Cisco & Salesforce.com to offer 'contact centre in the cloud'

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 06 October 2009 04:33

IT Industry - Strategy

Salesforce.com and Cisco have teamed up to offer a 'contact centre in the cloud' for SMBs by combining Salesforce.com's hosted CRM service with Cisco's unified communications offerings.

Their joint offering uses a connector to integrate salesforce.com's Service Cloud 2 with Cisco Unified Contact Centre's functionality. According to Cisco, "This allows customers to use the salesforce.com CRM application as their primary agent desktop while retaining full Cisco Unified Contact Centre capabilities to operate a customer care or support centre in any industry."

Cisco claims that, "With the Customer Interaction Cloud, agents may become more productive, and customers can use the cloud to achieve a more rapid time to value with no hardware, no software, no data centres and no telephony equipment to install." It says the product is designed for organisations with 30 to 300 agents and "reflects both high market demand from prospects as well as requirements from existing customers."

According to Cisco, organisations are increasingly turning to the cloud to answer their customer service questions. "Today, 50 percent of all service conversations take place in the cloud. The Service Cloud 2 lets companies join the conversation with their customers, by providing a cost-effective solution that unites the contact centre and the cloud to establish a new model for customer service."

Salesforce.com announced Service Cloud 2 on 9 September saying: "Product innovations include Salesforce Knowledge, the world's first Knowledge-as-a-Service; Salesforce Answers, crowd-sourced community knowledge; and the general availability of Salesforce for Twitter. For the first time, companies can amaze their customers with an integrated customer service experience that leverages their own agents as well as real-time conversations happening throughout the cloud."

It followed the release by Salesforce.com in January 2009 of Service Cloud for which Salesforce.com claimed 8,000 customers in September. "Companies using the Service Cloud have seen a 28 percent increase in customer satisfaction, 25 percent increase in call deflection, 30 percent increase in first call resolution, 37 percent rise in service and support productivity and a 26 percent in," Salesforce.com said.

Service Cloud 2 allows contact centre staff to have web conversations with customers and potential customers, to interact with them via Facebook, monitor Twitter in real time, join Twitter conversations and establish a Twitter support channel.

The joint offering is scheduled to be generally available in the first quarter of calendar year 2010 and will be sold by both Cisco and Salesforce.com