The We’re Listening Blog Series: What We Heard at Partner Summit

Cisco hosts a multitude of conferences, tradeshows, and online events each year. For our customers and partners, these events are great opportunities to interact with Cisco experts and keep current on the latest products, technologies, and network solutions. For Cisco, they are also a key way that we connect with our users and listen to their feedback about what’s working and what’s not. For example, we recently wrapped up the Partner Summit in Boston. Joe Pinto, Senior Vice President, Technical Services,  attended the event, and joins us to share his key takeaways.

 By Guest Contributor Joe Pinto

Last month, I attended Cisco Partner Summit 2013 in beautiful Boston, Massachusetts, and walked away energized about applying what I heard toward making Cisco easier to do business with.

Partners are absolutely critical to the long-term success of Cisco and our customers. Cisco depends on a global network of Partners to provide scale, skills, and capabilities at both local and global levels.

Each year, Cisco’s Partner Summit brings together over 2,000 partners for networking, channel discussions, technology updates, and more. Below are a few of my observations and takeaways from the event.

For me, Partner Summit reconfirmed the following:

• Our Partners are truly an extension of Cisco’s business and the Cisco experience, and a key element in making Cisco easier to do business with.
• Cisco must not only continue to focus on pain points that affect our customers, but we must also prioritize partner-specific improvements.
• Without effective, well-trained, and well-supported Partners, their business is less successful, Cisco isn’t represented as it should be, and most importantly, the customer suffers.
• The combined experience of Cisco’s 65,000 partners worldwide represents a vast amount of expertise in selling, implementing, and supporting Cisco products and technology. This makes them a valuable source of information that Cisco can tap into as we drive improvements in the experience for our customers.

And it brought to light new opportunities:

• Tap into Partner feedback and insights based on the thousands of customer interactions they manage daily to identify areas where Cisco and Partners can improve the customer experience.
• Explore additional Cisco capabilities to extend to Partners in order to improve and align the customer experience.
• Explore Partner operations, processes, tools, capabilities and innovations that Cisco can consider to improve the customer experience and better align with our Partners.

I know how important it is to connect and listen to our customers and partners. I met and chatted with many individuals at Partner Summit and, like every year, I truly enjoyed it, learned a lot from their perspectives, and fostered relationships both old and new. As usual, I started some really productive conversations with other attendees that will turn into a regular cadence of input and ongoing exchanges. I’m excited to keep these channels open to uncover new ways to continually improve and simplify doing business with Cisco.

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