We in Cisco Customer Experience, especially on the partner teams, have been talking a lot about Business Critical Services (BCS) 3.0 over the past 8 months. We announced BCS 3.0 to partners at Partner Summit last November, launched global availability in March, blogged about it in “The New Paradigm for our Partners” and in “New Ways for our Partners to Build Resiliencey”, and discussed it with partners and customers at Cisco Live a few weeks ago.
While BCS 3.0 has indeed been generally available since March 2020 and partners are reselling it, it is this June 2020 update that is momentous for our partner community. For the first time in Cisco’s Advanced Services 20+ year history, we are now enabling partners to directly quote and order Cisco subscription optimization services. Quoting and ordering will be available immediately for 1-Tier partners, with 2-Tier partners through their preferred distributor coming soon.
Direct orderability is a significant milestone. But that’s not all. BCS 3.0 was designed with partners in mind. We now have a package redesign, flexible consumption models, and more opportunities to extend partner services. Here’s a reminder of why this should matter to our partners, besides simplicity in ordering and ease of doing business.
- Simple, subscription-based packaging. BCS 3.0 offers three tiers — Essentials, Advantage, and Premier (Note, the Premier tier is currently available on a limited basis in the United States and Canada) — that have predefined deliverables and are sold as an annual recurring subscription. This allows for a faster and simpler sales process.
- Extensibility for partner service offers. Cisco is delivering BCS in a way that is complementary for our partners, with everything delivered remotely from our global CX Centers. Additionally, we are enabling partners with workshops and collateral that will help them build their own extensible service offerings on top of BCS 3.0 so that the last mile and engagement with the customer is still primarily between them and the partner.
- Lower price points, with customers still getting more value than ever before. While previous iterations of BCS were targeted at the top several hundred global customers, the new packaging and lower price points provide access to additional markets for partners to target for BCS resale and service engagement.
- Further entrenching partners as trusted advisors to their customers. Due to the monthly nature of the deliverables and the unmatched insights provided, partners will now have another way to deepen the relationship with their customers.
Partner direct quoting and ordering of BCS 3.0 is an important milestone on the road to Cisco’s promise to deliver value to our customers, together with our partners, throughout their lifecycle journey.
Learn more about Cisco Customer Experience on the SuccessHub or CX SalesConnect Partner Hub.
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