CX Through Partner Channels

Release Date: April 5, 2022 • Episode #211

Many companies rely on partners to deliver the best results for their customers – we here at Walker enjoy the benefits of being a member of the Qualtrics Partner Network. But any CX pro will know that it may not be particularly easy to manage the experience when it’s in another organization’s hands, and it’s natural to want to ensure that any experience your customers have with you or your partner reflects your brand promise. So how do you manage the experience beyond your own walls? Host Steve Walker welcomes Andrew Carothers, senior manager of digital experience at Cisco, for a discussion on delivering exceptional experience to and through your partner channels.

Andrew Carothers
Cisco
Connect with Andrew

Highlights

Understanding partners’ needs

“Partners run their own businesses and even partners that are that are very closely aligned with Cisco. They’re still trying to do what’s best for their business, for their customers, for their employees. If they’re a public company, for their shareholders. So we don’t dictate terms. And partners also have options in terms of vendors that they’re working with. And many partners are working with multiple vendors. So we need to be able to work with our partners to to feel scale and to connect with customers and in a way be able to do this in lockstep. So the approach that we’ve taken is systems, but systems that are flexible.”

Every customer is digital

“…the pandemic really accelerated something that was already in process and that is every customer is digital. So it used to be before the pandemic, people used to talk about digital customers versus non digital customers and really making a delineation between the two based on the size of the customer. So which is really looking at it through the lens of the vendor and that’s looking at it all wrong because in a in today’s economy, in a SaaS world in particular, customers are in the driver’s seat. This is the fundamental difference between sort of the legacy economy and the SaaS economy, and I call it out that way because it’s the fundamental difference between the what Cisco’s legacy business is traditionally hardware focused and software and subscription driven.”

Transcript

The CX Leader Podcast: "CX Through Partner Channels": Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

The CX Leader Podcast: "CX Through Partner Channels": this wav audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Steve:
Many organizations work with other companies or partners to deliver services and products. So how do you ensure a great experience when customers are not interacting directly with you?

Andrew:
Add on to that the layer of complexity of Cisco, where we have tens of thousands of partners and 90% of our business goes through partners, oftentimes, customers do not delineate in their mind the experience that they are having with Cisco directly or with their Cisco products and solutions via their partners.

Steve:
How to make certain the experience through different channels reflects well on your company on this episode of The CX Leader Podcast.

Announcer:
The CX Leader Podcast with Steve Walker is produced by Walker, an experience management firm that helps our clients accelerate their XM success. You can find out more at walkerinfo.com.

Steve:
Hello, everyone. I'm Steve Walker, host of The CX Leader Podcast and thank you for listening. It's never been a better time to be a CX leader. And this podcast explores topics and themes to help leaders like you leverage all the benefits of your customer experience and help your customers and prospects want to do more business with you. Many companies rely on partners to deliver the best results for their customers. Here at Walker, we enjoy the benefits of being a member of the Qualtrics Partner Network, but any CX pro will know that it may not be particularly easy to manage the experience when it's in another organization's hands. And it's natural to want to ensure that that any experience your customers have with you or your partner reflects your brand promise. So how do you manage the experience beyond your own walls? Well, I'm delighted to have our guest on this week to discuss some of these issues. We'll have a chance to look at how one of the best companies in the world with a globally recognized brand and thousands of partners worldwide manages such a feat. Andrew Carothers is the senior manager of digital experience at Cisco, a global Internet solutions company. Andrew, welcome to The CX Leader Podcast.

Andrew:
Steve thanks very much for having me. It's it's a great privilege.

Steve:
Well, it's a real privilege to have you. And I'm so grateful that you're willing to come in and talk about Cisco's experience. It's a company that I have long admired in my business career. Unbelievable story from startup to the world's most valuable company at one point. And really, one of the main reasons that today we enjoy all the benefits and all the innovation that's come out of the Internet. So maybe just for context, if you wouldn't mind, give us a little bit of of your career story and where you kind of have been and how you ended up kind of as the manager of digital experience at Cisco. And then we'll that'll kind of set the context for our conversation.

Andrew:
Sure, Steve. So I've had when I look back, I've had two great mentors in my life who, unbeknownst to me at the time, really helped focus me on the customer and on scale. So first was my father. My dad was a Hollywood writer and back in the day he was known as…

Steve:
Wow.

