SAN JOSE, Calif. -October 4, 2004 - Cisco Systems today announced its 2000th Cisco IP Contact Center (IPCC) installation at Nestle Waters North America. Nestle Waters North America, the leader in bottled water in the United States and Canada, chose Cisco IPCC Enterprise Edition to more efficiently distribute calls and to create a full featured Customer Interaction Network across two sites to provide superior customer service and satisfaction.

In order to meet the demands of its various customers - particularly home and office delivery customers - Nestle Waters employs approximately 300 customer service agents across two geographically dispersed sites. Cisco IPCC Enterprise Edition helps enable the company to continuously evolve and improve its customer service to meet and exceed the company's goal of providing effective and efficient customer care in a professional and user-friendly manner.

"With Cisco's IP-based contact center solutions we are able to offer our customers self-service options that are completed in a much more natural and conversational manner than they were in the past," says Kurt Mey, national technology manager for Nestle Waters North America, Inc. "No matter where a customer might be located, the location of our distributed agents is transparent, adding to the ease and efficiency of transactions."

Nestle Waters North America had previously deployed Cisco Customer Voice Portal (CVP) and Cisco Intelligent Contact Manager (ICM), both of which interoperated with Nestle Waters North America's traditional circuit-switched call centers and served as migration technology to the Cisco IPCC. "The transition from our old system to Cisco IPCC was seamless. With Cisco ICM and Cisco CVP already in place, cutting over to Cisco IPCC was a snap," added Mey. "With more efficient customer service representatives and better distribution of calls across our Customer Interaction Network, the Cisco solution has already delivered impressive return on investment (ROI) for us."

"Cisco is one of the leading vendors of IP-based contact center solutions available on the market today," said Katrina Howell, strategic analyst and program manager at Frost & Sullivan. "Customers can now more efficiently balance their call load and create virtual call centers to provide superior customer service and satisfaction."

Cisco recognizes that IP telephony and IP contact centers are two of the fastest growing segments in the telecommunications industry and with its customer contact software products, the company is positioned to take advantage of this growth. Laurent Philonenko, vice president and general manager of Cisco's customer contact business unit, adds, "Our ability to deploy 2000 IP Contact Center systems demonstrates our ability to meet the needs of customers that want to take advantage of IP networks and our commitment to evolving and delivering high quality IP-based contact center products."

Toward a Customer Interaction Network

A Customer Interaction Network is a distributed, IP-based intelligent information network that comprises an evolving suite of innovative, multi-channel services and customer relationship management (CRM) applications. These services and applications provide enhanced responsiveness and streamlined customer exchanges to help your organization deliver superior customer service. A Customer Interaction Network extends customer service capabilities across the entire organization, giving businesses a more integrated and collaborative approach to customer satisfaction.