How to turn your customer crisis into a competitive differentiator

Cisco strives to deliver a great customer experience, every time. It’s a top priority at our company. But even with that focus, we still trip up from time to time. With the increasing complexity of today’s IT environments and as our customers’ business networks grow, invariably things go wrong. When that happens, the most important thing we can do is address the issue with an urgency, transparency, and immediacy that gets our customers back on track and restores their confidence in Cisco.

With over 20 years of experience handling our customers’ most challenging technical issues, we’ve developed expertise and best practices in how to quickly respond to and resolve an issue while identifying the root cause so we can drive lessons learned back into the business for continuous improvement. In parallel, we continuously evolve and innovate how we serve our customers, particularly how we handle our customers’ most critical issues.

We recently documented our processes and based on that, I’m excited to share with you a new white paper: “Developing a Customer Assurance Program from Start to Finish: Best Practices from Cisco’s Award-Winning Customer & Partner Assurance Organization”

In this white paper, we share the five key best practices that form the foundation
of Cisco’s entire critical situation response process. Our intent is to share ideas and innovations that you can adopt in your business on a number of levels: to build out a full-blown critical situation response team, to better drive lessons learned in your business, or simply to improve the cross-functional leadership skills of your employees.

We also know that many of our customers and partners operate in similar environments. Cisco has a vision to build a common escalation management framework in the industry that can be employed when multiple companies are involved in the same critical escalation with a mutual customer or in a multi-vendor scenario. This would allow for standards that help all of us better manage customer expectations and deliver a more consistent experience. Together, we can ensure our customers’ success when it is most at risk.

Please give the paper a read, share it with your teams, and give me your feedback. I’m interested in the approaches you use at your business and the experiences you’ve had in resolving critical customer issues. Sharing ideas and learning from one another makes all of us better at serving our customers.