Cisco launches SocialMiner : Social media software that enables companies to monitor Facebook, Twitter, Public forums and Blogs

Cisco announced Cisco® SocialMiner, software that enables companies to find and proactively respond to customers and prospects communicating through public social media networks like Twitter and Facebook, or other public forums or blogging sites.Status updates, forum posts, or blogs from customers can all be monitored in real time, alerting enterprises of conversations related to their brand. Cisco's social customer care solution enables companies not only to monitor the social Web in order to improve business intelligence but also to engage customers that require service.

According to Nielsen, more than 1 million Tweets are sent out every hour, while 34 percent of online Americans have used Facebook, Twitter or other social media to rant or rave about a product, company or brand. With more and more Web-based conversations taking place over these social platforms, it's now more critical than ever that businesses are aware of what their customers are saying about them and are able to respond to general inquiries or rectify customer service issues so as to enhance and protect brand reputation.

Businesses worldwide use Cisco Contact Center technology to routinely handle millions of customer contacts a day, including voice calls, video, e-mail, chat and Web interactions. Social media is booming, but its use by businesses is largely ad hoc, unstructured, and unable to scale. Cisco's expertise in operational excellence and network scaling technologies enable the company to offer businesses an enterprise-class solution for proactive social media customer care.

Cisco also announced Cisco Finesse, a web 2.0 collaboration desktop for customer care representatives that puts all the information they need in a single, modifiable cockpit enabling them to help callers faster, better, and with higher accuracy. This can help lower operational costs for businesses and increase the number of satisfied customers. Cisco rounded out the announcements with the introduction of a new network-based rich media capture platform that supports the recording, playback, live streaming and storage of media, including audio and video, with rich recording metadata. This solution provides an efficient, cost-effective foundation for capturing, preserving, and mining conversations for business intelligence.

Key Facts / Highlights:

Cisco's Customer Collaboration software suite includes:

• Cisco SocialMiner: By providing social media monitoring, queuing, and workflow, customer posts on social media networks are organized and delivered to social media customer care teams, allowing companies to respond to customers in real-time through the originating social network.Consumers benefit from the engagement that Cisco SocialMiner enables. Customers see rapid response from businesses that are providing value-added engagement when and where consumers are seeking it. Additionally, consumers will see the benefit of enterprises engaging with them to provide service and information, rather than having to find information on their own through company web sites.
• Consumers will be able to continue to manage their online privacy in social media through opt-in and opt-out settings within the social networks themselves.
• Through proactive engagements with customers, companies can enhance relationships immediately, address potential consumers or product issues, generate proactive sales opportunities and manage brand perceptions.
• Internally, Cisco's Consumer Products team including Cisco Flip™ Video has been using Cisco SocialMiner to manage social media customer engagements.
• Cisco Finesse: This new solution combines traditional contact center functions with Cisco Quad^TM enterprise social-software capabilities.This Web 2.0 architecture for the agent experience will allow businesses to integrate collaboration technology and business applications to give contact center agents the tools to provide the best possible customer experience.
• Rich media capture: By recording conversations on the network, contact center agents will have access to captured media. The media can be accessed by different applications via simple interfaces, simplifying the architecture while helping to lower costs and provide optimum scalability for companies.Through this ecosystem, organizations gain insights into caller issues, can guide customer service agents toward speedy first-call resolution, improve agent productivity and increase customer satisfaction.

( This is a Press Release)