Cisco SocialMiner Offers Companies Ways to Increase Customer Interactions and Impact Lead Generation Opportunities Through Social Media
SAN JOSE, Calif., Nov. 3, 2010 – Cisco today announced Cisco® SocialMiner, software that enables companies to find and proactively respond to customers and prospects communicating through public social media networks like Twitter and Facebook, or other public forums or blogging sites. Status updates, forum posts, or blogs from customers can all be monitored in real time, alerting enterprises of conversations related to their brand. Cisco’s social customer care solution enables companies not only to monitor the social Web in order to improve business intelligence but also to engage customers that require service.
According to Nielsen, more than 1 million Tweets are sent out every hour, while 34 percent of online Americans have used Facebook, Twitter or other social media to rant or rave about a product, company or brand. With more and more Web-based conversations taking place over these social platforms, it’s now more critical than ever that businesses are aware of what their customers are saying about them and are able to respond to general inquiries or rectify customer service issues so as to enhance and protect brand reputation.
Businesses worldwide use Cisco Contact Center technology to routinely handle millions of customer contacts a day, including voice calls, video, e-mail, chat and Web interactions. Social media is booming, but its use by businesses is largely ad hoc, unstructured, and unable to scale. Cisco’s expertise in operational excellence and network scaling technologies enable the company to offer businesses an enterprise-class solution for proactive social media customer care.
Cisco also announced Cisco Finesse, a web 2.0 collaboration desktop for customer care representatives that puts all the information they need in a single, modifiable cockpit enabling them to help callers faster, better, and with higher accuracy. This can help lower operational costs for businesses and increase the number of satisfied customers. Cisco rounded out the announcements with the introduction of a new network-based rich media capture platform that supports the recording, playback, live streaming and storage of media, including audio and video, with rich recording metadata. This solution provides an efficient, cost-effective foundation for capturing, preserving, and mining conversations for business intelligence.
Key Facts / Highlights:
Cisco’s Customer Collaboration software suite includes:
Cisco SocialMiner: By providing social media monitoring, queuing, and workflow, customer posts on social media networks are organized and delivered to social media customer care teams, allowing companies to respond to customers in real-time through the originating social network.
Consumers benefit from the engagement that Cisco SocialMiner enables. Customers see rapid response from businesses that are providing value-added engagement when and where consumers are seeking it. Additionally, consumers will see the benefit of enterprises engaging with them to provide service and information, rather than having to find information on their own through company web sites.
Consumers will be able to continue to manage their online privacy in social media through opt-in and opt-out settings within the social networks themselves.
Through proactive engagements with customers, companies can enhance relationships immediately, address potential consumers or product issues, generate proactive sales opportunities and manage brand perceptions.
Internally, Cisco’s Consumer Products team including Cisco Flip™ Video has been using Cisco SocialMiner to manage social media customer engagements.
Cisco Finesse: This new solution combines traditional contact center functions with Cisco QuadTM enterprise social-software capabilities.
This Web 2.0 architecture for the agent experience will allow businesses to integrate collaboration technology and business applications to give contact center agents the tools to provide the best possible customer experience.
Rich media capture: By recording conversations on the network, contact center agents will have access to captured media. The media can be accessed by different applications via simple interfaces, simplifying the architecture while helping to lower costs and provide optimum scalability for companies.
Through this ecosystem, organizations gain insights into caller issues, can guide customer service agents toward speedy first-call resolution, improve agent productivity and increase customer satisfaction.
Supporting Quotes:
Dr. Barry Sears, founder and Petter M. Etholm, CEO, Zone Labs
“Zone Labs recognizes the importance of collaborating with customers and tracking what they say over social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, so we can consider their opinions and better serve them,” said Dr. Barry Sears, Founder of Zone Labs, marketers of Zone food and nutritional products. Petter Etholm, CEO, Zone Labs, added, “Since a combined focus on customer service and product quality are at the core of our success, we chose Cisco SocialMiner to launch the Zone social media engagement initiative to enhance our interactions with Zone customers.”
Andy Dignan, senior manager, Unified Communications, CDW
“Cisco Finesse provides significant value to customers looking to modernize their agent desktop applications by incorporating Web 2.0 technologies and enterprise mashup capabilities to simplify agent interactions and back-end integrations,” said Andy Dignan, senior manager, Unified Communications, CDW. “With Cisco’s new network-based recording platform, customers have access to rich media like never before. Leveraging the network for capturing not only voice calls but also video traffic opens up a world of applications, such as real-time analytics, that have not been viable before.”
Eric LeBow, vice president, Professional Services, Spanlink
“The expansion of the Cisco customer collaboration portfolio to include social media customer care addresses the groundswell of interest we’ve heard from our customer base,” said Eric LeBow, vice president, Professional Services, Spanlink. “We’ve been working closely with Cisco throughout the definition and delivery of Cisco SocialMiner to ensure that the solution addresses the needs of our customers. We see immediate opportunities to solve one of our customers’ top-of-mind challenges: bringing scale and operational excellence to the practice of engaging customers through social media.”
John Hernandez, vice president and general manager, Customer Collaboration Business Unit, Cisco
“Companies are realizing that by ignoring the online chatter, they’re opening up opportunities for their competitors and allowing dialogue about their brand to happen without them,” said John Hernandez, vice president and general manager, Cisco Customer Collaboration business unit. “As an active user of social media, Cisco realizes the value of social media interactions to our business. Our employees were some of the earliest adopters of MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other social sites. Our own Consumer Products Group is already using Cisco SocialMiner to collaborate with their customers.”
Tags / Keywords:
Cisco, Customer Collaboration, Customer Care, Contact Center, Collaboration, Call Center, Social Media, Recording, Analytics, Social CRM, Video, Unified Communications
Supporting Resources:
Keep up with Cisco’s news by visiting the company’s Platform Blog.
For more information about Cisco’s collaboration news and activities visit the Collaboration Blog or follow us via Twitter @CiscoCollab.
Cisco Collaboration and Communication
Cisco Customer Collaboration
RSS Feed for Cisco:
http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/rss.html
About Cisco Collaboration
From award-winning IP communications to mobility, customer care, Web conferencing, messaging, enterprise social software, and interoperable telepresence experiences, Cisco brings together integrated network-based collaboration solutions based on open standards. These solutions, as well as services from Cisco and our partners, are designed to help promote business growth, innovation, and productivity. They also designed to help accelerate team performance, protect investments, and simplify the process of finding the right people and information.
About Cisco Systems
Cisco, (NASDAQ: CSCO), the worldwide leader in networking that transforms how people connect, communicate and collaborate, this year celebrates 25 years of technology innovation, operational excellence and corporate social responsibility. Information about Cisco can be found at http://www.cisco.com. For ongoing news, please go to http://newsroom.cisco.com.
Cisco, the Cisco logo, Flip and Quad are registered trademarks or trademarks of Cisco Systems, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the United States and certain other countries. A listing of Cisco’s trademarks can be found at www.cisco.com/go/trademarks. All other trademarks mentioned in this document are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word partner does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company. This document is Cisco Public Information.Contact Information:
Press Contact(s)
Doron Aronson Cisco Systems, Inc. +1 408 424 3762 doaronso@cisco.com
