To that point our partner Cisco offers an entire suite of collaboration tools that help improve engagement with all of your stakeholders. These include Collaboration Applications, Customer Collaboration, TelePresence and Unified Communications. Their products will help your team make decisions, solve problems, reduce costs and accelerate time to market. In addition, their solutions offer the flexibility to accommodate new developments as your needs evolve and help protect existing IT investments related to their technologies.

Collaboration Applications like WebEx can help add an online component to your capabilities. The application brings voice, video, and web conferencing capabilities individuals spread out at different locations. It can be used for real-time communication for meetings, sales, training, customer support and events. WebEx conferencing solutions will also help optimize the IT resources you already have in place as they are delivered through the SaaS model to support easy implementation and scaleability throughout your organization.

The Customer Collaboration suite of resources will establish or expand the foundation for an improved customer experience. We already touched on how SocialMiner offers support for customer interactivity in this recent blog post. But additional products like the Unified Contact Center and the Customer Voice Portal will help increase customer satisfaction and loyalty by offering sophisticated call routing, contact management and speech-enabled self-service capabilities. In addition, they can provide an alternative to the mostly reactive mode of traditional call centers while helping you build a platform that supports engagement and proactively with your customers.

Cisco’s multiple options for TelePresence add a component that brings attendees face to face even if they’re in different offices. This suite of products offers a new way to support collaboration through high-quality video conferencing. By embracing TelePresence to support collaboration your organization can reduce travel costs, speed up decision making and provide highly engaged service for customers and partners. The systems also offer interoperability based on the industry standards meaning less support will be required from your IT team to assist with connecting to customers, suppliers and partners who are running on different types of systems or networks.

Then you can add in their Unified Communications solutions to make sure that what we discussed above runs effectively over a single converged network. This suite of products helps extend collaboration by offering reliable communications support for delivering multiple applications like voice, video and presence services to various types of devices and IP endpoints. It also addresses the growing need to support mobility at an enterprise level. Implementing Cisco’s Unified Communications platform allows you to view, optimize, and manage the entire communications system from one screen.

Each of these tools will enable your team to work together more efficiently, build new channels to communicate with customers and improve the way your organization communicates. We’ll provide a more in-depth look at each of the solutions individually in future blog posts to provide a better understanding of the platforms Cisco offers to support collaboration.

Cisco has done a good job of addressing the need for enterprise video with their Digital Media Suite. The offering includes a comprehensive suite of webcasting and video sharing applications. Specific resources like Digital Signage, Cast and Show and Share can help transform how organizations learn, communicate, collaborate and grow.

Briefly, Digital Signage is a network-based application used to deliver information and training to digital signage. Cast delivers live video, on-demand video and broadcast TV channels over IP to digital displays. Show and Share is a webcasting and video sharing application for creating secure video communities to share ideas and expertise to a variety of devices.

Here are a few of the benefits the Digital Media Suite can deliver to your business:
-Improves communications by establishing a cost-effective and secure platform for creating, editing, uploading, searching and displaying digital media.
-Integrates with existing infrastructure and networking components.
-Provides training to geographically dispersed employees, customers, and partners while saving money on travel costs.
-Expands revenue opportunities by establishing new resources for product promotion and advertising.
-Facilitates collaboration allowing organizations to increase productivity, accelerate time to market, enable quicker decision making and promote sharing of expertise.

For technology managers the Digital Media Suite enables your team to create, manage and access content for a variety of applications from a single platform. The Digital Media Encoders (DMEs) capture the video from a variety of inputs and encode it into the popular digital formats for delivery across an IP network. Then the Digital Media Manager (DMM) allows your IT team to manage content and approval flows, create playlists and schedule video delivery. The content your users create can then be accessed by multiple devices using Show and Share or delivered to digital displays via Digital Signs.

Digital media offers a compelling platform for adding personalization and immediacy to your organization’s communications with stakeholders. Contact us to learn more about how these technologies can help you establish real-time and on-demand channels for sharing expertise, information, news and training.

Traditional customer service has evolved over the past few years with this growth in social media usage. It is no longer enough for businesses to connect with customers on social media. They are now driven to monitor online conversations about their company then provide responsive and timely support through these channels. In addition to using social media for sales, marketing and business intelligence many companies have updated their customer service strategy to integrate these platforms. According to Gartner, 35% of all customer service centers will have social media capability by 2013.

If implemented correctly social media provide additional data streams for understanding customers’ expectations and needs. According to Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere, 38% of bloggers say they post about brands that they love or hate. And the 2nd most trusted information source for product referrals are Facebook friends. There are plenty of tools out there identifying where these conversations about your brand are occurring. The challenge has been turning the data produced by that monitoring into something actionable.

So how do you keep track of what the 800+ million Facebook users are saying or what is being written about you on the millions of active blogs out there? I think Cisco’s SocialMiner product can help by providing the bridge between social media and your customer support team along with the CRM system you are using.

SocialMiner is a customer care solution that helps companies proactively respond to customers and prospects communicating through public social media networks like Blogs, Facebook, Twitter or other online forums. It provides monitoring, queuing, reporting and workflow to organize internet postings related to your business. Then your customer care team can use this info to provide real-time responses using the same channels your customers are communicating on.

SocialMiner is part of the Unified Contact Center so deployment should be familiar if you are an existing Cisco customer. John Hernandez, General Manager of their Customer Collaboration Business Unit (CCBU), has said that SocialMiner is an engagement product, not a listening product. Check out the full list of features that support his statement and help set SocialMiner apart from traditional social media monitoring tools:

Whether you’ve established a social media presence or not, chances are that people are talking about your business online. SocialMiner is one of those products you may want to consider to help your company start listening to these conversations. Your team will be in a better position to increase customer loyalty, provide responsive service, engage new customers and protect your brand.

Among college students, 55% say they could not live without the Internet compared to 62% of those recent graduates with jobs. Over 30% in both categories say they could survive, but it would be a struggle. 40% of students rank the Internet as most important as compared to partying, dating, and music. 64% would rather have Internet access than a car. A big thing they rely on the Internet for is news, with 77% of students saying they get their news and other information from the Internet. TV comes in a distant fourth at 7% with newspapers, magazines and books behind that. The results are similar for the recently employed.

How is your business building an environment to support this new Internet generation of workers? Are your business apps web-ified? Can your data centers support mobile access to these applications on any device, anywhere? These will be critical components to recruiting the next top talent for your organization. Are you ready?

This increasing benefit for employees will mean a recruiting advantage for companies that are more developed in their teleworking policies. As the Internet generation of young adults enter the workforce, workplace mobility will undoubtedly be a key factor in their employment decisions. Are you preparing your business for the Anywhere Office? Morning staple to many, Starbucks Coffee is with a home-delivery bean subscription service. Now your employee truly doesn’t need to leave the home.