Rethinking Customer Care for a Spark(ly) World

Anyone remember The Jetsons or Jetson’s reruns?  I loved Rosie, the Jetson’s robot assistant.  I dreamed of having Rosie clean my room and bring me snacks.    While I don’t have Rosie yet as my personal assistant, it is clear that electronic robots (“bots”) are playing a bigger role in how we collaborate, work and play.  My question for this post is – how should we use Spark and Spark bots to provide better customer care?

Personal collaboration tools and social media have significantly influenced the way we socialize. They’re also transforming how we collaborate at work and interact with businesses. To keep pace, product and service providers need to adapt how they deliver customer care to match or exceed the ways we interact in our personal lives as these worlds become more and more blended.

At Enterprise Connect last month, Cisco announced availability of Cisco Spark service–the industry’s first integrated, cloud-based collaboration service. Spark brings social collaboration to the workplace. It also allows you to reimagine how you deliver customer care to a population that is increasingly digital.

Cisco Spark already offers customer care voice features:

• Hunt Groups, which determine how to route inbound calls to contact center agents
• Auto Attendant, which can provide an automated “front end” to a business

But Spark can also augment team collaboration in the contact center by allowing agents and back-office experts to discuss topics, share news, and solve customer issues.

And there’s more. Cisco’s announcement mentioned how new Spark bots can help simplify work life. Have a question and don’t know who can answer? Imagine a Spark bot that will either answer directly or connect you with a human who can help you. Spark provides the mechanism for identifying communities of experts. Cisco’s Customer Care team is leveraging that structure to enable a support model that works within Spark.

And, if you loved the Jetsons like me, see this article for more ways the shows predictions came true.

We have lots of ideas about how Cisco Spark can enable customer care. But we’d like to hear from you. Have something you would like to see? What capabilities can you imagine? Use the comments to let us know.

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