Cisco uncovers the future of customer experience enabling partners to drive re-occurring revenue

In the face of economic disruption, brands around the world are hyper-focussed on linking customer experience (CX) to return on investment (ROI). CMO’s State of CX Leadership 2022 report found when it comes to business outcomes, top of the list for respondents was CX, understanding it to be a key component to competitive advantage. A report from Zippia suggested companies that focus on CX increase revenue by 80 percent.

Cisco is leading the way with CX solutions, offering partners and IT resellers a comprehensive suite of solutions including the CX Lifecycle Selling, CX Success Tracks and CX Cloud.

In a recent webinar hosted by Dicker Data, Cisco’s leading value-added distributor: Ash Barron, CX Specialist, Dicker Data; Sonja Loder, Sales Specialist, Cisco and Jackie Ross, Cisco Services Sales Specialist and Success Tracks & CXEA facilitated a CX discuss2ion providing an overview of Cisco’s CX portfolio.  

Here are key insights from the webinar and what Dicker Data partners need to know about the Cisco CX offering.

An introduction to CX Lifecycle Selling

As a value-added distributor servicing more than 8,000 active reseller partners in Australia, Dicker Data understands the value of offering CX services, including the support and solutions required to get started and be successful. World-leading vendor, Cisco have enhanced their CX offering into a streamlined model ensuring partners and their customers are supported at every step of their technology lifecycle.  

Ash Barron, Dicker Data, CX Specialist said, “Cisco has worked to develop a journey so that partners can offer customers not only to buy products, but to buy more products. This is compelling and changes the way partners compete in the market. It helps partners understand how to sell more of their services, improve customer retention and drive growth focused on product innovation and competitive advantage, deliver a new model of managed services and drastically improve renewals rates. In some cases, we've noticed this up to three times.” 

Cisco’s CX lifecycle enhances relationships and customer experiences by digitally empowering partners with a management program that leverages insights and automation.  The program is built to ensure Cisco and partners jointly orchestrate customers through important milestones, across the entire lifecycle via a portal, whether that's assisting adoption, simplifying contract renewals, or upselling to higher-value solutions. Partners can instantly scale and maximize recurring revenue, automate processes, and uncover new opportunities to connect, support and upsell customers.  

Maximising tech investments with Cisco Success Tracks

Traditionally adopting new technology can be time-consuming, costly and overly complex before any measurable business impact is noticed. Cisco Success Tracks has been designed to remove adoption barriers and accelerate the path to better business outcomes with a guided lifecycle journey.

With the support of Dicker Data, partners can access the full value of Cisco, investing in faster and seamless solutions to accelerate success by connecting partners by connections to the right expertise, insights, learning, and support at the right time through a one-stop unified digital experience via the Cisco CX Cloud.

Sonja Loder said “When we're talking about success tracks, we're building on the traditional SMARTnet and solution support that Cisco offers and we are enhancing the offering by adding a digital experience . Success tracks support the CX Cloud. When a customer buys success tracks, they're really just swapping their hardware maintenance skew from smart net or solution support to a success track skew. And with that, when they buy it, they automatically get CX cloud.”

Success Tracks is packaged as a service with four capabilities - Expert Resources, Trusted Support, Insights and Analytics, and Contextual Learning. These capabilities build on each other and help partners rapidly adopt new technologies, simplify IT operations, and experience business value faster. This means partners can pre-plan and budget upfront leveraging Cisco capabilities, accelerate technology adoption with a fully guided digital journey and meet customer goals faster with highly meaningful data and resources.

All from one single view, the guided lifecycle journey connects partners to Cisco experts and customised resources to simplify and accelerate technology adoption, while maintaining business resiliency and agility.

CX Cloud, the digital platform for Success Tracks

Every organisation has an influx of data, but the value comes from how organisations use the data to maximise business outcomes, decision making and ROI. Key to this success is being digitally connected to analytics and automation and having access to strategic expertise at the right time, to stay agile.

Cisco® CX Cloud was developed to offer partners a one-stop and unified view of customer assets with access to artificial intelligence and machine learning driven insights, analytics, Cisco expertise user cases, and contextual learning. It simplifies solution adoption, resolves issues faster, and optimises an IT environment.

Jackie Ross said, “Legacy systems are going to collapse over time. Success Tracks and CX Cloud are the future of Cisco's services business. And it’s the Cloud portal that offers the big difference to customers. Partners have solution support, access to all these digital learning resources and insights plus analytics on their environment. It provides customisation and selective permissions to read/write access within CX code. CX cloud is going to become the hub and the one pane of glass for Cisco customers.”

CX Cloud empowers partners to guide customers to the right technology choices for solution deployment, manage assets, quickly identify risks, and, in an ever-changing landscape deliver the contextual learning needed to empower their workforce.

A look at the two levels of Success Experience

Dicker Data partners can maximise their Cisco IT investments by leveraging Success Tracks to accelerate business value, adopt and scale outcomes faster via a guided lifecycle journey. Working closely with ourthe dedicated Dicker Data Cisco team, partners can access meaningful content linked to user cases to meet project goals and timelines, tap into a one-stop and unified digital experience via CX Cloud. Partners can also maximize the value of Cisco Networking, ACI® and Intersight™, create an adaptive workforce, fill critical skills gaps with -demand upskilling opportunities, access human and digital intelligence on tap, reduce risk with AI and automation and increase ROI by up to 157%.

Level One: Enables partners to optimise customer IT infrastructure management and improve operational efficiency and reduce risk. This includes:

• Expert-led best practices webinar
• Digital learning resources
• 360-degree device visibility and proactive insights
• Centralised Solution Support

Level Two: Empowers partners to focus on driving smarter and fast decisions with proactive and predictive insights. Plus, offers guidance to speed technology adoption, outcomes and value. This includes all level one features plus:

• One-on-one expert coaching and Specialised Expertise*
• Deep product training, remote labs, and certification prep
• Proactive and predictive insights
• Centralised Solution Support

Jackie said, “The cloud agent has evolved. We find most customers upgrade because of the level of intelligence provided, which typically would have required them to go to different portals or may not be able to get automated at all. We also have our production lifecycle tab which contains really rich information centred around controllers.” 

From presales, configuration, to deployment, Dicker Data is the powerhouse at the centre of Australia’s digital transformation. We have partnered with Taleka to offer our partners a bespoke CX consulting service.