Cisco Systems is getting even more serious about social media. The tech giant rolled out software that lets companies find and respond to customers who engage with their brand through social-media networks. These include Twitter and Facebook, and other online forums and blogs.
Dubbed SocialMiner, the software lets companies monitor status updates, forum posts, or blogs from customers in real time. Armed with this information, enterprises can stay engaged with conversations related to their brand and gather additional business intelligence.
“Companies are realizing that by ignoring the online chatter, they’re opening up opportunities for their competitors and allowing dialog about their brand to happen without them,” said John Hernandez, vice president and general manager of Cisco’s Customer Collaboration business unit.
Mining Social Media for CRM
As Cisco sees it, social media is booming, but its use by businesses is largely ad hoc, unstructured and unable to scale. The use of voice communications, video, e-mail, chat and other web interactions is also prevalent. Cisco is betting its experience in network-scaling technologies can help businesses proactively tackle social-media customer care.
Besides SocialMiner, Cisco also announced Finese, a Web 2.0 collaboration desktop for customer-care representatives that puts information in a what Cisco calls a “modifiable cockpit” that paves the way for reps to help callers faster, better and with higher accuracy. Cisco is positioning SocialMiner as a tool that can help lower operational costs for businesses and increase the number of satisfied customers.
Cisco also introduced a 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. Cisco said the solution offers an efficient, cost-effective foundation for capturing, preserving and mining conversations for business intelligence. Through this ecosystem, Cisco said organizations gain insights into caller issues, guide customer-service agents toward speedy first-call resolution,…