Cisco has partnered with several outsourced vendors over the years for initial handling of many front-line calls and general information inquiries. Connecting these vendor environments into a single Cisco customer contact environment is critical for good customer care, but costly and not always easy. However, early this year we made a change: we’re using SIP trunking and Cisco Unified Border Element to bring us much closer together, and save money into the bargain.
This week in No Jitter, Cisco Collaboration Senior Vice President and General Manager Barry O’Sullivan looked into his crystal ball and elaborated on his predictions for 2012.
In an excerpt, Barry predicts:
“1. Post PC-era will explode
2. Video will break through
3. Contact Centers will evolve as customers choose to interact with companies in radically new ways
4. Companies will use the cloud and desktop virtualization to provide collaboration capabilities across the enterprise
5. Social business processes will become mainstream for many.”
I’m pleased to announce that customer collaboration solutions are becoming available in the cloud with the Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution for Contact Center (HCS) in early 2012. These solutions are optimized for companies with 500-1,000 agents, with emphasis on scalability, simplicity,flexibility, and speed.
Scalability allows the technology to be deployed to a wide range of customers. Thus, powerful customer collaboration solutions can scale based on the specific size and makeup of the customer. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all contact center solutions; now if you’re a small to medium-sized business you can cater to your customers’ needs and concerns with the same tools as a large one, and at vastly accelerated speed.
Midsize businesses often do not have the resources to deal with complex IT systems, which is why simplicity is paramount. With the simplified management of a cloud-based contact center solution, SMB’s IT departments can focus their time on more urgent matters.
As I’ve blogged recently, we are in the midst of a significant push in the UK contact center market. Customers, partners, and key influencers have validated that we have the right strategy, vision, and ability to execute to make a real change in the market. Coming out of my visit to the UK, are two articles published this week that do a great job of explaining how we are competing in the market.
Additionally, Alex Blyth in the lead story of “Fifty Reasons to Love Call Centres” a special supplement in Saturday’s London Times, outlined a number of changes in the customer service market, including our perspective that self-service should be used appropriately, but is not a catch-all for all customer requests. The supplement can be found Read More »
Today I’m boarding a flight to London, where I’ll spend the next few days meeting with analysts, consultants, and the press to highlight how the United Kingdom is a key growth area for Customer Collaboration and Cisco’s contact center business in general. I’ll also be spending time with key customers and partners as we continue to focus on their success in customer collaboration. I always enjoy meeting with our customers, so I’m really looking forward to having a “fireside chat” with UK-based SpecSavers, who have proven very successful with our customer collaboration solutions. In the end, customer successes like this are what’s fueling Cisco’s rise to the top.
Of course, we have seen significant customer successes across all of our geographic theaters, with lighthouse customer wins, major shifts in partner mindshare and wallet share, as well as awards and other recognition. Along with these key global proof points, we have seen that the foundation for our march to #1 has already been strongly set in North America, where our market-changing delivery of Customer Collaboration has been affirmed by the press and industry analysts.