Andrew:
…Yeah. So back in the day he was known as the best story pitcher in the business. And because he worked at home, I had plenty of opportunity to watch his process, to learn from him. And one of the chief lessons that I learned was the critical need to understand what your audience cares about before you try to communicate with them, whether that's a studio executive or a moviegoer or a customer or partner. The other mentor that I had that had a huge influence was a man named Ted Michael, and Ted was a pioneering Silicon Valley PR master. So many people know of Regis McKenna. Regis McKennna worked at an agency called Michael McKenna, and it was Ted Michael's agency. And together they put Intel and the high tech world on the map. And Ted helped me take the lessons I learned from my father into the business world and how the focus on the customer must include a holistic business approach, not just marketing words. So I took that and I started my career in PR and marketing, and then I joined Cisco 15 years ago.

Andrew:
And there I started to learn in a large company about the central function of data of tools systems that make the enterprise world spin and how many times these are the linchpin elements of success, sort of the unsung heroes or the unsung impediments. That success depends on being able to get the information you want when you want it. So Cisco, when I joined Cisco, I've always I started off in the services marketing organization. And about eight years ago, Cisco, which had never been known as as I'm sure you're aware of having phenomenal customer service about eight years ago, eight or nine years ago, we sort of went all in or at least formally in on creating a customer success organization, a function within Cisco. I say all in more like organizationally because there were only 100 people, there were only 100 of us in that original team out of 50 or 60,000 employees as we started to kind of pilot and figure out what our approach was going to be, what the roles are going to be, and how we were going to do all of this with our partners. And since that time, eight or nine years ago when we formed it, I've always been on the digital team, the arm that's looking to scale our approach with our partners and then direct to customers digitally as well.

Steve:
It's kind of interesting, but you have kind of a unique background from most of the guests that I have on the show. And I just wanted to unpack this a little bit because I find the story of your dad fascinating because one of my favorite sayings, I actually originally went to college to study theater art. And I think all businesses show business, right? It's it is show business. And the fact that you learned about storytelling from your dad, I mean, how often do we talk today about storytelling in the business world? You know, so that's a really, really cool background. And then you've also come more from the ad agency side, kind of the classic marketing communications side, where most I think our listeners either came up through more of the call center, contact center, customer service side or from kind of the more market research data analytics side. So I just think and then kind of the way you ended up in digital is, is so cool because Cisco was one of the drivers of that. But then this pandemic forced everybody to go digital. I mean, now you can't really separate the customer experience from the digital experience. So you talked a little bit about Cisco's digital experience evolve and where are you today on that? And kind of where do you think that your customers are in terms of how they interact with Cisco and the experiences they have? And how does digital complement or exist in all that?

Andrew:
Right. So I agree with you that the pandemic really accelerated something that was already in process and that is every customer is digital. So it used to be before the pandemic, people used to talk about digital customers versus non digital customers and really making a delineation between the two based on the size of the customer. So which is really looking at it through the lens of the vendor and that's looking at it all wrong because in a in today's economy, in a SaaS world in particular, customers are in the driver's seat. This is the fundamental difference between sort of the legacy economy and the SaaS economy, and I call it out that way because it's the fundamental difference between the what Cisco's legacy business is traditionally hardware focused and software and subscription driven. So we're in the midst of this multi-year transformation and central to that transformation, along with the product development and along with the the different ways of reaching customers and omnichannel. But to do it correctly is the fundamental understanding that in in today's economy, customers expect to be in the driver's seat. It is their experience. And that may mean that they want to work and interact with the company in a 9 to 5 world. And they want to pick up the phone and they want to talk to a salesperson just like ten years ago. But more often than not, that's not what they want. They want to be able to to chat with the with the customer rep. They want to be able to get information from a peer in a different country at 2 a.m. when then when they're working late, they want to be able to get the information that they want when they want it and how they want it. So that means the customer is in charge. To be able to do that requires a digital approach. And what Cisco has been able to do as we've sort of had a front row seat to this, I mean, honestly, we were not the first to recognize this. We were not the pioneers of digital customer experience.

Steve:
No. You actually got a little bit disrupted on this deal, didn't you?

Andrew:
Yeah, exactly. Yes, we did. We did. Yeah. But over the last ten years or so.

Steve:
You rallied back.

Andrew:
Yeah, exactly. We came back and and we've been working on our digital approach to to be able to connect datas and tools and systems like I was referencing before and to be able to create an omnichannel experience for our customers based on where they are as opposed to where we want them to be and as opposed to where we think they are. So just to unpack that a little bit, you know, traditionally organizations use their website as their primary communications vehicle and it's sort of half demand gen vehicle and half brochure where online. And yet that's not what customers are looking for. And so some customers want to reach out to Cisco and engage with us through they want to come to webinars. They want to come to ask the expert sessions. So the majority of our customers still want to receive emails as their primary mode of notification when they've got a renewal coming up or to help them with information through as they progress through their lifecycle stages of adoption. So surprisingly, email is still the number one choice that customers have. And we talk to customers every year to to ask them this. It's declining in terms of. But it's still number one. Right.

