Executive Thought Leadership

Accelerating Customer Success

Customer focus has been an essential component of Cisco Systems corporate culture since the company's inception in 1984. Because customer satisfaction has always been a core value, Sandy Lerner, one of the founders of Cisco Systems, created an organization specifically tasked with ensuring that our customers were well provided for. Called "Customer Advocacy", this innovative organization has been responsible for customer satisfaction, and has devised many programs and incentives to help ensure that all Cisco employees are committed to upholding this value. In fact, at Cisco, employee bonuses are based on the results of customer satisfaction reports.

Customer Advocacy is primarily focused on ensuring service and support to Cisco customers. It is our job to make sure our customers, wherever they are around the globe, are satisfied. Our mission in Customer Advocacy is to accelerate customer success with Cisco network technology and applications that meet their business needs. Together with our partners, we can help customers improve their productivity, reduce operational costs, and get their applications and services to market as quickly as possible.

Cisco is evolving from a company that provides hardware, device-based value propositions to its customers to a provider of solution-based value propositions, with a greater focus on advanced technologies and software applications. And Cisco customers--who are demanding more proactive thought leadership, increased knowledge transfer, tailored offerings, and consistent quality--are critical drivers for this change. The Customer Advocacy organization is positioned to deliver solutions that meet customers' needs today and to support their migration to the Intelligent Information Network of the future.

The importance of the network to businesses grows daily. Because virtually all of a company's information travels across its network, it has become the company's lifeline. And as networks grow in importance, so do network demands and the need for higher availability, security and reliability. Cisco Services, Customer Advocacy's service offerings, are built on a framework which includes the critical processes and capabilities needed to deliver this new level of value.

Through Cisco Services, we focus on customers in a segmented way, delivering services above and beyond the "one size fits all" model. Cisco Services are designed to deliver value throughout the entire network lifecycle. Our offerings provide network support across the entire network lifecycle of prepare, plan, design, implement, operate and optimize (PPDIOO). This approach allows us to provide a broader portfolio to our customers--one that is more end-to-end, targeted, and aligned with Cisco core and advanced technology solutions. It also allows us to build more integrated relationships with our customers, so that we can deliver the level of support they need when they need it.

We have made it our mission to help our customers successfully accelerate the adoption of our technology. Our technical assistance engineering and advanced services engineering teams work together to create the tools, establish leading practices of methodology, and provide the expertise needed to support our technology. In turn, this support helps our customers reduce their operational costs, increase the network availability and reliability, and reduce their time to market with network applications. Most importantly, this enables our customers to build their competitive advantage and increase their productivity.

Customer Advocacy's goal of achieving customer satisfaction has evolved. Now, Cisco not only supplies the network, Cisco provides the support necessary to ensure that customers make the most of their networks.

In essence, what this means is that with Cisco our customers get more than networking technology. With Customer Advocacy, they get an unparalleled breadth and depth of support, and they get the people, processes, tools, and partners they need to help ensure their success with Cisco technology.