As a consumer of banking services myself, I’ve always been interested in the people side of services delivery and how banks can deliver quality experiences at the branch and the attended contact center.
I recently had a chat with Kelly McSwain-Campbell, SVP and Customer Experience Director at Minneapolis-based US Bancorp, and asked her for some insight into today’s challenges and how she manages to delight the customer in spite of the increasing complexity of the banking environment. Organizational and technology complexity sometimes work to hinder our ability to provide an excellent customer experience and we as bankers sometimes find ourselves even more distant from our customers.
But during my discussion with Ms. McSwain-Campbell, she made it clear that given the challenges with managing customer expectations across the multiple delivery channels, she is focusing on simple but effective ways to stay connected with customers at each point of interaction. We spoke about three areas that can ensure customers continue to enjoy the best banking experience possible. Read More »
3 years ago Cisco entered the server platform market with the Unified
Computing System (UCS). This server platform was built from the ground up
for virtualization and immediately started making an impact and gaining
market share. Today it holds the number 2 position worldwide for blades.
At this same time Cisco began to deepen its partnership with SAP. SAP
customers who had relied on Cisco for their networking gear looked to
expand the Cisco relationship by moving their SAP instances to UCS. SAP
HANA accelerated many of these customers move to UCS. Because SAP HANA
operated outside the bounds of the Data Center, it has allowed the
companies to look at UCS without affecting their current SAP instance
while proving UCS as a fast, reliable, scalable, cost reducing platform,
giving the customers confidence that Cisco UCS can more than handle the
mission-critical application workload
But that was just the beginning of the relationship between these two
giants. The diversity of both Cisco and SAP has allowed for a much more
strategic and far reaching relationship allowing each of us to expand our
business together.
SAP Afaria and Precision Retail in SAP’s mobility area combined with the
Cisco mobility and Cisco UCS platform business is bringing mobility to
the masses in a cost efficient way. In addition SAP has begun
collaboration with Cisco’s Jabber collaboration product again using UCS
as the basis platform for these products. Teamed together, Cisco’s and
SAP’s Cloud business has also made a big impact in the form of Vblock and
Flexpod.
Last but not least, Cisco, unlike its platform competitors, partners with
EMC and NetApp for the storage and SANS product in order to complete all
solutions with SAP. Customers enjoy the flexibility of these solutions
allowing them to keep the vendors they have already standardized on. An
added bonus to these customers is that it allows them to also maintain
their reseller relationships using the massive channel capabilities of
Cisco, where over 95 per cent of Cisco products are sold
Cisco and SAP recently completed a 20 city world wide SAP HANA and Cloud
road show generating millions of dollars of new revenue for both
companies. Cisco and SAP are the world leaders in their respective
areas, reinforcing their position in the market connecting the world in
the Internet of Things.
