The Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service are part of an international competition designed to recognize excellence in disciplines that are crucial for business success. Organizations of all sizes from all over the world altogether entered over 1,100 entries for this year’s competition. Recently, winners of the 7^th Annual Stevie Awards were unveiled at a gala ceremony held in Las Vegas, NV.

Among the lucky champions was the Cisco Support Community (CSC), which was awarded within the “Innovation in Customer Service – Computer Services & Software” category for its innovative web platforms and customer service offerings. Known for its creativity and high business impact, the community strives to leverage its software-enabled community capabilities, social media, mobile technology and open APIs to redefine the future of services. Their efforts have not only resulted in over $200 million a year in cost savings for Cisco through case deflection but also accelerated design and architecture with key partners.

Congratulations to the team and all 2013 Stevie Award winners for their commendable achievements!

Tags: awards, cisco support community, CSC, customer service, innovation, social media, stevie award

Organizations small or large can deploy collaboration technologies on premises, on the cloud, or on both with a hybrid deployment. I believe that the source or the provider of collaboration technology should be transparent to the end-user and that the experience should be the same regardless of deployment model or device used.

At Cisco we’re very focused on offering flexible deployment models that support on-premises, cloud, or hybrid deployments of our collaboration technologies.  Of course, these are built on our collaboration architecture to ensure the interoperability and user experience. Read More »

Tags: Accenture, AT&T, Callway, Cisco Collaboration Cloud, Cisco HCS, cloud, Cloud Computing, collaboration, collaboration cloud, CSC, HCS, OBS, Sprint, Verizon, vodafone, WebEX

Many companies today are jumping on the bandwagon to add custom social media accounts to their list of web properties. The Cisco Support Community team is one such group, but this team has done so particularly well and seen great successes with their endeavors.

In early 2010, they launched and revamped their social initiatives in hopes of staying connected with customers and extending the community beyond Cisco’s immediate reach. Just over a year afterward, the team was recognized as the winner of the 2011 Forrester Groundswell Award in the B2B Supporting Category. What’s more, Cisco estimates that the community-based support on Facebook and Twitter is saving the company more than $400K annually! Not everybody rises to fame with the fruits of their social media labor. I was curious to find out what the team did that led to such positive results, so I chatted with Pratibha Gupta and Mohan Rao, leads of the social media branch of the Support Community team.

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Tags: award, B2B, b2b supporting category, cisco support community, CSC, facebook, forrester groundswell, linkedin, social media, Technical Support, twitter, youtube