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CRM Software

News: The SocialMiner Software from Cisco extends CRM to Social Media

November 2010. Dealing with comments about your company on social media is made easier with Cisco's new SocialMiner CRM software. Using SocialMiner, companies can gather business intelligence from sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Cisco also announced the new Finese module to put data into a "customisable cockpit" for fast CRM responses.

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Cisco Systems is getting serious about social media. The tech giant developed software that enables companies to find and respond to customers who engage with their brand through social-media networks, like Twitter and Facebook. But also includes other online forums and blogs.

The SocialMiner software allows businesses to monitor status updates, forum posts, or blogs from customers in real time. Equipped with this information, companies can stay in touch with conversations related to their brand and gather additional business intelligence.

"Business are realizing that by ignoring the online chatter, they're opening up opportunities for their competition and allowing dialog about their brand to happen without them," said John Hernandez, vice president and general manager of Cisco's Customer Collaboration business unit.

Mining Social Media: the next step in CRM

According to Cisco, social media is booming, but its businesses use is largely ad hoc, unstructured and unable to scale. For most businesses, the use of voice communications, video, e-mail, chat and other web interactions is prevalent. Cisco thinks its experience in network-scaling technologies can help companies proactively tackle social-media customer care.

Next to SocialMiner, Cisco also introduced Finese, a Web 2.0 collaboration tool for customer-care representatives that puts information in a "modifiable cockpit" that helps reps to deal with callers faster, better and with higher accuracy. Cisco is positioning their SocialMiner product as a solution that can lower operational costs for businesses and increase customer satisfaction.

Microsoft at Risk?

"Cisco has had a big focus on social collaboration with the release of Quad. Quite frankly, if you look at the rest of the industry, Cisco is really stretching its lead in the unified communications and collaboration side. This is all part of that strategy," said Zeus Kerravala, a vice president at the Yankee Group.

"There are so many methods of communicating with people now, between chat, e-mail, Twitter, voice, Facebook, LinkedIn. Cisco is trying to get to the point that no matter which communications tool you use, a worker can easily filter through that and find the information they need much faster."

According to Kerravala, Microsoft should be concerned. Microsoft has been actively working on building a voice platform, in the last two years. Meanwhile, he said, Cisco has focused on many emerging areas like social media.

"Although Microsoft has a lot of mouse share right now, Cisco actually has a lead in this area," he said. "If Microsoft doesn't begin to embrace consumer tools from the consumer perspective rather than just the IT perspective, its empire in corporations globally is at risk."

Handle Social Media CRM with CRM software? Compare all leading CRM vendors and request a free CRM information pack now!