Two themes emerged from Cisco’s Collaboration Analyst event were the delivery and execution of strategic initiatives announced previously and the strong push to grow market share at Avaya’s and Genesys’ expense. The highly packed agenda did a good job of presenting Cisco’s current market plans and major areas of focus. By selling the “Cisco” story, the company hopes to drive higher adoptions for its customer collaboration contact center line of products, while also validating the improvements and enhancements made in its contact center product line during the last five years.
Cisco has done a remarkable job of expanding its market share and divides its customers into three segments:
- High touch customer segment. These are the large enterprise customers that want full featured and highly customized solutions. This is the area that has been dominated by Avaya for many years, followed by Genesys. Cisco’s product for this segment is the Contact Center Enterprise edition.
- Mass Market segment. These are mid-sized and large customers that require the scalability and features of the contact center enterprise but have less need for a highly customized solution. Cisco’s product for its mass market customers is the Contact Center Enterprise Packaged edition. By packaging several of its applications, Cisco can reduce its list price by 20% and offer a simpler solution for its services partners to install.
- Attached market. These are the customers who buy Cisco’s Unified Communication Manager and have smaller contact centers. Cisco sells its Contact Center Express package to this segment. An advantage of its Express is the large number of certified resellers, making it easier for more partners to sell and install.
Cisco’s next release (9.0) coming out next month offers several enhancements but does not reveal any surprises The four pillars that make up the Cisco customer collaboration experience include the following:
- Mobile connectivity. Cisco embraces the adoption of mobile devices by its customers and wants to provide secure access to information and people. They have a new mobile application for administrators or supervisors that allow them to make changes in agent assignments directly from their mobile device. With strong support for mobile devices and tablets, Cisco’s offers solutions to support customers anywhere. However, Cisco does not have a productized offering for mobile application support that would connect customers directly from the mobile app into the contact centers.
- Social Customer care. This offering provides social media agent support across all market sizes and includes queuing of social media contacts as email notifications.
- Visual Support. This enables customer collaboration on video from kiosks, smart phones, and desktops to support rich media interactions. Cisco views video as a growing market with strong opportunity but admits video is still relatively small for contact center interactions today.
- Virtual support. Cisco offers server and desktop virtualization with Finesse Agent and Supervisor desktops, which reduces costs for hardware and system management. Virtualization is also important for extending contact center connectivity to the expanding population of home agents.
Cisco’s announcements show progress in shrinking its product gaps in areas, such as reporting and analytics, email and Web integration and precision routing. These are all positive moves that will improve its competitiveness in the market. While advances on its core product are extremely important, I did not see a lot of innovation with customer examples but expect its extensive developer community will continue to create inventive improvements for its product line. For Cisco competitors, I think there is something to be learned by Cisco’s intense focus to build up market share in the contact center. Competitors cannot ignore the smaller end of the market and only focus on the higher end, as Cisco continues to gain strength across all its market segments.
