What’s in a Name – Part II – Cisco’s New Customer Collaboration Software with Social Media Punch
This morning Cisco introduced three software products, continuing its parade of customer collaboration offerings that started with a deluge late 2009 at the collaboration summit they held in San Francisco. Each announcement since that one, that contained something around 60+ products, has built on that base.
Because of talk in the industry on social media, the most interesting of the three is SocialMiner, which provides social media monitoring, queuing and workflow. This will allow Cisco contact center customers to monitor social media networks, mine customer posts, and then sort and deliver actionable interactions to different customer care teams, who then can reply to customers in real-time back through the channel that they posted on. I got to see this in action with Cisco’s Flip Video team, who was an internal “beta” customer, and it really brought to light how useful using social media as a customer care channel could be, as seeing it live as opposed to just talking about it is so much more vivid because you get to see the kinds of things that customers post.
With SocialMiner there is no forced routing to agents. Instead agents can pick, reject or postpone taking a tweet, Facebook posting, blog, etc. Any agent can pick from an alert. In this iteration of the product there will be a “bubble” that says there is social media work in queue. When I saw the product all sorts of questions popped up for me including how much of an interruption will this be for an agent if they aren’t dedicated to that one channel, what happens if two agents go for the same interaction at the same time, etc. This is a work in progress, and just as we saw with Cisco Pulse and some of the other products introduced in November, a year ago, by July, Cisco had refined the products so much more that most of my questions were answered. I expect the same after more customers start using SocialMiner. After all, all the vendors who are adding social media are breaking new territory here. I think it’s exciting.
Door number 2 is Cisco Finesse, which a Web 2.0 collaboration desktop for the agent, which is a container, or as Cisco referred to it “a modifiable cockpit” that integrates collaborative applications into the agent desktop to help agents improve the customer experience. This is a merging of Cisco Quad, announced (again) last year, with traditional contact center functionalities.
Finally, door number three is (real name coming soon) network-based rich media capture that records conversations on the network, and allows agents access to captured media through simple interfaces. The solution supports recording, playback and storage, so that agents can mine valuable information about customers; hopefully improving customer satisfaction and all those other business goals we continually talk about.
So let’s get to “What’s in a Name Part II”. Back in September I blogged about how naming conventions have changed in high tech, and how it was helping unified communications and other areas including customer care. The blog is here, but in it I said, “We have recently seen a bunch of these names come out of Cisco. For example, Cisco Pulse, “takes a pulse” on what is going on knowledge or theme wise, within a company, by scanning through everything that traverses a corporate network that has been tagged. Not only is the name short, and a real English word - not two words slammed together with a capital letter in the middle - it also elicits the image of taking a reading. Cisco’s Show and Share is similar; short, sweet and not only tells what it is, but elicits the sense that it’s easy to do. I video, and then upload and share. Cisco has some other names in the works that are equally compelling. ”
Here you have it. Cisco Finesse and Cisco SocialMiner. When Blair Pleasant and were getting to see the demo of SocialMiner last week and heard the name, we both thought the same thing. We had to step back for a second because to us, SocialMiner reminded us of the company CallMiner. But we both came to the same conclusion that it is a great name because it says what the product does, and just because it reminds us of a company, which has an equally great name for that same reason, it won’t to everyone. To most people it will be another name in a string of useful product names. Similarly, Cisco Finesse, doesn’t evoke images of what the product does in terms of it being an agent desktop, but makes perfect sense in playing off what it should enable an agent to do. Score 2 for Cisco on the names.