Ok, while most everyone else is busy puking on Cisco’s parade for their two recent acquisitions of Social Networking Companies, and wasting otherwise productive time by ranting about why this is such a bad idea. Let’s take a look at what’s really going on here.
Unlike the News Corp-MySpace acquisition, Cisco clearly isn’t after these companies for their customer or user base. Cisco could careless about ad generated revenue. What they’re really after here is the technology. Granted, just about any high school kid could code one of these things, but why reinvent the wheel if its only going to cost you a couple million bucks to buy it?
So the question becomes, why would a router & switch company want “social networking” software? The answer is actually pretty simple.
The Contact Center.
In 1999, Cisco bought a company called Geotel that provided CTI and Enterprise Call Center Routing functionality. Over the years that followed they’ve acquired companies that provide other contact center functionality such as email, chat, web collaboration, and self-service IVR. They’ve integrated these technologies into what we in the contact center world call Multi-Channel Communications, or to be more specific Cisco Unified Contact Center Solutions.
Ok, so why social networking? Let’s start by taking a look at a still relatively unintegrated form of customer contact; the online user group forum.
A traditional customer forum site, like Roxio/Sonic for example, can divert thousands of calls into the call center by allowing customers to leverage this as a form of self-service.
Now, enter the “intelligent user group forum” a la social networks into the equation and what you have is a mechanism by which customers can actually interact with your brand online (need I mention my.barackobama.com?). To put it bluntly, Social Networks are really nothing more than online user forums that will enable companies to further extend their customer interactions on the web.
So, now you’re Cisco and you take this new software and integrate it in with the rest of the suite. What you get here is pretty damn powerful stuff.
Imagine for a minute that you’re a customer on a company’s website surfing for boxer shorts. Now let’s say you’ve been on one page for several minutes and for whatever reason you can’t find your size so you haven’t placed your order yet.
Also keep in mind that the boxer shorts company knows your size because of previous orders, it also knows that you’re looking for the yellow polka-dot kind because you belong to the yellow-polka dot customer forum. All of a sudden your cell phone rings and its your personal shopper on the line ready to help you find those special undies in your size and color.
This does two things for the boxer shorts company:
- Reduce cost by deflecting self service calls
- Increase Revenue Opportunities by customer profiling and an integrated communication strategy
Technorati tags: Cisco, Five Apart, Tribe.Net, Utah Street, the Human Network, Social Networks, GeoTel, Chris Crosby, Roxio/Sonic, contact center, call center
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4 Responses to cisco, social networks & the next generation contact center
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Chris,
do you see your company building out the reporting solution you offer now to work with other third party applications like CRM packages or sales packages? Seems like you only offer solutions that incorporate call center data only today.
I think collaboration is clearly a trend that smart software companies need to have their eyes on. People have spoken through their utilization of these social networking environments and collaboration is key.
Why wouldn’t we look to integrate these components into our solutions?
Once you have the social graph modeling your enterprise – each department, region and special interest – then you have the perfect foundation for internal and external collaboration.
CISCO at least understands that potential and knows that these junky “free” services are not providing the kind of quality that brands of value would accept.
I’m just not sure CISCO is the brand that people expect to bring them a quality branded network solution for business.
We’ll see!
[...] Chris thinks that they’re planning to offer social networks to their customers as an extension of online user forums, as part of an integrated offering to help defray customer service costs by deflecting calls from the contact center. This could be part of the reason, but social networks are typically more about user-generated content and less about pushing content to the user. So here are my thoughts on the subject. [...]