UC Today were lucky enough to attend Enterprise Connect 2017, and during our time at the event, we made it our mission to gather as much information as we could to share with you. One of the companies with the most news to share was Cisco, who delivered a host of announcements over the course of the week. Cisco chose the Enterprise Connect event as their platform to announce “Spark Care”, a customer-care solution for companies affiliated with Spark.
What Spark Customer Care Is
Since it’s likely that many people will jump to conclusions when they hear about the new Spark Customer Care offer, it makes sense to identify what the solution is, and what it isn’t. The first thing to note is that Spark Care isn’t a replacement for existing contact centre services from Cisco. Rather, this new service is:
- A digital customer support service for small teams and help desks. The target market for this product is teams that include up to 20 agents, who serve either external or internal customers, such as external tech support operations, or internal help desk offers.
- A competitor to solutions that specifically target the web chat market, including FreshChat, Live Person, and Zendesk Chat
- A quick and easy solution for auto-generated care on company websites, offering instant call back and chat services.
The callback solution offered by Spark Care is powered through Spark Call, which means that it supports video escalation and voice from chat. Built through the Spark platform, the new Spark Care service uses all of the IT management and security features of spark, including the single sign-on option. Spark Care also offers Context services, which is a Spark-based repository for historical consumer interactions.
While the initial capabilities of the service might appear modest, it’s worth noting that Cisco is just getting started, the company announced that they were planning further developments in the area of live chat for the future.
Cisco Partners for Customer Care
Interestingly, Spark Care wasn’t the only contact centre solution that was announced at Enterprise Connect to be working on the Cisco Spark platform. Altocloud also announced a new Sales Communications solution designed around the Spark Platform. With the new service, Altocloud will be extending a customer-centric approach for sales professionals, where external and internal sales teams can offer simple and straightforward communications with customers.
Altocloud also announced deeper integrations with the Cisco Unified Contact Centre platform for enterprises, using the power of customer analytics to enhance Chat and Email solutions. With the new integrations, agents will have the opportunity to view customer journey history when incoming chats occur. What’s more, agents will be able to escalate from ECE into a Spark video call with customers.
The latest announcement from Altocloud simply reinforces that Cisco’s partner community is also in the process of building applications that extend and improve the Spark platform.
