At the recent Cisco Customer Collaboration Analyst Event, Cisco identified its key initiatives for the coming year and its plans to continue to capture market share with its customer collaboration strategy. It also demonstrated how its continuous improvement in its collaboration product line earned increased market share against contact center competitors. Cisco credits its recent success is in providing its customers with robust end-to-end solutions and its sound financial position, which especially appeals to larger enterprise customers. During the last year It has made significant gains with competitive wins against Avaya and other established contact center solution providers.
Cisco is prioritizing the following four areas for its customer collaboration solution:
- Differentiate customers’ experience with video solutions. Video provides the opportunity to deliver a more intimate customer experience without the cost for face-to-face interactions. Healthcare, high-end retail and financial services are early adopters for providing customer service across multiple video endpoints, such as kiosks and smartphones.
- Offer mobile support from smartphone applications. Interactions with smartphone applications will outpace social media and become a primary channel for seeking customer support. Customers want direct service from within their mobile application and do not want to to repeat information already provided on their mobile device before live assistance is requested.
- Deliver scalable cloud solutions. Many customers are considering a cloud solution rather than invest in premise based equipment for upgrading their contact centers. Cloud solutions represent a fast growing market opportunity for Cisco
- Maximize resources with consolidated and departmental solutions. Many aging contact center operations have acquired too much equipment based on earlier network limitations. Multi-site customer support operations now realize real savings by consolidating sites and simplifying management and operations. This is especially important as companies now realize they require complex multi-channel support.
Cisco is also expanding into the Internet of Everything (IoE) that represents an innovative project to link people, processes, data and things to deliver higher impact customer experience. Cisco intends to partner for the data component and create intelligent applications that proactively connect products (things) to the Internet and automatically send out a signal when a problem is identified to customers and product support organizations. Automobiles, electronics and high end appliances are examples of products that would benefit from IoE solutions. The process piece is where Cisco believes it has a major advantage and will use its decisioning engine to identify problems and proactively send outbound notifications. While this initiative is in its early stages, this endeavor will potentially revolutionize how companies serve its customers through increased automation and result in significant reduction of cost for customer support.
As Cisco continues to expand is its marketing reach it believes the simplification of its product offerings has made it easier for partners to sell its entire portfolio of collaboration products. The delivery of differentiated customer experience requires an ecosystem of applications, services and strong partnerships contribute to Cisco’s success in this area. As future technology disruptions, such as WebRTC, Big Data, predictive analytics and proactive customer support change the nature of customer service, it is essential that companies, such as Cisco, remain flexible and innovative to address this changing paradigm. However, for now Cisco has established a competitive edge on its major competitor Microsoft in the contact center and customer collaboration area and has plans to keep up its momentum.
