Many of you take part in our annual satisfaction surveys.  You share opinions, discuss challenges, and make valuable recommendations. More than 65,000 customers and partners responded to our survey during the first half of FY13.  For this installment of the “We’re Listening” blog series,  I asked Joe Pinto, Senior Vice President, Technical Services, to review these responses and what we’re doing to improve your Cisco experience.

  By Guest Contributor Joe Pinto

While overall feedback from our customers and partners in FY13 has been positive, we know there is a continuous need for improvement. One of the questions you often ask is, “What is Cisco doing to make Cisco easier to do business with?” Here’s a sampling of areas you’ve asked us to address and progress we’re making in those areas:  Read More »

Tags: Cisco Services, order management, software licensing, Technical Assistance Center, Technical Support, we-are-listening

In this installment of the “We’re Listening” blog, Steve Young discusses how Cisco’s Technical Assistance Center (TAC) teams are using collaboration processes to solve customer problems faster. Steve is Director of the TAC’s Service Delivery Transformation efforts.

By Guest Contributor Steve Young

In my last blog posting, I discussed what we’re doing to get you, TAC customers, to the right expert, right away, when you need support. This time I’d like to focus on what we’re doing to improve your experience once connected with that engineer. Read More »

Tags: cisco_services, contact center, Technical Support, we-are-listening

This is the fifth in a series of blogs comparing and contrasting the Microsoft and Cisco approaches to providing enterprise collaboration in the post-PC world. The first blog discussed the differences between a purpose-built architecture and a desktop-centric approach that needs third party extensions to make a working enterprise-class system. The second blog discussed how the two companies are approaching the trend towards “Bring your own device” (BYOD) to work. The third  blog discussed how the two companies deliver voice and video. The fourth blog examined true cost to deploy. Today’s blog addresses enterprise class support.

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These days, workers at enterprise organizations depend on real-time collaboration solutions to get their jobs done.  The solutions need to work 24/7, and if something goes wrong, it’s imperative things get fixed fast. In a world where customers view 100% uptime as the only acceptable Service Level Agreement (SLA), solid customer support means everything. While we could all live without email for a day or two, few businesses could function without working telephones for that long, or would trust ‘crossed-fingers’ while the CEO meets with an important customer over a video link.

At Cisco, we feel that support for business critical solutions should not become a guessing game of “who you gonna call”.  In fact, we think the right way to handle support is to offer the option of ‘”one-stop” responsibility for the entire system — from the software to the endpoints, switches, gateways, security and compute hardware, and other technologies as required.

After all, given the vast array of offerings today from a multitude of vendors, the chances are slim that the wide range of components used in collaboration will all have the same management interfaces, diagnostic, and testing routines to determine where an issue lies when a problem arises. We also know that even if you are able to track down the root cause of the problem, some third parties may have very limited specialist support staff and escalating issues can be incredibly challenging. We prefer that our customers spend their time driving their business, versus spending countless hours trying to resolve problems where finger pointing is the name of the game.

As my colleague Rowan Trollope blogged recently, we feel Microsoft’s approach is very different. First off, a Microsoft Lync enterprise deployment requires Read More »

Tags: Cisco, collaboration, Microsoft, Microsoft Lync, Technical Assistance Center, Technical Support

The Web Marketing Association recently announced the Cisco Support Community’s technical support iPhone/iPad application as the winner of their 2012 Best Advocacy Mobile Application Award. The app was recognized for its ease of use, breadth of features and intuitive design. What was so eye-catching about this app? Before I go into further detail about the entry, here are some customer testimonials that speak for themselves:

 ”Just downloaded the app and it is swanky!!  It’s already helping me in an outage tonight…  It beats running across the data-center to where my laptop has to charge!” --Brett Lykins, Network Administrator, Rockingham Memorial Hospital

“It’s a great app.  I like the functionality and the fact that I can post and reply on the go.  Thanks to all who made this possible.” --Rajiv Dasmohapatra, Customer Support Engineer, Wipro

  Read More »

Tags: Best Advocacy Mobile Application Award, cisco support community, iPhone iPad application, Mobile Apps, Technical Support, Web Marketing Association Award

Many companies today are jumping on the bandwagon to add custom social media accounts to their list of web properties. The Cisco Support Community team is one such group, but this team has done so particularly well and seen great successes with their endeavors.

In early 2010, they launched and revamped their social initiatives in hopes of staying connected with customers and extending the community beyond Cisco’s immediate reach. Just over a year afterward, the team was recognized as the winner of the 2011 Forrester Groundswell Award in the B2B Supporting Category. What’s more, Cisco estimates that the community-based support on Facebook and Twitter is saving the company more than $400K annually! Not everybody rises to fame with the fruits of their social media labor. I was curious to find out what the team did that led to such positive results, so I chatted with Pratibha Gupta and Mohan Rao, leads of the social media branch of the Support Community team.

Read More »

Tags: award, B2B, b2b supporting category, cisco support community, CSC, facebook, forrester groundswell, linkedin, social media, Technical Support, twitter, youtube