ITNewsAfrica.com: What is Cisco’s approach to collaboration?
John Hernandez: There is a dramatic change in the industry. Companies need to capitalize on market transitions and collaborate through Internet and social media tools. Consumers are changing the way companies interact with their clients and new collaborative tools are needed to drive growth and revenue. Cisco started with telephony and converging services across IP (voice and data). Today we have TelePresence, Webex for meetings, unified messaging – video and social media are becoming the new voice and contact centers are evolving this way.
ITNewsAfrica.com: Speaking of current trends in collaboration technology, what is Cisco’s main focus?
John Hernandez: We have seen an explosion in social software and targeted-type advertizing. Companies want real-time insight in the minds of consumers to transform this information in proactive service. The new trends indicate a consumer engagement, driven by media tools like Facebook and proactive companies like Apple. Our focus is on social- and video-enabled customer care applications. We will launch products that address this contact center evolution, as we see it.
ITNewsAfrica.com: What collaborative products is Cisco launching?
John Hernandez: The next week launch will see an integrative application transforming the way traditional contact centers work. Usually, contact centers have used routing and reporting, speech self-service, multi channel capabilities and the use of experts to address customers’ needs. The process will evolve to real-time multimedia capture and storage, video-enabled customer care, collaboration agent desktop, social media and cloud computing integration and business video applications. This will allow the view of multiple streams of real-time posts via Twitter, for example, for proactive and prompt responsiveness.
ITNewsAfrica.com: What are the benefits of these new tools and do you expect to replace the traditional customer care centre in the next 10-20 years?
John Hernandez: It’s definitely a shift towards proactive engagement, by integrating multiple social media (Facebook, Twitter, wiki, blogger) and capturing, storing and filtering real-time conversations to be listened and analyzed in order to provide a suggestive response. We see a growth in popularity of social-enabled tools and a faster adoption on video customer care in the coming years. There will be however future beyond Facebook and Twitter, but this trend of proactive responsiveness will be there. The traditional call centre will minimize as this massive social trend will get addictive. This technology will be available globally and Africa will follow suit.
