There is something special about the Cisco Customer Experience/ Contact Center / Customer Engagement strategy that makes it stand out. See Cisco believes in connecting technologies that are best in breeds in what they do, in order for your organisation to deliver an exceptional customer experience.
See, to explain this further, we need to look at what the other vendors do. Typically a CX/CC/CE vendors usually offer to organisations the full range of solution. So typically you’d get from one vendor the contact center technology, voice recording, workforce management, quality monitoring, analytics, chatbots, digital channels, etc. In comparison with Cisco’s approach.
In contrast to other vendors, the Cisco Customer Experience Strategy is about connecting best in breed technologies together. Cisco realises that it has developed one of the most advanced routing engines in the market, while also realising that the CX space is a big, where some vendors would excel more than others in specific areas. With that in mind, Cisco shaped its strategy around BRIDGING SILOs.
An organisation can have many silos, there can be a departmental silo, business function silos, or technological silos. All kinds of silos are considered a hurdle to delivering effective customer experience. Take a technological silo for example when it comes to customer engagement, where your web chat is not linked to your voice contact centre. This would create a fragmented customer journey, affecting negatively the customer experience, as the customer might have to repeat themselves across different channels.
Had there been no silos, in a simplistic world, the customer journey would be smoother, the customer would not have to repeat themselves.
So as mentioned above there are two approaches to removing silos, namely:
- BREAK THEM. This is when you get all your customer engagement channels technology from one vendor, ensuring their coherent integration between them. While this approach has its merits, such as standardised reports, the same interface for all channels, less training costs, let operation costs. However what it lacks is that possible chosen vendor will not excel in every aspect of the customer engagement technology.
- BRIDGE THEM. This is the Cisco approach, rather than providing everything. let’s CONNECT the best in breed together. there might be some more investment required in order to bridge the different technologies and standardising the reporting, however on the upside, your organization would be benefiting from the best of breed technologies, while reducing its dependency on one vendor.
And Cisco’s approach work, because this has always been Cisco Strategy from the very early days (the early 2000s) when they developed one of the strongest routing engines in the industry, allowing for ease of integration with any third party. For example, if you need voice recording, workforce optimisation, knowledge management, it can be acquired from Verint, where Verint excels in that field. If you want CRM, get it from the leaders of it such as Salesforce or Oracle, and the same goes for other technologies that support the customer engagement field.
The picture above was taken recently during the Cisco Customer Journey Partner Summit in Athens, 2018, to demonstrate the sheer size of the customer engagement technology industry and the different providers that affect different aspects of the customer journey and Cisco simple yet effective and beautiful strategy. “Don’t knock down CX/CE Silos, But Bridge them”
If you would like to see how IST & Cisco can assist with your customer experience/engagement solutions, please contact us here.
