The Cisco social media appliance is expected to be made available this November, while the Avaya gateway can be ordered now for custom, professional services-related projects.

Following up on Sheila McGee-Smith's overviews on the separate contact center briefings Cisco and Avaya held for industry analysts, I wanted to dig a little deeper on a common theme at both events: social media integration. Both companies detailed the appliances they are developing to better tie in social media communications with contact center operations.

Avaya's solution centers around a pair of social networking solutions, part of an Avaya Labs project called Customer Connections. One is FacePhone, a Facebook widget demonstrated before and with plenty of information already available--like this video which provides a nice overview of it. The other is Social Media Manager, a solution that is by no means secret but which has had less attention paid to it to date. The software resides in a gateway (yes, the Avaya Social Media Gateway) connected to the Avaya Aura communications environment. Initially focused on Twitter, it uses advanced text processing techniques to search for references to one's company or products or other relevant keywords. It determines if the use of the keyword is relevant (for example, if a reference to "united" refers to United Airlines or United Freight or something else), then determines if action should be taken by a contact center agent or other personnel responsible for social media interactions. If actionable, the tweet is treated as an inbound customer communication, entering the contact center engine which uses skills-based routing to determine those best qualified to respond.

Cisco, meanwhile, has what it calls a social media customer care deliverable in the works. As yet unnamed, it is based on an appliance that can be set up either on-premise or in the cloud. The server searches and captures information from Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, and other public social media sites, then analyzes and prioritizes what to do with it, such as creating a workflow on what response is required and who in the contact center or elsewhere in the company is to be involved. The appliance can also aggregate profile information from LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. to create a mash-up profile of the customer having problems. If the customer's location can be determined (and if applicable with the customer support situation) the software can mash up a map showing nearby store locations where more help can be found.

The Cisco social media appliance is expected to be made available this November, while the Avaya gateway can be ordered now for custom, professional services-related projects, with productization to follow around this time next year. Follow me on Twitter!