3 Ways to Be More Customer Obsessed in 2019

Today’s buyers want business outcomes – they want to know that their technology investments are having an impact. They also want their interactions with the companies they do business with to be fast, frictionless and effective. In fact, according to a Salesforce study, 57 percent of customers say they’ve switched to a competitor to get a better customer experience.

It’s no secret that Cisco has been adapting to the changing market by focusing on what our customers want. We’ve made it our mission to be passionate about the customer experience and support customer needs throughout the entire lifecycle from choosing, to using, to loving Cisco solutions.

One way we’re doing that is through the Cisco Customer Experience (CX) Lab. Formed in 2015 and launched at Cisco Live in San Diego, CX Lab uses a closed-loop process for listening to customers, learning how to improve their experience and implementing change with a goal to deliver greater value.

The team worked on a variety of projects throughout Cisco to ensure that the customer perspective is being fully addressed – from personalizing the Cisco.com website for our customers, to making it easier for them to adopt and implement our Next-Generation Firewalls (NGFW), and much more.

For partners who want to take a page out of the CX Lab playbook, the good news is that what we’re doing isn’t rocket science. Here are three simple strategies that we use to zero in on what customers want:

Open the lines of communications: Throughout the year CX Lab participates in third party conferences, Cisco Live, and digital experience interviews. At each live and digital event we set up a booth, staffed by our team, not with the intention of selling or promoting, but with a goal to simply talk with customers, understand their expectations and preferences, and gain their valuable feedback. This effort has resulted in nearly 1,500 in-depth interviews with customers from seven countries. You can read more about what CX Lab does with the feedback it receives here.

Gather research and take action: CX Lab develops hands-on experiments to gather research directly from customers regarding what they like, what they don’t like, what could be better, and why. We interview customers using responsive, often tactile methodologies, then evaluate results and employ analytics tools to identify pain points and areas for improvement. Using Social Listening, qualitative analysis, context is added to the insights to inform and drive business decisions that produce ideal interactions for our customers.

Break down internal silos: One important factor behind our success with CX Lab is cross-functional collaboration. The Digital Experience Marketing team works with a broad-cross section of Cisco organizations. Working together with disparate groups, our small team has been able to break down internal silos to influence company-wide changes in the way we interact with our customers.

We’re In This Together

CX Lab has been so well received that our reach will be expanded in 2019. We’ll add a new digital platform that will enable us to collect customer feedback not just during Cisco Live events but throughout the year. It’s just another way that we’re doing everything in our power tohear what our customers have to say, learn how to improve their experience and effect change.

As we embark on a New Year, we want to remind our partners that we recognize your critical importance to our go-to-market strategy. We also recognize that it takes teamwork to keep our customers healthy and on the path to achieving their desired business outcomes. Whether you want to emulate our CX Lab strategies to improve the customer experience, or use our partner-branded tools such as Lifecycle Advantage to nurture effective product and service adoption, on-time renewals and more, we hope you’ll make 2019 your year to be more customer obsessed. The reward will be stronger revenue and profits and greater loyalty, too.

Join us at one of our upcoming Cisco Live! events to see what the hype is all about:

Melbourne, Australia: March 5-8, 2019
Click here to register

San Diego, California, US: June 9-13, 2019