Media Center

Building a close relationship with customers means becoming more available to communicate regularly about their challenges, needs, and goals and helps ensure that you deliver what they want the way they want it. Including customers in decision-making processes also improves the customer experience and helps increase revenues. See three ways that collaboration and video solutions help extend your reach and improve your customers' experiences with your business, regardless of location.

1. Get closer to your customers: Fast and high-quality communications give customers a positive experience and build trust. Cisco TelePresence solutions, for example, deliver an in-person meeting experience without the travel and its costs, while making it easier to meet with your customers personally and more frequently.

University Improves Service to Callers

A large U.S. university needed to improve its service to thousands of prospective students, current students, and faculty members who call for information. By implementing Cisco Unified Contact Center Express and Cisco Mobility solutions, the university increased its contact center answer rate to 93 percent while handling 25 percent more calls. Callers who needed undergraduate admission information were helped faster, reducing average waiting times by 40 percent. The school also implemented mobility solutions that allowed employees to work from home during a pandemic and reduced the need for office space. And Cisco Unified Video Advantage solutions enabled face-to-face collaboration capabilities for a better, more personal experience.

Mining and Construction Firm Extends Reach

A large mining and construction firm extended its reach to local employees, partners, and customers by using Cisco Unified Mobility, Unified MeetingPlace, and presence capabilities. The company now can establish communications quickly with temporary field offices, and employees can locate and collaborate immediately with coworkers and partners on large deals. Remote employees also meet face to face using Unified MeetingPlace to reduce travel costs and environmental impact. Response times for service requests were reduced from two days to 30 minutes, and the company saved 10 percent on its mobile costs.

2. Embrace customers in decision making: Engineers, product designers, and sales people value customer input. But including customers in decisions about product direction, marketing strategies, and other initiatives means extending your reach beyond the company's firewall. Thus when you collaborate with these customers, it's important to focus on security.

Toy and Game Manufacturer Solicits Customer Product Ideas

A leading toy and game manufacturer wanted to improve its responsiveness to changing customer tastes and establish a community where it could gather feedback and test future product designs. Using a suite of secure Cisco collaboration solutions, the company created an online design studio that included blogs, message boards, online polling, and an "ask a designer" feature. As a result, the company accelerated its product development and produced more successful toys.

3. Personalize or customize products and services to match customer needs: Meeting customer needs often requires adapting services and products or finding new ways to deliver them. But the technical information, detailed knowledge, and special expertise to make decisions are often centralized in a few resources or locations. Distributing that knowledge used to require travel with its associated time and cost, but today businesses can use collaboration and video solutions, such as Cisco TelePresence, to deliver expertise to meetings without travel yet with everything customers need.

Asian Bank Tailors Service to Specific Customer Loan Requirements

A large Asian bank enables customers across hundreds of branches to meet virtually face to face with headquarters-based experts using a Cisco Virtual Expert management solution. Since its deployment, the solution has improved customer satisfaction, enabled the bank to reduce missed leads, and increased projected revenue growth by US$3.5 million in the first year alone. Bank employees also gained 30 to 60 extra minutes per day for prospecting, and the experts improved productivity by 20 percent with less travel.

Driving True Customer Intimacy

The Five to Thrive Drive True Customer Intimacy strategy represents a proven, sound approach for building success. Your customers are experiencing the same apprehension over the economy that you are, and this is an excellent time to draw closer to those customers by listening to them, collaborating with them, and incorporating their ideas into your products, services, and business processes. Position yourself to succeed in this economy and thrive in the upturn to come.