Networking Giant or Social Networking giant?
Posted by tggokul on February 10, 2007
Close on the heels of IBM (who thinks that the future is in social networking) looks like Cisco has has been sold out on the whole social networking thingy as well. Cisco has announced its intent to buy Five Across, makers of Social Networking software.
It is not surprising considering that Cisco’s strategy of late has leaned towards selling more customer-facing products. YOU seem to be the real deal these days and the success/failure of a product is directly linked to what YOU want.
Cisco plans to use the Five Across social networking platform to help companies add community-oriented features to their Web sites, particularly organizations that want to build better relationships with their customers.
I am sure that they will integrate this software with their existing UPCC (Unified Contact Center Suite of Cisco) and we can soon see Call Center agents answering queries through these social networking platforms. It is exciting times to be in the Call Center Solution space. I believe this is the most under-developed area in communications and there is a whole lot of scope for improvement/innovation.
Startups take note, Cisco is buying and that is always a good thing!!!
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anonymous said
Gokul
How do you visualize Five Across integrating with UPCC ?
tggokul said
Hi,
The current UPCC suite has voice/video/email/chat/sms has its communication channels. I see five across giving another facet namely social networking.
For example, this would give the customer a forum where his different customers can join and discuss/resolve their problems. So if the customer’s customers are facing similar problems, an agent ( who also might be in the network) could intervene and fix the issues of all concerned parties. That is one small example.
Social networking gives a personal touch to any interaction and even though the response as such might be the same, it gives a feeling to the customer that he is being personally serviced and that would meet better customer management.
Gokul
anonymous said
Gokul
your example sounds more like – unified communications rather than social networking.TO that effect UC is a facet of SN
example:
In a contact center world SN with presence information could trigger unified communications.
I am on a forum or a blog and I am immediately given information about 5 different people who are searching for an answer to the same question, knowledge agent or agents come online and they influence a pick routing to get into a session with all 6 folks LIVE in a private conference call.
Wouldn’t that be nice… comapnies like Dell could use this and cut down the queue times tremendously.
tggokul said
Anonymous,
You are right on the money on that one. UC is a facet of Social Networking and I believe they are converging at such a rapid pace that soon one will become the face of the other.
Gokul
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