How Listening to the Customer Helped Cisco Improve its Business

Karen Mangia is currently the Senior Director of the Listening Services Center of Excellence, which leads Cisco’s global Voice of Customer, Partner and Field portfolio. She and her team drive customer, partner, and Cisco success through connected listening and insights that shape Cisco’s direction, strategy, investments, and closed-loop process.

You can next hear from Karen at the Customer Analytics and Intelligence Summit, where she will present the keynote, “Engaging Executive Sponsors at the Highest Level and Engraining Customer Insight in Your Culture.”

Shawn Siegel: Can you briefly discuss a new initiative or a changed strategy at Cisco that was the direct result of the Listening Services Center?

Karen Mangia: In the earliest days of Cisco’s customer and partner listening activities, focus was placed on customer and partner satisfaction with Cisco. As Cisco’s relationships and listening activities matured, it became clear satisfaction was not the only element that fueled relationships and growth with customers and partners.

The Ease of Doing Business with Cisco emerged four years ago as a primary area of customer and partner focus and was a leading driver of both customer and partner loyalty to Cisco. It was within this context that the Ease of Doing Business with Cisco was created as a key Cisco priority and area of focus. The entire Cisco organization is now focused on how it can make it easier for customers, partners, and employees to do business with Cisco.

Cisco’s investment in customer, partner, and employee improvements has yielded the following business impact:
– Improved access and navigation of Cisco’s support website: Improvements made to website access and navigation have led to higher case avoidance. This translated into a savings of $374.4 million in 2011.
– Establishment of consistent ordering rules and platforms: Efficiencies brought about by the consolidation and streamlining of ordering platforms and rules has reduced OPEX costs by $200K per year.
– Creating unified tool platforms: Aligning disparate tools into central locations has saved Cisco $20M per month in invoicing delays.

Siegel: How has Cisco incorporated social media into its listening strategies?

Mangia: Cisco’s Customer Intelligence Center is in the marketing organization and monitors social media traffic. Our executive briefing centers have a visual display that shows how that feedback is changing on a minute by minute basis globally.

Siegel: Many companies gather a lot of data, but struggle to integrate data from disparate departments or functions. How does a company as vast as Cisco manage to integrate the voice of customers, employees and partners?

Our annual customer and partner relationship data as well as our Executive PULSE survey results are on the same platform. For our other listening vehicles, we use a dashboard function native to the Verint tool.

Siegel: Are there any new technologies or tools that you think have great potential for customer analytics and insight?

Mangia: Technologies that enable integration of multiple listening sources as well as the ability to analyze and use verbatim comments are key.

Siegel: Lastly, gathering customer insight is one thing, but presenting it to senior management in a way that convinces them to change is another. What do you find are the best strategies for presenting the insights to senior management?

Mangia: With senior management, it’s important to do three things:
– Integrate the readouts with existing reviews, such as Quarterly Business Reviews and Operations Reviews
– Presents trends and implications rather than data
– Suggest actions to take based on the insights