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According to a study by Accenture, price is not the primary reason for customer churn: 66% of respondents stated they have switched companies due to poor customer service. But what makes this number even more relevant is that 82% of these respondents felt the company could have done something to prevent them from switching.

When calling customer service, customers are often already frustrated. So when they have to call multiple times for the same issue, are put on hold for long periods, or have to repeat information to multiple people, it shouldn’t be surprising when they turn to the competition.

Your contact center is your customer service front line. It can be one of your most effective tools for retaining customers, increasing loyalty, personalizing the customer experience, and providing a consistent user experience across channels. And that’s important as the Internet continues to change the ways your business needs to interact with your customers.

Moving your contact center to the cloud provides a way to quickly and cost-effectively optimize the customer experience. With a cloud-based contact center, you can more easily manage your budget with a pay-as-you-go model that lowers internal support costs and eliminates capital investment for upgrades. Taking a cloud approach also enables you to develop an effective and affordable omni-channel strategy. Now your customers will be able to reach you the way they want, whether by voice, web, email, social media, or video.

The eBook Driving Customer Experience Excellence with Your Contact Center describes how the cloud can transform the way you deliver customer service. Some of the other benefits you get from moving to the cloud include:

  • Focus: Your service provider manages your solution, freeing you to dedicate resources to more strategic business initiatives
  • Speed: Deploy advanced contact center capabilities in weeks, not months
  • Control: Simplify budget management with predictable costs
  • Scalability: Dynamically ramp capacity up or down to meet seasonal peaks and valleys
  • Innovation: Leverage the latest technology to significantly improve the outcomes of customer issues

Underestimating the role your contact center plays in the success of your business can be detrimental to your bottom line. In fact, 71% of business leaders believe that customer experience is the next corporate battleground (source: Shaws and Ivens). You need every advantage you can get.

With the right cloud contact center solution, you can provide exceptional customer experience and retain valuable customers. And by choosing a Cisco Powered service, your contact center will offer enterprise-class performance and security so you can always be there when your customers need you.

To learn more about the different ways cloud can transform your business, visit Cisco and our partners at Enterprise Connect in Booth 405.

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Authors

Xander Uyleman

Senior Manager

Global Partner Marketing

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Today, I’m excited to announce the acquisition of Synata. Synata is a privately-held company based in San Francisco that will enhance how customers can search rooms and content within Cisco Spark, our business collaboration service.

Cisco Spark is built on the Cisco Collaboration cloud and enables customers to message, meet, or call anyone, anywhere, and anytime. Over the past year, Cisco’s Collaboration team has continued to innovate on Cisco Spark, delivering new features and increased momentum in the market. More recently, our enterprise customers have been asking us to continue developing search capabilities within Cisco Spark to deliver increasingly fast, intelligent and relevant results.

Synata’s technology allows users to search both on-premise and cloud-based applications simultaneously from one platform. Their search technology will also work within Cisco Spark’s unique approach to end-to-end encryption in the cloud, which makes them a great fit for our team. Like us, they prioritize cloud development that allows customers to have privacy and control of their data at all times. With Synata’s search capabilities, we can take Cisco Spark’s existing search capabilities to the next level. Once integrated, customers will be able to find the most relevant information quickly and securely. Read more about how Synata’s technology will be integrated into Cisco Spark on Rowan Trollope’s blog.

Collaboration continues to be a top priority for Cisco. Today’s acquisition builds on the success of other recent acquisitions in collaboration like Collaborate.com, Assemblage, Tropo, and Acano. Together, we will accelerate our development in cloud and collaboration.

We’re extremely excited to welcome a team with proven expertise in search technology to Cisco, and can’t wait to work with Synata to keep driving Cisco Spark momentum.

Find out more information about our other Cisco Spark news today here. You can also find additional information on the Synata announcement on cisco.com

Authors

Rob Salvagno

Vice President

Corporate Development and Cisco Investments

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I recently bought a new home and even before I’d signed the papers I was mentally making a punch-list of things I wanted to change and improve.

The Cisco Spark team loves punch lists, too. From the beginning, two things have been at the top of our list: world-class security and incredible search.

Just like I don’t put my passwords on sticky notes, I don’t want my team’s communications lying around unencrypted on a server somewhere – open to any sys admin or hacker who breaches the system. And as for search, well, I want not just today’s best search technology but the search technology of the future.

While we have recently released secure search in Cisco Spark, we’ve always envisioned it being even better. Advances in deep learning and artificial intelligence are making it possible for computers to predict what you want almost before you know it yourself. That’s what we want for Cisco Spark. We want it to be like that good friend who can finish your sentences. Super-fast. Almost uncannily accurate.

