Remote Expert, Cisco, 2009
Cisco Remote Expert: Customer & Agent View
Cisco’s Remote Expert was designed to make specialized advice available wherever the customer happened to be. The solution connected shoppers to experts through in-store TelePresence, the web, or phone, using a shared platform built from Cisco’s collaboration, contact center, and video technologies. The result was a more flexible service model that increased access to expertise, improved productivity, and helped retailers recover sales that were otherwise being lost.
How do you make expertise available exactly when and where the customer needs it, without staffing every location for peak demand? That question shaped Remote Expert, a Cisco solution created with retail customers to rethink how specialized advice could be delivered across stores, websites, and phone channels.
Retailers were struggling with a familiar tension: customers needed knowledgeable guidance at key moments in the buying journey, but it was costly and inefficient to place highly skilled experts in every store at all times. Journey analysis revealed exactly where the experience was breaking down, long waits, inconsistent advice, and missed opportunities that sent customers elsewhere. At the same time, experts in physical stores frequently had downtime that was difficult to use efficiently.
Our team used digitized customer journey flows and staffing simulations to identify where expertise had the greatest impact on conversion and where the absence of it was costing the sale. From there, we designed a new service model that took expertise out of individual stores and made it available as a centralized, on-demand capability.
Digitized process flows of the customer journey capture where a customer leaves and the sale is lost due to lack of expertise (lengthy wait, poor quality of advice). Simulations using different staffing levels show conversion improvements with higher availability of expertise.
Experts could support multiple store locations from a contact center, while also assisting online and phone customers, creating a more seamless advisory experience across channels. By turning expertise into a shared resource rather than a fixed in-store role, retailers could improve service availability without adding headcount. The centralized service model also resulted in higher quality expertise through better training and performance monitoring.
The result: An increase in the availability of experts without needing to hire additional staff. Centrally located resources serve all touch points, enabling maximum use of experts time, thus increasing productivity and reducing leakage.
Additional Implementations of Remote Expert
Remote Expert was subsequently extended to mobile which Cisco offers as part of its Collaboration portfolio.
Mortgage Advisor: Cisco has deployed Remote Expert in Retail Banking to enable timely access to experts who can assist with complex product sales such a Mortgages and Small Business Loans.
Services Presence for retail: includes periferials such as a display, credit card reader, signature pad and printer to enable complex finance transactions such as loans or insurance plans.
Related Information
White Paper: Manning the Unmanned Aisles
Article: Lessons from retail analytics
NRF2013 - Cisco Big Ideas Session Recap
Blog Post: Have A Problem? Ask An Expert