When talking to vendors about competition in contact centers the two names that most often pop up for North America are Cisco and Avaya, followed by Genesys, Interactive Intelligence, and then myriad others. What do Cisco’s competitors say are magic bullets in competing with Cisco? They say that Cisco is too expensive, not fully-featured, complex, and solutions require too many servers. Those bullets are losing speed, since Cisco, in addition to continuing to develop and rollout some rather visionary contact center and collaboration goodies, is working on filling long overdue feature holes in the more traditional contact center products, and reducing the amount of servers required to run it all.
I was happy to participate this week in a contact center day that Cisco held in Boston. We hadn’t had a deep dive into contact center for awhile, in part because of the effort it has taken Cisco to bring to market and educate analysts on their unified communications and collaboration portfolio enhancements. Contact center is part of UC at Cisco, but in last year’s big fall announcement of new UC and collaboration products, traditional contact center products tended to take a back seat; but not now. No, this isn’t a renewed focus on contact center, as the focus has been there all along, we just havent’ heard much about it lately. But in the last year Cisco has added 80+ people to their contact center teams, and are shooting to be number one in contact center; hoping to boot out Avaya, a vision John Hernandez, VP and general manager of Cisco’s contact center business unit, made clear in his opening presentation.
However, getting back to my earlier comment on competitive silver bullets – in order to facilitate adding new capabilities and fixing feature holes in the product line, Cisco made some big changes to both process and organization. The company moved from a waterfall development process to an Agile one so that they can very quickly add new developments or fix issues within products, in weeks, not months or years. They have a board focused solely on customer interaction, and they make use of what other development teams are doing, taking developments within, for example, UC and applying them to the contact center, so they take advantage of existing resources. For example, Cisco is taking the competency collection capabilities of Cisco Pulse, and applying it to skills-based routing functionality in contact centers.
What this has allowed Cisco to do is to focus the bulk of their R&D on the core or legacy contact center portfolio. Cisco still has 70% of its R&D focused on the core platform and applications, and have been avidly working on improving some of the weaker areas of their product lines.
However, the day wasn’t all core product enhancements. Of course, during the event we also heard more on some of more intriguing product additions being made to the portfolio. For example, in November we were introduced to Cisco Pulse, which watches everything going across the network and tags pertinent content building a dynamic picture of knowledge competencies across an organization. Within a contact center, Cisco’s vision is to use Pulse to embellish or replace skills-based routing.
We also heard a lot about how Cisco intends to integrate social media into the contact center as well. For example, Cisco is building a solution to add social media to customer care agents. Cisco is already openly talking about this for launch later this year. Basically, it is an appliance that taps into the social web, captures consumer-generated content, analyzes it, prioritizes it, and then distributes it through workflow. More details to come as they get to announcement.
In all, the new things Cisco is working on seem very compelling, and much more clear than when we sat through the big launch in November. For example, seven months ago Pulse was a concept. Now it is available, and fairly soon we will get to hear about how contact centers are using it. I’m looking forward to it.
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