Steve:
Well, this is such a fascinating discussion. I do want to get to this concept of the partner ecosystem, but you've kind of used this SaaS economy, SaaS market as kind of the centralizing, I think, theme for why all this is happening and that the customer is in the middle of that. And we had in the intro and we were talking a little bit offline, my business has adapted to the SaaS economy as well. You know, we used to be sort of an independent professional services firm. Now we're part of an ecosystem. Talk a little bit about at Cisco how you do use all those partners and how you make sure that that is a positive experience for the end customer and how you keep that all kind of I guess you don't really control it because you don't want to stifle the innovation and stuff, but just how do you govern it, I guess, and make sure that it's getting to the right results?

Andrew:
It is a challenge. It is a wild beast to wrangle. And what I mean by that is, as you mentioned, we don't control it. Partners run their own businesses and even partners that are that are very closely aligned with Cisco. They're still trying to do what's best for their business, for their customers, for their employees. If they're a public company, for their shareholders. So we don't dictate terms. And partners also have options in terms of vendors that they're working with. And many partners are working with multiple vendors. So we need to be able to work with our partners to to feel scale and to connect with customers and in a way be able to do this in lockstep. So the approach that we've taken is systems, but systems that are flexible. And I'll talk about that in a moment. Shared value so that there's there's there's a reason for both the partner and for Cisco to participate fully in the relationship and then to keep driving toward the business impact and make sure that everyone recognizes the business impact, which helps reinforce the reason for being in the partnership. So one of the initial things that we've done is probably started seven, eight, ten years ago. We started to develop a way to mutually reach our customers. Originally, it was for services renewals where we also know because partners customers have told this year in and year out that the number one reason why every year, the number one reason why customers don't renew a services contract is because they didn't know they had a renewal coming up.

Andrew:
So nobody told me. And when you start to peel away from it, it starts to make sense a little bit that in some cases, especially with with customers that maybe have a smaller dollar value, partners don't – sometimes they lose money if they have sellers working on their own, their own reps working on a customer, just or even if it's just down to processing the order, cost them some money. So having a digital strategy that is based on automation helps to take the friction out. And that friction is, is what costs money processing fees, etc., even just time. So we started working with our partners to build a program we call Lifecycle Advantage, which is a, it's a, it's a program and it's an approach. And there's, there's a tool behind it, a portal that allows us to share with our partners information about our customers started with renewals. We now have customer success information in it as well, where we're sharing information with our partners, they're sharing customer information with us. So oftentimes because partners are closer to our customers than Cisco is, they know which which contact at a customer to work with on a particular solution. So they're able to share with us who should we be contacting? We're able to share. Here's the upcoming renewal or here's the telemetry data that shows where a customer is in their adoption process and then jointly using templates as communications going out to customers, we are able to jointly, in a co-branded way, reach out to customers.

Andrew:
So that could be an email that goes out that could be reaching out to customers via LinkedIn, that could be Google ads, your variety of channels, but jointly reaching out, sharing the knowledge, the custom the partner has of the the customer specifically, and sharing the knowledge Cisco has as to where those customers are and their adoption or renewal process. That's been phenomenally successful. And then we've built that in a flexible way, meaning some some partners. And this oftentimes is based on sort of the size of the partners. Some partners say, look, I just want the data. I have either an off the shelf or a home built customer success management system. I want APIs to help pull that data into my own system. Great. You're running your own business. You may be selling other vendors besides just Cisco. No problem. Here's the data. Other partners say I, especially smaller ones, say I'm going to use this as my own customer success management platform. I don't need to go out and buy something else or expend it resources to build something great. Here's this and it's free. So it's a win win for everybody. So we're flexible enough to accommodate different size partners and to accommodate the different ways that customers want to work with us. Excuse me, that partners want to work with us that best suits their business.

Steve:
A couple of things that you said there that I think are so important for our audience to notice that you time the interactions to the renewal process. And I think this is this is 101. But I'm surprised still how many companies that have sort of a subscription model or an annual contracting don't kind of think about that in terms of the cadence of how they're doing this because basically every customer contact throughout the the cycle, it's building towards that repurchase agreement. And so I think that's really cool. And then just your whole concept of a three key point systems shared value, business impact, but then there's also sort of this three legged stool of there's Cisco, your partner and the end customer. So it's not just a two way relationship. There's actually there's three relationships. So, you know, it's like Cisco to the partner, which you were just talking about, partner to the customer and then customer back to Cisco. So you talked a little bit about the value for the partners. How does that play out then for the end Cisco customer?