Some said we couldn’t have it both ways. Super-secure, they said, means super-difficult to search. Continue reading “Cisco Acquires Synata to Solve a Tricky Problem: How Do You Search What You Can’t See?”

Authors

Rowan Trollope

Senior Vice President and General Manager

IoT and Collaboration Technology Group

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Enterprise Connect definitely got underway today in Orlando. The sessions grew more crowded throughout the day and the halls got busier. I heard a lot of talk about cloud, hybrid, UCaaS, and WebRTC just in passing conversations. (And I finally stopped looking for small dogs – the jingle of the badge lanyards somehow sounds like dog collars at this show.)

The Path to UC
The first general session of this year’s conference focused on unified communications, UC Summit: Is the Path to UC Changing? With a panel of execs from Cisco, Avaya, Google for Work, Microsoft (Skype), Mitel, NEC, and Unify sharing the stage, there was definitely a variety of perspectives. But there was also a lot of agreement about hybrid.

Cisco’s Rowan Trollope talked about “a future where video is part of every conversation.” But that doesn’t mean everyone has to be on video, just that video should be an automatic part of calls. Instead of users having to choose whether to place a voice call or a video call, “the difference between voice and video calls is whether your camera is on.” He talked about interoperability being a key part of what Cisco does and how the “new interoperability” comes from web APIs. (Cisco Spark is a great example of this with its developer platform…) Continue reading “Enterprise Connect, Day 1 Wrap-Up”

Authors

Kim Austin

No Longer with Cisco

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Last week at our global Partner Summit event, at a press conference in front of global press and analysts, Cisco unveiled its Digital Network Architecture (DNA) to help customers on their journey to digitization.

The response from industry reporters has been extremely positive, as journalists highlighted the industry-wide benefits with CRN headlining that it’s going to “Change the DNA of the Channel.” Several articles also noted the importance of Cisco’s introduction of Enterprise NFV with the new DNA solutions, calling it a “game changer for the enterprise.

Highlights from the DNA press coverage include: Continue reading “Industry press respond to Cisco DNA announcement: “Cisco Launches New Digital Architecture That Will ‘Change The DNA …”

Authors

Ben Stricker

Senior Public Relations Manager

Cisco UCS

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By Leonard Luna, Senior Marketing Manager, Cisco Service Provider Solutionsheadshot-resized-sp360-132x150

Cisco will be at OFC, the world’s premier optical event again showcasing our industry leading Packet Optical Convergence innovations and solutions. We encourage you to be part of the experience by visiting our Exposition booth (#3109 in Hall C) where you can interact with Cisco demonstrations, technical experts and Cisco Service Provider executives.

This year our messaging will focus on Packet Optical Transport Innovations, Evolving the Transport Network for Packet Growth and Optimizing Data Center Interconnect.

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Continue reading “Cisco at OFC: Next Gen DCI & Transport Network Modernization”

Authors

Greg Smith

Sr. Manager, Marketing

Cisco Solutions Marketing

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Best Security Company and Best Security Organization Awards for Cisco

I speak with customers and partners frequently and I always hear common themes in the challenges that prevent them from achieving effective security. The diversity, rate of change, and complexity of what customers and partners are protecting continues to rapidly grow while the attackers continue to innovate on a global scale and become more efficient in exploiting this increasing complexity. Meanwhile resource-constrained security teams are struggling to operationalize dozens of disparate security technologies that were never designed to interoperate. These disparate technologies are often effective in their own silos at detection or protection, but are proving increasingly inept at protecting against today’s multi-vector modern threats.

These issues are a daily reality for organizations everywhere. At Cisco, we are combining best of breed products with an architectural led approach that reduces complexity and fragmentation, while providing superior visibility, continuous control and advanced threat protection.

Witnessing the industry response at this year’s RSA Conference, it’s clear that our momentum is building and that customers, partners, analysts, and the press all recognize that Cisco is leading a much needed transformation in security.

Continue reading “Cisco recognized for security leadership at the 2016 RSA Conference”

Authors

Scott Harrell

Senior Vice President and General Manager

Enterprise Networking Business

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Guest Blog by Igor Dayen, SP Product and Solutions Marketing

In this video interview, Jorge Salinger, Comcast’s Vice President of Access Architecture, explains how DOCSIS 3.1 and the Cisco cBR-8 will enable Comcast to meet bandwidth demands and service group growth. With the cBR-8 platform, headends and cable modems can support multi-gigabit rate from the start. Comcast plans to deploy DOCSIS 3.1 throughout its markets where they need capacity the most.

