If you serve small or medium business and aren’t planning to attend Partner Summit 2011, we’ll bring some of the content to your area with the Advantage Now! event on March 1, 2011.

The event will give you the information you need about new and enhanced Cisco collaboration solutions that will help you build a more profitable practice.

After all, the nature of how businesses communicate is changing. Your customers are interacting with their customers in new and different ways – to serve them better and to build stronger relationships.

And the pace of change isn’t slowing down.

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Tags: Advantage Now!, andrew sage, business, Cisco, collaboration, customer, medium, partner, partners, profit, small, small business, UC, unified communications

New Tools for Customer Collaboration

How great is it that we now have the ability to broadcast our gripes to anyone that will listen and if we have enough creativity, we can even re-brand ourselves to great acclaim.  But how challenging is this for a business who may be making attempts to not only broadcast a message in these new ‘social media’ channels…but is also realizing that these are great listening posts as well?  There are lots of free tools for doing this but they are next to impossible to integrate into the customer service framework that has been built and perfected over the years.

The combination of challenges and opportunities available to us these days are not limited to social media. The root issue here is that our modes of communication, the channels if you will are shifting -- some of these are really taking root (video for instance) and others are either maturing (audio) or on the brink of acceptance (twitter/facebook).

Today’s show is about the tools you can employ to respond to this reality today AND set yourself up for success no matter which way these things may shift.

Tina Shakour, our TechWiseTV Collaboration Expert assembled a great set of topics and hands-on examples for us to dive into for this, Episode 76 -- ‘Collaboration in the Contact Center‘

Tina knows where to go for answers and she started at the top.

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Tags: collaboration, contact center, social media, socialminer, TechWiseTV, UC, unified communications

As described in my contact center upgrade post, Cisco recently upgraded the Cisco Unified Intelligent Contact Management Enterprise (ICME) and Cisco Unified Communications Manager (UCM) systems that serve our contact centers to software Release 8.

Here are the top lessons we learned from this activity and the recommendations I would offer to Cisco customers who are planning a similar upgrade.

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Tags: call manager, central controller, ICM, ICME, IPCC, UC, UCCE, unified communications

IP-based phones can reduce costs and improve customer service for a better bottom line

Have you ever played the game of “telephone,” where you pass a message from one person to the next to see how much the message changes by the time it gets to the last person? Garbled communications, although funny in that context, are not amusing in business. And like mixed messages and miscommunication, a traditional PBX phone system may be holding your small business back. They’re often hard to use and manage and, in some cases, provide inferior call quality. An IP-based phone system can help your company cut costs, increase flexibility, and improve communications--all of which can give your company a competitive edge. As a result, more and more companies are taking advantage of IP-based phone systems. In-Stat predicts that 79% of U.S. businesses will be using VoIP technology by 2013.

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Tags: ip phone, small business, UC, unified communications, voip