Avatar

We often hear stories of collaboration customers who grow frustrated with how complicated it can be to achieve their desired business outcomes, especially when they need to create an “out-of-the-box” solution on their own.

And they have a point.

A lot of the difficulty in getting your collaboration technology to work right lies in actually customizing the technology to meet your specific company needs. In fact, it’s because of this customization problem that many companies struggle to accomplish their original vision for collaboration, creating gaps and holes that lead to sub-optimal user experience and reduced ROI in collaboration technology.

To help companies achieve these outcomes easier, Cisco created a service called Custom Application Development & Integration (CADI). CADI services help you customize and optimize your Cisco collaboration software, integrate it to third-party platforms, and better address gaps relative to your specific collaboration needs.

As customers desire to seamlessly integrate collaboration technology with their existing applications and platforms such as CRM, CADI services and further customization options continue to be in high-demand. And with the growth in analytics, IT managers and directors can pinpoint their exact needs with precision, making it easy to see where custom improvements can best be made. In fact, our customers have consistently relied on us for: (1) an accelerated time to market; (2) implementation expertise and ability to handle complex integrations; and (3) additional customization.

To put things into perspective, here are a couple examples of how we’ve helped our Collaboration customers so far:

For a large US financial institution, our CADI services created an automated assisted bot powered by AI to be used in Webex Teams. For financial planners and their assistants (FPA), this bot can expedite the necessary preparation for their client’s annual reviews by 95%, taking roughly 2 minutes to complete. Within seconds, the bot quickly creates a financial review package with all documentation, creates a Webex Team space for notes and other pertinent information, and automatically schedules an event in outlook with the financial planner, FPA, and client, attaching all necessary documents. Normally this process would be filled with manual, mundane tasks but the bot makes the preparation easy and puts a whole presentation together for the financial planner so he or she can focus on more important things.

In another instance, a major European wealth management company wanted to improve its video-based booking and scheduling process. Because of the lack of integration between its legacy in-house scheduling system and its Cisco TelePresence® Management System (TMS), many employees found the process difficult. In fact, the booking process caused such significant delays in scheduling and other errors, that usage was at a record-low throughout the enterprise. To fix the issue, our CADI services team developed a Java Spring based web application that helped to automate the video conference scheduling process. It also integrated the legacy scheduling system with the TMS system and validated the solution’s efficacy, leading to a(n):

  • 80% reduction in scheduling time
  • 100% improvement in booking errors (completely eliminated)
  • 20% improvement in employee usage (adoption)

With the new integration, meetings were once again fun for employees and employee engagement returned to its normal form.

Customizing your collaboration technology doesn’t have to be difficult. And it doesn’t have to break the bank! Learn more about our CADI services here, or contact your account manager for more information.



Authors

Srinivasan Raghavan

Director of Product Management

Collaboration