It’s an exciting time of year at Cisco – it’s time for our annual sales conference, Cisco IMPACT, where our entire global sales team, along with our Cisco executives and business leaders, come together (virtually, of course) to celebrate our customers’ and our employees’ successes, to share and align on our company strategy, and to innovate in how we leverage technology to reimagine the possibilities for our customers through this new normal.

The entire Cisco team and our partner ecosystem is about supporting our customers – from our revered Systems Engineers to Sales Account Managers, from Customer Success Executives to Customer Success Specialists. We are reimagining how we deliver exceptional value to our customers, with the right mix of products and services that put our customers in the best position to succeed, today and in the future.

So, indulge me for a minute. While the pandemic has created challenges, let’s think about what we all can achieve if we reimagine what’s possible.  A world where healthcare transcends location. A society where education is universally accessible and inclusive. A world where businesses are secure and flourishing.  Where we are all seamlessly connected, any time and everywhere.

A transformative year for Customer Experience

The global pandemic we’ve found ourselves in this year has accelerated our efforts on every digital front – for ourselves and for our customers, and it’s forced us to think differently about how we address our customers’ needs. It’s highlighted the importance of the customer experience – how every touchpoint we have with our customers impacts their own business success, their relationship with technology and our relationship with them. And it’s evolved our thinking on how to drive customer value around the lifecycle.

Let me share an example. A large global bank faced a 300% increase in call volume due to COVID-19 while their staff was isolated at home. Together, the Cisco Sales and Customer Experience teams designed a solution that included a mix of products and services that extended their call center services to mobile agents.  In one week, the team enabled 5000 workers to handle calls from home. A live dashboard allowed bank leadership to track the impact of Cisco’s remarkable response in real time. This is just one of many examples of how our teams have come together to face new challenges, delivering the right blend of products and services to accelerate our customers’ success.

Meeting our customers where they are, today

We continue to drive businesses forward using this model through the pandemic. For example, a large healthcare provider came to Cisco with an urgent need to establish a temporary hospital for COVID-19 patients. Cisco Sales and Customer Experience again worked together to build a medical-grade network enabling secure patient monitoring by providing LAN Wi-Fi, telephony, and conferencing.  It allowed the healthcare provider to establish 4000 new beds for patients in just nine days. And, using Cisco technologies and services, the healthcare provider was able to create a replicable blueprint for other global healthcare providers as a result.

We’ve developed an entirely new set of business resiliency offers and solutions focused on how we address our customers’ business needs in the near term and drive their digital transformation for the long term. Our customers’ future success depends on how they drive their digital strategies forward – how they transform and adapt to the new normal. And we’re working harder than ever before to ensure their success.

Accelerating digital transformation for tomorrow and beyond

When we talk about this being a transformative year for Customer Experience – and what customer success looks like, we can’t just think about the near term. We have to think about what will sustain our customers moving forward for the long term, what will accelerate their time to value with new technologies and drive profitability, innovation and growth. This year, we’re focused on how we drive that value, and two examples of how we are doing this are with our Ask the Expert sessions and Accelerators.

• Ask the Expert sessions are one-to-many interactive sessions with Cisco experts, specifically the Customer Success Specialist, that tackle challenges, demonstrate best practices and allow for Q&A with customers on their current challenges. These sessions help customers learn about features, capabilities and best practices to accelerate time to value with Cisco products.
• Accelerators are one-on-one, and are designed with specific objectives in mind, to help our customers overcome hurdles or challenges that they may be facing as they onboard, adopt and use new technologies.

Here’s an example of how these sessions drive value. A Cisco partner was working with their customer, who was in the middle of an acquisition. Part of the acquisition involved merging two data centers with very different technologies. An Accelerator was used to demonstrate how Cisco DNA Center could be implemented across both and drive tangible benefit for the customer, accelerating time to value and digital transformation.

This is just a small sampling of the services we offer to our customers, and we’re excited that we have the opportunity to join forces with our sales team over the next week to talk about how we can continue to innovate for our customers, to help them succeed.

Reimagine customer experience

So, indulge me again for just a moment. Imagine a world where businesses aren’t just surviving, they’re thriving. Imagine a society that’s connected and inclusive. Imagine a more sustainable future, where the possibilities are limitless.

Customers – it’s your year. And it’s about how we, at Cisco, unite with you to support your digital strategy in the near term and how we sustain it for the long term. It’s about how all of Cisco, including our Sales Account Managers, Systems Engineers, Customer Success Specialists and others, accelerate your success. This week, at IMPACT, that’s what we’re after.

We’re reimagining the customer experience.

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