Enterprise cloud computing company Salesforce.com and Cisco have entered into a partnership to offer combined service for small and medium businesses (SMBs) to deliver a complete contact centre in the cloud.
The combined offering called Customer Interaction Cloud brings salesforce.com’s Service Cloud 2 with Cisco Unified Communications. It allows small and medium sized companies to run their customer service completely in the cloud. It was designed to focus on organisations with 30 to 300 reps or agents and reflects both high market demand from prospects as well as requirements from existing customers.
The companies said that the combined offering utilises a connector to integrate salesforce.com’s Service Cloud 2 with Cisco Unified Contact Center’s functionality. This allows customers to use salesforce.com CRM application as their primary agent desktop while retaining full Cisco Unified Contact Center capabilities to operate a customer care or support centre.
With the Customer Interaction Cloud, customers can use the cloud to achieve time to value with no hardware, no software, no data centres and no telephony equipment to install, the companies claim.
Built on the Force.com platform, the Service Cloud 2 brings together cloud computing platforms like Google, Facebook, and Twitter to capture conversations, enabling companies to deliver the expertise of the community to customers, agents and partners regardless of location or device.
Alex Dayon, senior vice president of customer service & support product line of salesforce.com, said: The combination of Cisco’s Unified Communications and salesforce.com’s Service Cloud 2 will provide companies with a true cloud based option when it comes to their customer service needs. Companies will no longer have to manage routers, servers and switches when it comes to their contact centre, they can focus on delivering the best customer service possible.
The combined offering is expected to be available in the first quarter of calendar year 2010 and will be sold by both the firms.
