Enterprise Connect, Day 3: Let’s Talk about Contact Center

Rumor has it there’s more to life than #teamcollaboration. Actually, I can confirm the rumor with just a few words: chocolate, puppies, and motorcycles. You’re welcome to fill in the blanks with your own evidence. But, I digress.

Teamwork is absolutely important, but even if you come up with the best product or service on the planet, it’s your customers who can make or break your business. So, let’s talk about contact center.

Enterprise Case Studies: Contact Center Upgrade Decisions

With representatives from six companies, Sheila McGee-Smith hosted a group of panelists who covered companies from soft drinks and online entertainment to health care and financial services. Each had a different story about the contact-center upgrade, but the catalyst for change was typically the desire for a single platform.

When it comes to features and business requirements, their key criteria focused on customers, internal users (including IT), and compliance. They looked for solutions that let customers access help easily and on their device of choice. But it wasn’t limited to the end product, it was also important that the upgrade process itself had minimal impact on customers. For internal users, they looked for flexibility of user profiles. Security requirements are always important, but particularly for regulated industries like healthcare and finance.

And now, a cautionary tale to vendors (of any product, really): Panelists brought up the importance of the vendor relationship. One dropped a big hint: If you don’t answer an RFP, don’t expect to get the gig. It seems obvious, but he was making the point to vendors in the room, since he followed that with “You know who you are…” Yikes.

If you’re a vendor doing a site visit to pitch your proposal, bring your actual project team. In a critical business area in which the project can affect end customers, it helps to build trust. Let your contacts meet the project manager and core team that will be involved in the upgrade project.

Edmund Siy, vice president of business transformation for Mercy, talked about his organization’s experience implementing Cisco’s contact center. (Dating back to 1827, Mercy’s history alone is interesting stuff.) It’s one of the five largest health systems in the United States. And it has the world’s first virtual care center dedicated to caring for patients entirely outside its own facilities.

“The patient is always first. Whether it’s for the care, or from the IT perspective, or their data.” – Edmund Siy, Mercy

“Our goal is frictionless, seamless experience,” Siy says of Mercy’s contact center approach. “ The contact center probably isn’t the right verbiage, it’s a customer engagement center.”

https://youtu.be/Ew60ET6vneI

Find more information and videos about Mercy and Cisco.

Siy talked about making the full organization part of the strategy. IT has a seat as part of Mercy’s strategic planning process and vision setting. “You have to follow the DNA of your organization. If there’s a need for a particular solution to fit a certain group within your organization, that has to be part of how you look at things.”

Learn more about Cisco Contact Center solutions.

P.S. If you missed the previous days’ posts, you can find them here: Day 1 and Day 2. If you want to follow me on Twitter, you’ll find me @ciscokima.

P.P.S. Today was the final day of the exhibit hall. I saw two things every time I went to the Cisco booth. One, a full house. Two, people asking for Cisco Spark socks. (The really savvy people asked for WebEx or Jabber socks, new to the Cisco footwear collection.)