Cisco, in keeping with its recent oversized corporate personality – showy consumer-focused television advertising campaigns around ‘The Human Network Effect,’ anyone? – decided to make a splash with its latest product announcements. The company recently flooded the market with 800 updated or new features across 40 different unified communications (UC)-related products. Somewhat lost in the sea of sexier video-heavy and collaboration-centric announcements was a string of contact-center and customer-interaction enhancements that attempt to push Cisco deeper into the realm of an extended-enterprise approach to customer-support technologies.
There were two themes to these customer interaction-centered announcements: incremental and sensible upgrades that saw Cisco continuing down the path of connecting its UC message and its contact center technologies; and flashier, leading-edge and video-heavy customer-interaction technologies, of more dubious near-term value to contact centers.
In the first camp, Cisco announced version 7.5 of its Unified Contact Center Enterprise suite, as well as version 7.0 of the small and medium enterprise (SME)-focused Unified Contact Center Express suite. Cisco has been one of the rare vendors in the core infrastructure segment of the contact center market to show a pulse over the past year, and the company used these upgrades to add enhancements that should help cement its momentum.
Included in the list of fresh features for the Express suite are a presence-enabled agent desktop and a browser-based agent desktop, as well as basic inbound-email handling capabilities. The newest version of the Cisco Unified Intelligence Suite (the company’s contact center reporting platform) includes some nuts and bolts improvements, such as tightly integrated web-feed functionality, via Really Simple Syndication (RSS). Managers can use historical report data as HTML in an RSS feed, which they can then access via any RSS 2.0 reader. This allows managers to access their crucial reports, even while on the road. While not particularly flashy, these sorts of incremental improvements help Cisco quell any lingering doubts about its enterprise-readiness, as well as its suitability for complex, multi-switch environments.
At its recent UC-focused summit for analysts, consultants and partners in San Diego, held September 23-26, Cisco placed slightly more emphasis on its new Expert Advisor offering, a tool that allows enterprises to include knowledge workers or branch employees in customer interactions. When deployed as an extension of a contact center solution, captive agents no longer need to know the right expert to help them with a specific interaction: instead, the Expert Advisor system identifies the pool of available and suitably-skilled workers and chooses the best one. Cisco has also begun to position the Expert Advisor as a standalone solution that does not require integration with a formal contact center. There is clearly strong technology underpinning the Expert Advisor offering, but technology does not solve every issue.
Cisco realizes it faces the same problem as every other vendor looking to break down the walls of the contact center: the thorny issues of altering enterprise processes around compensation, workload and scheduling, as well as identifying the correct interactions for which knowledge workers can be called upon. When asked what it was doing to help customers solve these non-technology issues, Cisco’s director of UC solutions marketing asked analysts and consultants to help educate enterprises about the transformative power of such solutions. That was clearly not the most proactive answer possible, but one typical in a nascent market and one that clearly underlines how slow the pace of adoption of such solutions is likely to be.
Still, Cisco essentially buried all of these clear value-enhancing features under an avalanche of higher-profile announcements, mostly centered on video. One announcement in particular, presented as a boon for customer interactions, played more like a teenager trying to create errands to run as a pretext for driving the family’s new car than a product truly designed to solve specific customer pain points. TelePresence Expert on Demand attempts to link the contact center with Cisco’s newest toy, the immersive remote experience called TelePresence. The basic idea for this product is that branches – retail banks and other financial services branches, mainly – can deploy a smaller version of Cisco’s TelePresence and centralize some staff in the contact center. The theory here is sound and makes a great case for a comparatively inexpensive video kiosk setup, which would provide centralization of resources to enterprises at a relatively low cost. But TelePresence Expert on Demand seems more like overkill for this specific application: it provides essentially the same benefit of centralization of resources, but does not add much except significant cost. And since TelePresence is a bandwidth hog, networking capacity will need to be expanded, meaning even greater infrastructure costs.
At the UC and Collaboration Summit, one Cisco executive revealingly called TelePresence Cisco’s iPod and, like the Apple sensation, the tool does have numerous appropriate applications. But, because of the fundamental total cost of ownership issues involved and the limited value of talking-head-style video, customer interactions with a contact center via TelePresence is probably not one of them. To continue to thrive in this slowing market, Cisco needs to stick with a program of incremental improvements to its elemental IP contact center technology and leave the ‘cool for cool’s sake’ to the Apples of the world.
Ian Jacobs
