EC News DeskWith IT driving business transformation, leaders feel boardroom pressure to deliver results while coping with skills gaps and struggling with increased complexity. To address this, at the recent Cisco Partner Summit, Cisco CX announced new developments to a lifecycle selling approach that accelerate customer success while supporting growth for its partners.
“Selling across the lifecycle is the largest opportunity for our partners to position customers for a successful digital transformation. Partners are integral to delivering on the Cisco Customer Experience vision, which is why we have designed our entire CX portfolio with partners in mind,” said Adele Trombetta, Vice President Customer Experience, Middle East and Africa. “Cisco’s unique CX approach, insights, and digital capabilities can help partners modernise and monetise their services to drive business transformation.”
Cisco’s annual Partner Summit attendees will get an update from one year ago when the Cisco Customer Experience strategy was first unveiled. Since then, Cisco focused on investing and developing partners’ lifecycle services. The biggest developments include hiring new CX roles that help drive more business to partners, delivering specialisation criteria and certification curriculum, and a refreshed SuccessHub for partners with lifecycle content and role-based training.
While growing partners’ lifecycle services to accelerate customer success, Cisco is also announcing services to grow partners’ profitability. Cisco’s new offers were all designed with partners in mind and enable partners to book bigger deals, expand their offerings, and scale digitally, all to deliver a superior customer experience.
Key new offers Cisco has announced include:
Business Critical Services, BCS, 3.0: Packaged expertise, analytics, and insights guiding customers to perform and transform. The services’ actionable insights, recommendations and automation are powered by AI and ML with access to Cisco and partner experts.
BCS 3.0 was built to address key needs for the Architecture, Engineering, NetOps, SecOps, and DevOps functions. New BCS 3.0 packaging, Essentials and Advantage, allow partners and customers to choose the how best to integrate BCS 3.0 into their environments.
Solution support: Solution-level coverage and coordination for all Cisco technology portfolios that resolves complex issues on average 44% faster than device-level support. Customers and partners get access to a primary point of contact with product and solution expertise across 30+ Cisco solutions, 250+ Cisco products, and 100+ technology providers. Cisco is now extending this offer to cover software subscriptions. Support for Collaboration is now available, followed by Cisco Digital Network Architecture and Security in Q2, and others to follow.
Operate offers: An updated portfolio of managed services that help partners simplify IT operations and ensure availability of their customers’ networks. Packaged for partner resell, allowing partners to rapidly deliver managed services capabilities from Cisco while adding to or creating new managed service practices. These offers draw upon orchestration and automation capabilities to proactively identify and resolve issues before they occur.
The three new offers are Managed Detection and Response, Managed Secure SD-WAN, and Unified Communications Manager Cloud.
New partner programme incentives focused on the lifecycle: The new Lifecycle Incentives programme rewards partners that successfully drive software activation and adoption with customers, and for expanding existing deals into new opportunities. We’re also introducing an additional reward for activating more Cisco DNA Centre use cases, the new Use Accelerator bonus, available now through end of Q3. Cisco is making new additions to the programmes and incentives that now covers the full lifecycle and increases partners’ profitability.
