Making your customer experience future ready through scale and simplification

 

Zarina Pasalic, Director, Digital Cistomer and Partner Experience, CISCO

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According to JB Wood, President and CEO of the Technology & Services Industry Association (TSIA), “the number one determinant of market share in any industry will be digital customers’ experience”.

 

In the past, we’ve bucketed, sliced, and diced our customers into personas, businesses, accounts… B2B, B2C, and so on.

 

These days are long gone.

 

Those barriers between the business and the consumer no longer exist. In the age of the customer, where experience is at the core, B2E – business to employee – is the way forward. We live in a world of B2E, a new era of customer engagement where we are witnessing convergence of everything, everyone, everywhere, with experience at its core.

 

There’s no doubt that digital transformation is at the heart of all business strategies, and customer experience business’ number-one priority. Digitising core businesses operations and processes turned out to be the lifejacket for most CEOs, who found in digital a way to meaningfully communicate with customers and help their businesses thrive while navigating the uncertainty of the pandemic.

 

Digital transformation comes with a unique set of challenges

 

Although every company in every industry had their own unique set of challenges, we at Cisco found that there were some unifying thoughts. What can be delivered digitally must be delivered digitally, across four key customer priority areas. But this has in turn accelerated the needs of, and presented further set of challenges for, customer experience. Companies and individuals are increasingly valuing experiences as the new metric.

 

We are witnessing changes in customer buying habits. Due to the pandemic, a high percentage of customers are now purchasing technical solutions online, so the industry has to adapt to this new way of selling. Customers are also now much more informed and knowledgeable coming into the buying process. Gaps in digital skillsets are forcing companies to rethink how to apply digital technologies and ways of working at scale. Still other companies are planning end-to-end transformations but have yet to move beyond the drawing board. And the orchestration of the entire customer lifecycle means having to co-ordinate five key areas necessary to create digital experience: process; data science and analytics; platform; content; and people. That is a very labour- and time-intensive exercise.

 

But the common denominator remains retention.

 

Retention, for centuries, has been top of mind for every business, whether it’s retaining a customer base, employee headcounts or revenue. Just as customers have evolved to look at value over price, companies are evaluating lifetime value over transactional value. Customer retention is critical because the cost of acquiring new customers is so much higher than retaining existing ones.

 

Taking our partner community on the same transformational journey

 

At Cisco, we are focused on creating a data-driven digital customer experience that is seamless, simple, end-to-end, fully orchestrated and hyper-personalised. It’s designed to ensure that every interaction is optimised for desired customer outcomes across business, products and through the entire lifecycle. We provide our customers with the multiple self-serve options any modern buyer expects today, so those customers engage with us on their terms, in their own time and in their preferred channel. That means they will appreciate the value of the technologies they have purchased and make the renewal process as simple as possible.

 

Partners are our lifeblood: our extended salesforce and Lifecycle Advantage is helping them scale customer experience. Lifecycle Advantage is the leading customer experience management program for partners, leveraging insights and automation to drive retention and growth.

 

But for many partners, the renewal business can be particularly difficult to scale. This is especially true for smaller customers, as many partners simply don’t have the people to manually keep up with every customer’s renewal opportunity. With Lifecycle Advantage, however, Cisco automatically sends out co-branded partner notifications, informing customers of contracts and services that are expiring. Partners add their own price quotes. Alongside these notifications, Cisco also automatically sends recommended offerings based on customers’ transaction history, helping partners to upsell additional business. It really puts the partner in the driving seat. Through an automated co-branded messaging system, Lifecycle Advantage allows deeper communication with customers by sending them relevant information about their solutions.

 

The newly launched feature in Lifecycle Advantage – Success Program Insights – allows Partners to track customer success and get a detailed view of a customer’s point in the lifecycle, based on telemetry. This way, partners can personalise their approach and meet customers with precision, offering tailored options to enhance their engagement, build trust and drive growth. Success Program Insights is just one more way we’re changing the game – for partners and for customers.

 

Turning digital transformation challenges into opportunities

 

We’re a partner-led, customer experience-based organisation. At Cisco, we remove scale problems by enabling partners to engage with thousands of customers at any given time, using a real-time data exchange platform. This platform gives them the tools to review their entire installed base and drive engagement with their customer digitally, using pre-packaged digital journeys which they can co-brand with their own logos and values.  

 

We connect data, content, platforms and processes to help partners drive their renewals opportunities, upsell to higher value products, and drive customer success – at scale, and at no cost to them.

 

With well over 8,000 partners taking advantage of this free program globally, those that do embrace it tend to progress to advanced stages of the lifecycle faster, with higher health scores – which is more likely to lead to higher loyalty and retention rates.