With 31 venues, 364 medal events, 7,000 athletes, 1 million attendees, 650 hours of online coverage, and 23,000 volunteers, the 2015 Pan Am Games in Toronto, Canada were one of the largest international multi-sport competitions ever. And to broadcast the nearly month-long event, organizers needed a massive network capable of reaching every corner of the globe.
To do that, technology-sponsor Cisco tapped local Cisco Networking Academies to build the technology to power the games. Working with Cisco Systems engineers, students were given a unique opportunity to gain hands-on experience, build out their resumes, receive mentoring and training, and gain exposure to potential workplaces. The program was designed to showcase the potential of the students for employers and highlight their unique skills in a professional setting. From behind-the-scenes to the podiums of a world-stage sporting event, the students were given the chance to gain the experience needed to stand out in a competitive job market.
Your customers are the most important drivers of growth for your business. They’re often the reason new clients seek you out, and they serve as the source for post-sale opportunities and recurring revenue. It’s the simple truth.
But what’s also true is that in today’s digital age and dynamic business environment, where trust and loyalty isn’t what they used to be, maintaining customer health can be challenging to say the least.
So, what’s the “secret sauce” to staying on top of customer expectations and growing the value of your installed base?
The answer is all in how you manage your customer data. Clean, actionable data intelligence can help you deliver greater value to the customer, create personalized experiences, accelerate revenue and profits, and serve as the primary catalyst for building customer lifetime value (CLV).
The Ultimate Goal: Expanding Customer Relationships
Growing CLV may mean different things to different people, but I think of it first and foremost as improving the end-to-end customer experience. It’s the concept of serving customers well beyond that first deal and addressing the full lifecycle across all customer touch points. Along the way, customer satisfaction is improved, and for any sales organization, there’s no denying that retention is tremendously important. Think about this:
Cost: Acquiring a new customer is anywhere from 5 to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one. (Source: Harvard Business Review )
Value: 82% of companies agree that retention is less costly to execute than new logo acquisition, supporting the idea that ongoing profit from a customer lifetime is higher than any one single transaction. (Source:Forbes)
Your Greatest Limiting Factor: Bad Data
There are many roadblocks to CLV growth, and poor data quality is the top limiting factor today. Disparate data along with outdated, incomplete or inaccurate records can hurt communications, resulting in customer engagement that misses the mark, or sales opportunities that slip through the cracks.
Growing CLV requires that a sales organization effectively manage the data residing in their CRM, ERP, pricing, point of sale, entitlement and other systems. Aggregating and cleansing these disparate data sources to make the information complete and actionable is critical to providing a full 360-degree picture of the customer lifecycle. Enriched, actionable data can enable your team to know precisely who to reach out to and when, with a message or offer that addresses the customer’s specific needs at that point in time.
What are the secrets to a successful digital transformation? We’re exploring that in our Going Digital podcast hosted by Peter High, President of Metis Strategy, Author and Keynote Speaker. Peter recently interviewed Gus Shahin, the Chief Information Officer and Senior Vice President of IT at Flex (formerly known as Flextronics) to understand their success. Note – this transcript has been edited due to space limitations.
Flex manages supply chains and manufactures products for companies – from large OEMs like Cisco to startups. They procure, manufacture, distribute, and repair products for their customers with about 100 factories in 40 countries.
Late last autumn, the detector described in one of our previous posts, Cognitive Research: Learning Detectors of Malicious Network Traffic, started to pick up a handful of infected hosts exhibiting a new kind of malware behavior. Initially, the number of infections were quite low, and nothing had drawn particular attention to the findings. Recently, this changed when we observed a significant uptake in the number of infections during the first few weeks of 2016. These infections were linked to a Trojan commonly known as DNSChanger. In our findings, this Trojan was delivered by a modular malware called Mamba. Our root cause analysis strongly suggests that the Trojan is spread by leveraging an established base of adware, unwanted applications, and ad injectors.