Andrew:
Well, you hit on a key point and it's been important to us as a cornerstone of our strategy to share information across all three of those of those corners of the triangle. So we make sure that when we share this information with partners, we also communicate with them on a monthly basis, a list of all of their customers and their renewal opportunity for that partner as a particular sharing of information. We're also sharing the same information with our own Cisco renewal managers at our own Cisco customer success managers that are also working directly with partners so that they see what's being shared with the partner and what's being shared with the customer. So all three sides are all three of these stakeholders that you call down are receiving the same information and we do the same thing when it comes to customer success data. We share now with partners the same information that we're sharing with our own customer success reps at Cisco and being able to provide alerts for partners when they've got customers that are stuck in stage that are not moving through an adoption cycle as quickly as we think they should. Based on our overall data set of hundreds of thousands of customers and looking at using AI and machine learning to analyze that information, to know this customer of this type in this industry should take 30 days to move through this particular lifecycle stage. They've been there 60 days or 45 days. Let's alert the partner. So we alert the partner within this tool using this data as well as provide them with recommended actions to take so that the customer is getting the same information from Cisco and the partner, whether that be through human outreach, whether that be through digital outreach, whatever it might be.

Steve:
Excellent. You led me right into the next question, which is, where is this thing going in the future? You're talking about AI machine learning algorithms that would predict, kind of almost predict what the customer is thinking before you even got any feedback from them. With your experience and with literally thousands of customers and hundreds of thousands of end users, paint a picture of the future from from Andrew Carothers standpoint, where are we going with this thing? What are some of the possibilities?

Andrew:
So I will I will start with a quick review of where I think we've been because it informs where we're going. I've been at the at the front row seat of the growth of customer experience as a discipline within Cisco, within our partner base, and I would say across the industry overall as well. And I think that it started with a what I'll call a front end approach again within Cisco as well as within the industry overall. How do we tie together our messages? How do what maybe what should those messages look like? A whole emphasis on delight your customers. And that's part of that. That's part of it. And that's hard to do. But honestly, that's the low hanging fruit because to really provide the type of customer experience that customers are demanding, meaning it is connected across an organization, meaning that it is hyper personalized. So where I see Cisco and the industry going is a much greater connection between tools and systems and processes and breaking down silos across companies, large and small. And so that information can be shared internally and with partners so that we then get to a point of predictive capability. And this is where it's going, so that when a customer comes to Cisco and they come to cisco.com or they go to Cisco community, so I mentioned those because those are our two most visited digital properties that we have at Cisco and millions of customers a month coming to both of those two assets. So when they come. They will be able… they will they will log in with their customer ID and we'll know who they are. And then the background, all the hamsters will be turning on their wheels and pulling in all the information we have from across the company and from across our partners so that we understand who that customer is, specifically what they've bought, where they are in their adoption cycle.

Andrew:
When they go to a product page and we know, gee, they just bought that product two weeks ago and the telemetry shows, they haven't uploaded a seed file or taken whatever the first step is in their adoption process. We know where they are and likely what information they need and we know how they like to receive it, probably because we've asked them when they first bought the product how they like to receive information. Do they want a podcast? Do they want to ask the expert webinar session? Do they want user guide? What do they want and how do they want to receive that through which channels we were talking about earlier and we tee that up for them sometimes in immediate response to the information they've come to find. Nothing worse than been spending too much time trying to find information that should be easy to find. Well, how about somebody comes and we tee it up for them immediately and in some cases taking it to the next step before they even realize they have a problem, before they even realize they are stuck in stage. We are teeing up information because we know they are stuck in stage and we know what information they need to receive. That's going to be most likely to get them unstuck. That's the next step, that predictive capability. And I think that that comes from from having the connectivity and the orchestration and the automation to be able to do this at scale in hundreds of countries for millions of customers through and with tens of thousands of partners.