Continue reading “Meeting the Demands of Bandwidth & Service Group Growth with CCAP”

Authors

Greg Smith

Sr. Manager, Marketing

Cisco Solutions Marketing

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This Blog has been developed in collaboration with Avi Networks. Primary Author: Chandra Sekar, VP Marketing, Avi Networks.   Outline, Flow, Adaptation  by Ravi Balakrishnan, Cisco Systems.

Avi Networks recently acquired a large financial management software company as a customer, and experienced first-hand the customer momentum that Cisco ACI has in the marketplace. The customer in this case was faced with a need to move to a robust and dynamic network architecture. Their goal was to create a programmable and policy-driven network to enable automation, drive self-service to internal customers across multiple data centers, and roll out applications quickly. But before I continue with the customer’s use case, I’d like to present an overview of the Avi Vantage Platform for application services.

The Avi Vantage Platform – an introduction

Avi Networks has built the next generation of application delivery controllers (ADC) the Avi Vantage Platform, based on software-defined principles. Avi Vantage is a natural fit for the network automation and programmability that Cisco ACI brings to dynamic data centers. The Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) (a best of Interop award winner), acts as the centralized policy and management component in an architecture that separates the control and data planes to ensure scalability and robust traffic management. In a similar approach, the Avi Vantage Platform architecture separates the control plane (Avi Controller) and data planes (distributed software load balancers) for application services. The Avi Controller receives real time application telemetry from its data plane components while the Avi Service Engines delivers application services as a centrally managed pool of resources across the data center environment. The Avi Controller then directly controls the life cycle and configuration of the Avi Service Engines based on analyzing the application telemetry received. This continuous feedback loop ensures that the platform responds in real time to application performance issues, workload movements, or configuration changes.

 

Cisco ACI and Avi Vantage Platform Integration

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Back to our customer story

The financial management software firm chose Cisco ACI as their solution to implement a software-defined network, and layered their application services on top of the ACI fabric with the Avi Vantage Platform.

Policy model drives automation and simplification

The first implementation challenge for the customer was network services insertion and it proved to be a complex operation involving several manual steps and compatibility issues.

The integrated Cisco ACI and Avi Vantage Platform solution immediately delivered the following benefits to the firm.

  1. Service insertion was reduced from weeks to mere minutes due to the direct integration through REST APIs with the APIC. The integrated solution provides out-of-the-box automated load balancer provisioning and services insertion without the need for custom device packages.
  2. Avi Vantage also uses the APIC’s southbound APIs to implement policy control for the load balancers and ensures that security policies configured are preserved in the load balancing configuration.
  3. The complete automation delivered by the solution also made it possible to scale and seamlessly migrate workloads. The Avi Vantage multitenant architecture ensured that the customer was able to migrate workloads without impacting services across business units within the company – a sore point that once fixed made it possible for the IT team to meet SLAs for their internal customers.
  4. The firm also reduced the time to troubleshoot applications with the rich and actionable analytics provided by the Avi Vantage Platform – one of the many application insights provided by the platform includes the ability to display granular transaction roundtrip times by client using the ability to record and replay network events much like a DVR for video.
  5. Other security, performance, and client insights made the platform a powerful monitoring and troubleshooting tool for administrators.

Snapshot of roundtrip time analysis from Avi Vantage Platform

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6.  With load balancers running on x86 servers and scaling out or scaling in automatically in response to traffic patterns the customer realized TCO savings of over 50% compared to their legacy solution. In addition, overprovisioning of ADCs is no longer an issue. Administrators are able to better focus their efforts on delivering high quality IT services to their internal customer instead of spending time with manual virtual service configurations.

The ACI fabric is designed from a foundation for programmability and simplified management – Avi Vantage complements Cisco ACI with robust application services that mirror the automation achieved through ACI.

Avi Networks is a proud member of the Cisco solution partner ecosystem and I look forward to more successful joint customer engagements.

Related Links

www.cisco.com/go/aci

Visit Avi Networks – http://www.avinetworks.com/

Solution Brief – https://avinetworks.com/media/pdfs/Application_Delivery_for_Cisco_ACI.pdf

Blogs: http://blogs.cisco.com/datacenter/discover-how-cisco-aci-avi-networks-joint-solution-enables-faster-application-rollouts-and-continuous-performance-monitoring

 

 

 

Authors

Ravi Balakrishnan

Senior Product Marketing Manager

Datacenter Solutions