There is excitement building in the Data Center team for Cisco Live Berlin next week! Our friend Ravi wrote an excellent blog about some of the sessions and demos you should put on your list if you are live in Berlin – but what if you aren’t able to be there?
I will be joining Lauren Friedman (@lauren), Christina Greiner (@ChristinaGren), and Mark Murphy (@mjmsf) to bring you all the best live from the show floor. Engineers Unplugged will be filming on location and Cisco Champions podcasts will be recording. We have a special #CiscoChat with Mark and Intel IoT spokesperson Roger Benson, Director of Intel, EMEA on Tuesday, Feb 16th at 16:00 Berlin time. They will be joined by Director of Cisco IoT Marketing, Jaishree Subramania (@JaishreeMS). You can catch the live broadcast on Periscope from @CiscoDC and the replay will be available for 24 hours. Be sure to follow @Cisco_IoT for all the Cisco Internet of Things (IoT) related discussions.
In addition, I will be joining Pradeep Parmar (@pradeepsparmar), Cisco marketing manager, to discuss Digital transformation. You can view this #CiscoChat on the @CiscoDigital Periscope channel on Thursday, Feb 18th at 9:00 local time.
I work with a lot of customers discussing how they can reduce their cyber risk and increase resiliency with an effective security strategy. It’s easy to talk about leading practices for security, but figuring out how to put them into practice can be a whole other story.
As I mentioned in a recent post, the Security and Trust team is headed to CiscoLive Berlin with the goal of sharing real and actionable security practices that are designed to be taken home and put into practice straight away. Continue reading “Built-In Security: Sharing the ‘How’”
To say that global device and connections are growing is a true understatement. And this growth is rapidly shifting.
By 2020, there will be 8.5 billion handheld or personal mobile-ready devices and 3.1 billion machine-to-machine (M2M) connections supported by mobile networks. From smartphones and tablets to PCs and “phablets”, mobile digitization and wearables adoption is creating new demands on wireless infrastructures.
On the heels of last week’s 10th annual VNI Mobile Forecast update, take a visual journey into the major role digitization, personal devices and M2M connections have on mobile data traffic growth.
The Shift from PCs to Smartphones
Each year, new devices in different form factors and with increased capabilities and intelligence are introduced to the global market. For the 2015 VNI Mobile Forecast, phablets were added as a new subcategory within the smartphone segment, which is projected to grow from 38% of all mobile connections in 2015 to 48% of all mobile connections by 2020. Within the same time frame, the overall share of nonsmartphone devices–like PCs–will decline from 50% of all mobile connections in 2015 to 21% by 2020.
You know the drill. It’s one of the great things about the OpenStack Summit. Unlike most other conferences, where organizers single-handedly set the agenda based on what they thinkyou want to hear, the OpenStack Summit agenda is based on what you actually want to hear.
Curious about containers? Intrigued by NFV? Wondering what’s next on the Neutron roadmap? Tell them with your votes. Go to the OpenStack Foundation page and choose the sessions that are most interesting to you.It’s easy, it’s fun, and there is no limit to how many sessions you can vote for.*
But here’s the catch: The Foundation received more than 1,200 talk submissions this time. 1,200!!!
Working with limited resources and being asked to “do more with less” is often par for the course for small and midsize businesses (SMBs). Smaller companies are also credited with being more nimble than their enterprise counterparts, adopting next-generation tools more quickly and experimenting with new business models. However, a new survey of CSOs and SecOps Managers reveals that more SMBs are putting themselves at increased risk for cyber attacks by forgoing critical security capabilities and processes.
Attackers are Developing Sophisticated Tactics for Entering Networks and Remaining Undetected
In the 2016 Cisco Annual Security Report, Cisco researchers detail some of the latest advanced attacks and trends shaping the security industry. Online criminals are continually evolving their attack methods to evade detection and accomplish their goals. They’re building resiliency into their operations; if detected, attackers quickly reconfigure and reconstitute on new systems in minutes. Security professionals need to fill the gaps in their defenses and improve their own resilience to these advanced attacks.
installed base?
map? Tell them with your votes. Go to the 