Steve:
I'm having a fascinating discussion on this week's podcast with Andrew Carothers, who is the senior manager of digital experience at Cisco. His background is a little different than our classic guest on the podcast. He comes at it more from sort of the creative writing and traditional communication, but he was an early adopter of understanding the digital abilities of organizations. And then he's worked with a great company, Cisco, that obviously is ushered in a lot of this. So Andrew, I'm so grateful that you came on to share the Cisco story. It's a company I admire greatly, but I know because we have a relationship with Awards International that Cisco did go ahead and apply for this award. And my thought on this is that the world is not a better place if we're modest about what we're trying to do to make customer experience better. So the fact that companies like Cisco and other clients are actually out there trying to promote what they're doing for customers, I think makes the world a better place. But if you could just share a little bit about your experience, because I think one of our objectives is to make more of our audience aware that Awards International exists. So if you just sort of tell what the experience was and why you did it and kind of what the outcome was, I'd appreciate that.

Andrew:
Sure. So I agree with you. It's important to have the opportunity to gain some visibility and hopefully some praise for the awards for the work that that a team is doing. It's important for the team members. And so it's also important that a company like Cisco, a large company, it's important for other parts of the organization to see the external validation that an award brings through awards international to to the approach that we're taking. So we participated in the International Customer Experience Awards. We are also participating in the inaugural US Customer Experience Awards and in the international award categories we won five different awards, three golds, a silver and a bronze for our approach and for what we're doing with partner specifically. That's been an effective way for us to communicate with audiences across Cisco. The the awards have also provided us with the third party validation that we've shared with our partners. Certainly this is a program that we built together with our partners. At the same time as we work with more and more partners around the world, it helps them understand the approach and the third party validation that that that it's the right it's the right train to get on. And then I mentioned our employees. It's been very valuable for our own employees to who are head down and working hard for them to see the validation from the industry that for for the for the work that they frankly are the ones who have been doing so. It's been very valuable for us.

Steve:
Well, thanks again. And we are trying to increase the awareness of this. So if our listeners have not checked out Awards International, they should. And thank you for sharing that. All right, Andrew Carothers, we've reached that point of the podcast where I ask every guest to give their best tip. We call it take home value. The idea is that the listener could glean from all the incredible content you've shared over the last 25, 30 minutes. And what is the one tip that they could take back and start improving their program immediately?

Andrew:
Well, it's hard to focus in on just one tip.

Steve:
Well, you can get bonus if you want to have two, but…

Andrew:
[Laughing] Bonus point. Well, I will say I'll say two and they'll be connected. One is start. It can be it can seem daunting and I'll be more specific. So here's point number two. Start with connecting data. Tool by tool. System by system. Start now. When we first began our digital journey within Cisco, at times it felt like we were more of an I.T shop than we were a customer experience organization or customer success organization because we were so focused on how do we get access to data. And I'll tell you, a company as large and spread out globally and across so many different industries and product lines, it actually took us a couple of years to identify, to discover, and then to connect all of the different data sets within Cisco and to get access to all of that data. But until we could do that, we could not provide a holistic approach to customers. We do not want a situation where a customer has ten or 15 different Cisco products, which is a very common situation, and they receive ten or 15 get started emails when they buy a solution. And the only way to avoid that is by connecting the tools and the systems and the data. So my, my number one tip out of the gate, regardless of where a customer, a company is in, their customer success journey is to start connecting all of the data. And if you don't know where all the data resides, just start asking bit by bit. And once one person will lead you to the next person. To the next person.

Steve:
Yeah. The even the longest journey starts with the first few steps and inertia is rampant in the business world. So I love that tip. Andrew Carothers, thank you for being such a great guest on The CX Leader Podcast. And I just in case anybody would want to continue the conversation, I think I found you on LinkedIn. So you're out on LinkedIn, Andrew Carothers, and or any other kind of contact information you'd be willing to share?

Andrew:
Sure. People are always able to. And I welcome the opportunity to speak with people on LinkedIn or if they want to reach out to me on Twitter. I'm @ajcarothers. More than happy to connect with people and have conversations. As you mentioned, there's so much more that to this topic that we can discuss. So it's been a pleasure. I really appreciate the opportunity to even scratch the surface with you, Steve, and maybe some point be able to continue the conversation down the line.

Steve:
Hey, thanks again. And if any of our listeners want to talk about anything you heard on this podcast or about how Walker can help your business customer experience, please feel free to email me at podcast@walkerinfo.com. Be sure to check out our website cxleaderpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, find all of our previous episodes. We organize them by series by topics. It's a wealth over 200 episodes now in the books. And we also have contact information if you want to drop me a note or make a suggestion for a future podcast, we always love to hear from you. The CX Leader Podcast is a production of Walker. We're an experience management firm that helps companies accelerate their experience management success. You can read more about us at walkerinfo.com. Thank you for listening. Remember, it's a great time to be a leader, so go out there, take those first few steps, like Andrew said. And thanks for listening and we'll see you again next time.