Spanlink Communications, a 22 year-old company with a well-earned reputation for developing and integrating highly-innovative contact center technologies is at it again with a new service called SocialWatch. Call it a sign of these economic times, the new service is a hosted instantiation of Cisco Systems’ SocialMiner software, which is designed to monitor real-time “feeds” from blogs, Facebook, Twitter and customer forums.

The premises-based version of SocialMiner was launched in early December as part of a larger suite of contact center software that integrates data capture and analysis as well as a new agent desktop and back-end collaboration platform called Finesse. Spanlink has designed SocialWatch to run in its cloud, to eliminate the need for additional capital expenditures and to enable its engineers and technicians to manage start-up and scaling of the service. Because Spanlink is an integrator and channel partner for Cisco’s full line of Contact Center products, it has also designed the service so that enterprises can follow a “host-to-own” strategy, where the hosted application, data management and reporting resources can be migrated from the cloud to a premises based solution.

In the survey Opus Research conducted last quarter, we discovered that employees, whether they are in contact centers, cubicles or offices, bring their favorite tools to work. They have put Google docs in the same category as Microsoft Office and made Facebook as predominant as IM. It’s a cultural trend that cannot be reversed. At the same time it calls for management and forethought. Implementing SocialMiner as SocialWatch is a viable tactic for garnering the benefits of monitoring and responding to social media comments without having to bear upfront costs to acquire new servers or to train technical personnel to manage new applications. It could be the least disruptive way to implement new services that are highly disruptive by nature.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Cloud Computing, Contact Center, Social Media, Recombinant Communications