Collaboration is critical to an organization’s success. It helps drive innovation, improve customer service and support a communicative corporate culture. How you embrace technology will help define the impact of collaboration on your employees and your customer base.

To that point our partner Cisco offers an entire suite of collaboration tools that help improve engagement with all of your stakeholders. These include Collaboration Applications, Customer Collaboration, TelePresence and Unified Communications. Their products will help your team make decisions, solve problems, reduce costs and accelerate time to market. In addition, their solutions offer the flexibility to accommodate new developments as your needs evolve and help protect existing IT investments related to their technologies.

Collaboration Applications like WebEx can help add an online component to your capabilities. The application brings voice, video, and web conferencing capabilities individuals spread out at different locations. It can be used for real-time communication for meetings, sales, training, customer support and events. WebEx conferencing solutions will also help optimize the IT resources you already have in place as they are delivered through the SaaS model to support easy implementation and scaleability throughout your organization.

The Customer Collaboration suite of resources will establish or expand the foundation for an improved customer experience. We already touched on how SocialMiner offers support for customer interactivity in this recent blog post. But additional products like the Unified Contact Center and the Customer Voice Portal will help increase customer satisfaction and loyalty by offering sophisticated call routing, contact management and speech-enabled self-service capabilities. In addition, they can provide an alternative to the mostly reactive mode of traditional call centers while helping you build a platform that supports engagement and proactively with your customers.

Cisco’s multiple options for TelePresence add a component that brings attendees face to face even if they’re in different offices. This suite of products offers a new way to support collaboration through high-quality video conferencing. By embracing TelePresence to support collaboration your organization can reduce travel costs, speed up decision making and provide highly engaged service for customers and partners. The systems also offer interoperability based on the industry standards meaning less support will be required from your IT team to assist with connecting to customers, suppliers and partners who are running on different types of systems or networks.

Then you can add in their Unified Communications solutions to make sure that what we discussed above runs effectively over a single converged network. This suite of products helps extend collaboration by offering reliable communications support for delivering multiple applications like voice, video and presence services to various types of devices and IP endpoints. It also addresses the growing need to support mobility at an enterprise level. Implementing Cisco’s Unified Communications platform allows you to view, optimize, and manage the entire communications system from one screen.

Each of these tools will enable your team to work together more efficiently, build new channels to communicate with customers and improve the way your organization communicates. We’ll provide a more in-depth look at each of the solutions individually in future blog posts to provide a better understanding of the platforms Cisco offers to support collaboration.