Cisco IT has deployed voice infrastructure around the world in order to handle our 1+ million voice calls per day with high levels of quality and reliability. We used to manage this infrastructure with four separate regional teams: one managing the Western part of North America, another managing Eastern North America and Latin America, the third Europe/Middle East/Africa, and the fourth Asia/Pacific. But we found that this regional organization led to inconsistent operations because the regional teams had different ideas on how things should be done and they applied our corporate standards in different ways.

Our early lack of global consistency led to inefficiency in our support operations.   We would have people from different time zones trying to help troubleshoot problems and be unable to support an unfamiliar configuration.  And this meant that our regional teams had to provide around-the-clock support by themselves – which led to sleepless nights and frayed nerves.
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Tags: coc-collaboration, IPT, management, operations, support, telephony, UC, unified communications, unity, video, Voice, voicemail, voip

Just a decade ago, supporting enterprise voice services was simpler, our voice operations support scope was smaller, and one person could be proficient in everything you needed to know for voice operations. But as IP telephony capabilities grew into Unified Communications, the skills our engineers had to be proficient in grew exponentially.

Today, we support UC systems and collaboration platforms, both on traditional hardware and now on virtualized server platforms (Cisco UCS). We still support phones and softphones, but now we also support mobility services, video phones and mobile devices like the Cisco Cius, voice and video conferencing, menus of phone-based services, and ever-more sophisticated customer support tools in our contact centers. There are now so many things within the scope of the UC systems that we manage that it would be extremely difficult in an enterprise the size of Cisco to be an expert in everything. So, individuals on our voice operations team need to specialize.

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Tags: administration, coc-collaboration, IPT, management, operations, personnel, support, telephony, UC, unified communications, virtualization, voip

I guess the age-old saying is true, great ideas come to those who “think outside the box.”

The Worldwide Partner Readiness and Support team did just that and incorporated the old “Partner Enablement (PE) in a Box” PowerPoint slides into a new, interactive eBook to help increase your productivity and sales. Not only is it packed with useful information to help partners successfully and profitably sell, deliver, and support Cisco Architectures and Solutions, but it’s also easy to use.

The eBook separates partner programs and tools into five convenient sections organized by selling stage. Each section includes: Read More »

Tags: Cisco, ebook, partners, productivity, resource, support

Cisco IT maintains about 21 Cisco Unified Communications Manager (UCM) clusters to support  150,000 hardware phones and 51,000 software phones used by our global employees, contractors and contact center agents.  In general, Cisco IT likes to stay up to date, and upgrades to most major releases of the Cisco UCM as soon as possible – frequently this occurs before the code is available to our external customers.  We do this to take advantage of new features and to help the product developers identify needed improvements before the release is made available to customers.

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Tags: cluster, coc-collaboration, CUCM, server, support, UC, unified communications, upgrade, Voice

As you’ll remember from Bill Skeet’s post the other day, we recently rolled out a new menu for Support that focuses on the top tasks our customers do on Cisco.com.  This menu is available on virtually every page — it’s that little window that appears when you hover your cursor over the “Support” menu link.

Well, web analysts SiteIQ have been watching, and have some very nice things to say in their new blog post about the Support Mega Menu.

My favorite quote in the article hints nicely at the balance we try to achieve on Cisco.com:

“Support is a different animal than marketing. It is truly task-based. More access is key—the quicker the better. That requires functionality, scannability, and a nod towards popularity. This is where Cisco.com gets it—and the gold.”

Congrats to the Support web team for this very nice (and on target) review.

Tags: support, web design, webexperience