Cisco unveils its SocialMiner business collaboration software, which lets companies monitor what consumers are saying about their products and brands on such sites as Facebook, Twitter and blogs, and more easily respond to questions or issues.
Cisco Systems wants to help businesses keep track of what
consumers are saying about them and their products on social networking sites.
Cisco's new SocialMiner collaboration software, unveiled
Nov. 3, enables businesses to see what consumers are saying on such sites as Facebook
and Twitter, as well as blogs and other online networking environments, and to
respond to those comments.
The goal is to let businesses become more responsive to
customers' demands by seeing what they are saying online about the products,
services and brands. Businesses can monitor the public social sites and engage
customers when necessary. Companies that aren't taking advantage of the wealth
of information that is being passed back and forth on these social networking
sites are risking losing ground to competitors, according to John Hernandez,
vice president and general manager of Cisco's Customer Collaboration business
unit.
"Companies are realizing that by ignoring the online chatter,
they're opening up opportunities for their competitors and allowing dialogue
about their brand to happen without them," Hernandez said in a statement. "As
an active user of social media, Cisco realizes the value of social media
interactions to our business. Our employees were some of the earliest adopters
of MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other social sites. Our own Consumer
Products Group is already using Cisco SocialMiner to collaborate with their
customers."
Social
networking sites are rapidly becoming key places for businesses to find out
what consumers think of their products, services and brands, and to address
concerns or questions those consumers might have, according to Cisco.
Nielsen
reports that more than 1 million tweets are sent out every hour, and that 34
percent of U.S.
citizens who are online have used Facebook, Twitter or other social media to
talk about a product or company. Finding out what they're saying, and
addressing concerns or questions, will increase customer loyalty and product
brand reputation, Cisco officials said.
In addition to SocialMiner, Cisco rolled out Cisco Finesse,
another collaboration desktop product for customer care representatives.
Finesse is designed to bring all the information the representatives need into
a single, customizable place, which in turn will enable them to more quickly,
easily and accurately deal with callers' concerns, according to Cisco.
Businesses can reduce operational costs while improving customer care.
Lastly, Cisco introduced a new network-based rich media
capture platform that enables the recording, playback, live streaming and
storage of such media as video and audio. The offering is designed to give
businesses a more cost-effective way to store the media, and for mining the
data for greater business intelligence.
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