The keynotes are over and the exhibits have closed: The last day of Enterprise Connect, Thursday at 8 am, I was heading to the convention center and conference room Sun C, wondering how many attendees still remained. Even more than that, I wondered how many would brave the early start time for the last of the five contact center sessions of Enterprise Connect 2013: Emerging Tools of the Contact Center, Social and Analytics.
My five panelists and I could not have been more pleasantly surprised to see an audience of what appeared to be 100+. Clearly there was a high enough level of interest in social media and analytics for the contact center to influence plans to leave on Thursday instead of earlier, as well as coax people from their beds after what was for most a late night of "networking."
One company that was not on the panel nonetheless ended up being discussed--SoCoCare. Why? Because it brings together not only social and analytics but is a SaaS-delivered service, another very hot contact center topic. SoCoCare is also a hot because it was only recently launched (in the past month), announced a partnership and reseller relationship at Enterprise Connect with cloud contact center provider inContact, and is implemented via a cloud-to-cloud application integration.
SoCoCare's partnership with inContact is leveraged in multiple places. As discussed by panelist Paul Lang, SVP at Siemens Enteprise Communications, Siemens resells inContact, which makes SoCoCare part of their portfolio as well. And as referenced by Alla Reznick, Director of Product Management for Verizon Business, in Wednesday's Cloud Contact Center Solutions session, Verizon is also a reseller of inContact's cloud contact center solution and therefore another possible distribution channel for SoCoCare.
inContact's integration to SoCoCare will be available as part of inContact's recently released 13.1 release, which added universal queue, and is scheduled to be generally available in the second quarter of 2013. Social interactions will be routed and prioritized using work item routing, similar to the way the Salesforce.com cases can be routed by the inContact solution. inContact is also making SoCoCare available as a standalone offering, for organizations that may want to deploy it without integrating to the contact center universal queue.
What is different about SoCoCare? First, it is available only as Software-as-a-Service, and is billed on a per-interaction basis. This decreases the upfront cost to pilot and/or deploy the solution. Second, SoCoCare was built by contact center professionals. A number of SoCoCare's founders (including Ed Margulies) also founded the early cloud contact center pioneer, [email protected], which was sold to Oracle in 2006.
Finally, SoCoCare's Social Customer Interaction Management (CIM) solution is different from many existing social analytics tools, as they typically focus on the needs of marketing or PR professionals. Social CIM was built for the contact center and offers role-based analytics suited for that world:
* Agent KPI/Workgroup Analytics
* Top Voices, Relevancy, Sentiment Dashboards
* Supervisory Real-Time Agent Display
* Real Time SLA Readerboard Display
Based on the follow-up questions about SoCoCare I received at the end of Thursday's session, I'd say they'll soon have an active pipeline.
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