You know how it is when you have guests coming over. You want to be ready for them. You want a nice physical environment and you want to make sure your guests feel welcome, enjoy the experience, and have some interesting conversations to engage in.
Our Customer Experience (CX) support teams constantly looks for ways to transform feedback into better experiences for our customers. They often find ideas in feedback customers offer about their experiences with TAC cases, ordering product, shipment processes, and more. Customers also offer feedback when they visit one of Cisco’s Customer Experience Centers (CXC) in person, where they learn about how we can help them achieve their visions. However they provide feedback, we strive to enrich how customers experience their interactions with Cisco. While you likely don’t ask guests that are coming to your home how they feel about you or what they want to talk about before they come over (awkward!), when you have customers coming for a business visit, this information is vital.
We recently improved the way we prepare for visits to our CXCs to make sure our customers’ time here is focused, enlightening, and productive, so I’ve invited one of our Customer Insights and Action managers, Kitty Cheeks, to share the details.
Cisco’s CXCs not only highlight Cisco’s technology, they showcase the key role that technology plays in transforming businesses and positioning customers for success in the digital world.
When customers visit CXCs, they receive interactive demonstrations that showcase Cisco’s innovative solutions, and how they are solving some of the world’s most challenging issues. They also see Cisco’s unique vision of how business will be done in the future.
Before customers visit, our sales teams work with their customer, of course, and then the CXC team to craft customized agendas based on customers’ business objectives. Cisco’s subject matter experts then prepare presentations that target how Cisco can help address those objectives.
One big change we made recently was to funnel aggregate customer feedback into the CXC prep process. This step helps connect customer visions and goals with Cisco’s solutions, while helping them understand how the people in their organizations experience Cisco, what they need from Cisco, and how we can meet those needs. This might seem like a subtle change, but it really helps our teams make sure we are meeting customer objectives from both top-down and bottoms-up perspectives.
Our sales teams like it because it helps them better prepare to meet customer needs and show them what they want—and need—to see.
“The CXC prep process allows the Customer Experience Center to offer more relevant and focused discussions between Sales and our customers. We can more effectively provide customers access to experts that not only address their future needs but also their existing concerns,”
– Todd West, Manager, CXC
Advanced access to customer input provides Sales with a more complete view of customer situations. It gives Sales the opportunity to demonstrate that closing the loop is more than just fixing a system or improving a process; it’s also about how to best structure engagements that meet the customer’s requirements.
“Visibility into current customer sentiment through Cisco surveys and other inputs help Cisco make more accurate critical decisions during the customer lifecycle. At a time when speed matters, real-time customer data and sentiments enable an accelerated sales process for customers.”
– Kevin Dunn, Manager, Regional Sales
Extending the voice of the customer throughout Cisco helps us make sure we are doing everything we can to improve the customer experience. And since all of us in Cisco play a role in creating the best possible experience for our customers, a deeper, more holistic understanding of our customers is a good thing for everyone. Shining lights on customer sentiment across Cisco is one big way we improve the overall customer experience. It’s what enables Cisco to be a better business partner and trusted advisor. And in this instance, it helps us make sure our guest customers get the most out of their visits!
For more information, or to share feedback, please reach out to us at customer-listening@cisco.com.
This is great!
It is not clear from this post but it is critically important that our customers feel understood. Towards this end we should include in the CXC conversation not only the feedback from the customer but also our understanding of that feedback and what we intend to do about it.
Thanks for the reply, Mike. Our ultimate goal is to make sure customers not only know we're listening, but that they feel heard and that we do whatever we can to take action on the things they tell us. Providing account teams with customer insights before they meet with customers at the CXC provides a proactive way for Cisco to start taking action where that makes sense, and then to tell customers what we’ve done before they arrived. That's a great way to start a meeting at the CXC!