Cisco's Customer Collaboration Solutions Help Customers Offer Better Service, Fill Orders Faster and Realize a Competitive Edge

SAN JOSE, CA--(Marketwire - Oct 10, 2011) - Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) today announced customers spanning the education and waste management industries, have deployed Cisco's Customer Collaboration solutions to help expedite response times, fulfill orders cost effectively and increase agent productivity. New customers include Liberty University, the largest private university in Virginia, and Republic Services Inc., the leading provider of solid waste collection, transfer, recycling, and disposal services.

As Liberty University continues to expand locations, it relies heavily on communication and collaboration technology to cater to its increasingly mobile faculty and staff. Liberty enlisted the help of Cisco® Unified Contact Center Express to serve more of its students without incurring the additional expense of adding staff to handle student inquiries. To expedite response time to students, Liberty University uses the built-in interactive voice response (IVR) and database lookup functions of Unified Contact Center Express to route calls to the most appropriate department. The result is increased responsiveness to student needs.

In 2008, Republic Services, headquartered in Arizona with operations throughout the United States, acquired Allied Waste expanding from 225 to 750 locations and tripling its revenue. With this rapid growth came a significant increase in the size of their customer base, prompting Republic Services to look for solutions that would enable it to provide exceptional service and fill customer orders quickly without having to involve agents unnecessarily. To address the challenge, Republic Services turned to Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise and Unified Customer Voice Portal (CVP) to assist in managing 1.25 million customer calls monthly. Through the implementation of a self-service application in CVP, Republic Services is now able to fulfill customer orders in many cases without the involvement of agents, saving nearly five minutes apiece for each of the 100-200 daily service requests it receives.

Supporting Quotes

• Connie Allison, IT liaison, Liberty University
  "Today's students expect more online services and more options to interact with university personnel. We do not necessarily know what new needs are around the corner, and the Cisco Unified Communications and Cisco Unified Contact Center solutions give us the flexibility to adapt."

• Doug Saunders, IT director, Republic Services, Inc.
  "When Republic Services acquired Allied Waste, Cisco collaboration tools were instrumental in helping to complete 36 IT integration projects on time and under budget, resulting in $190 million in savings through synergies. Automated order entry with Cisco Unified Customer Voice Portal saves approximately five minutes apiece for each of 100-200 daily service requests, the equivalent of one to two full-time employees."

• John Hernandez, vice president and general manager, Customer Collaboration business unit, Cisco
  "Our customers continue to utilize our customer collaboration solutions to solve business challenges and drive real business value. With customers such as Liberty University and Republic Services joining thousands of other customers in deploying Cisco solutions, the momentum is clearly with us. The acceleration of customer adoption, coupled with the recent news that technical skills in Cisco contact center systems are a top skill being demanded by IT executives in 2012, sets the stage for our continued momentum in this space."

Supporting Resources:

• Keep up with Cisco's news by visiting the company's Platform Blog.
• For more information about Cisco's collaboration news and activities visit the Collaboration Blog or follow us via Twitter @CiscoCollab.
• Cisco Collaboration and Communication
• Cisco Customer Collaboration

Tags / Keywords:
Cisco, Customer Collaboration, Customer Care, Contact Center, Collaboration, Call Center, Unified Communications

RSS Feed for Cisco: http://newsroom.cisco.com/rss-feeds

About Cisco Collaboration
From award-winning IP communications to mobility, customer care, Web conferencing, messaging, enterprise social software, and interoperable telepresence experiences, Cisco brings together network-based, integrated collaboration solutions based on open standards. These solutions offered across on-premise, cloud-based or virtualized platforms, as well as services from Cisco and our partners, are designed to help promote business growth, innovation and productivity. They are also designed to help accelerate team performance, protect investments, and simplify the process of finding the right people and information.

About Cisco
Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is the worldwide leader in networking that transforms how people connect, communicate and collaborate. Information about Cisco can be found at http://www.cisco.com. For ongoing news, please go to http://newsroom.cisco.com.

Cisco and the Cisco logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. A listing of Cisco's trademarks can be found at www.cisco.com/go/trademarks. Third-party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word partner does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company.