The We’re Listening Blog Series: Making It Easier to Do Business with Cisco by Simplifying Order Management

In this installment of the “We’re Listening” blog, Kathy Harrington, VP of Global Service Delivery, delves into actions taken by Cisco’s Order Management team to improve your order management experience.

By Guest Contributor Kathy Harrington

We constantly strive to achieve the best possible customer experience in every part of our business. As customers and partners, you’ve told us you want Cisco’s order management process to be less complicated, more efficient, and take less time. Your feedback is taken seriously and has resulted in several improvements to ensure placing a product or service order with Cisco is fast and simple. Comments from customers like the one below confirm we’re moving in the right direction on this journey to continually improve your experience:

“My dealings with Cisco, either for equipment issues, purchasing or planning, have been treated with probably the best customer service I’ve found…customer service reps are helpful.”
– Public Sector Customer

Your time is important and we understand frustration around seemingly unnecessary steps that increase the cycle time of order fulfillment. To bring down cycle times and increase your productivity, we are ramping up the adoption of our Cisco Commerce Workspace (CCW) tool. CCW is your single online portal that consolidates quoting, configuring, and ordering functions into one platform. Today, customers, partners, and distributors using the full functionality of Cisco Commerce Workspace are experiencing:

Faster quote to order times, with 90%+ of all orders processing within 24 hours or less

More auto bookings

Improved transaction quality

Average booking times of 1 hour (vs. 3-5 hours for those still using Ordering Tool)

We expect to have full adoption of CCW, and the retirement of legacy commerce tools, in the 2nd half of 2013.

To reduce time and complexity in orders that require manual assistance, we‘ve increased resources to more quickly address your needs, and now ensure there is one case owner and one single point of contact throughout a manual ordering process. You can now open and track these cases through Customer Service Central, a newly launched portal that consolidates multiple case management applications into one destination. For the first time, you can now submit customer services cases related to both products and Cisco services business through a single intuitive interface.

In the near future, expect to see improvements to the order management backlog process by optimized tracking and notifications that avoid potential delays in booking. We are also enhancing our Services quoting process to increase the flexibility of the quoting tool, improve the accuracy of contract renewals and speed up cycle time.

Keep the feedback coming! We want to hear whenever we miss your expectations. Our goal is to listen and always keep improving. When you share, you give us the opportunity to continually make your experience with Cisco a better one – thank you!