Ok, perfect. So hello, I'm Monica Cale and I'm gonna be talking today about um scaling the customer experience. So at Cisco, I am a senior director of digital experience. I've been here for a number of years working in the digital experience arena.I wanted to give you a little bit of insight into, you know, what we're, what we're up to. Ok. So I'm gonna go ahead here and get started. Um Essentially one of the things that we have been, you know, keeping top of mind in the past few years is that they're in this age of, you know, age of the customer, in the age of digital um worlds are sort of converging. There's always been historically, there was a separation between B to B, the B to B world and the B to C world. And the way that you would do customer experience or digital experience in B to B was quite different from the way that you would do digital experience in B to C that I believe is over. I think that the advanced, the advancements that we've seen in digital and customer experience in the B to C world are things that we really need to be paying attention to in the B to B world.

And with the technology that exists today, there's no reason that we can't give people a comparable and just a good experience for B to B as what they have in B to C. Obviously, there would be differences but it shouldn't be subpar. So what we have today is really like this B to E business to everyone. And um I do believe that really just, you know, in the way that people are engaging with companies today, their expectations have dramatically increased. So companies in the business world need to meet those expectations and do things like have real time intelligent personalized experiences, use the data that we have on customers or on people to um you know, personalize and change the experience for them based on what we know about them so that we can be more helpful.

Um And truly just clear the way for letting people get to the information they need um in the easiest way possible. And I think what we've seen is that well, in past years, we have thought that this was something we should do, this was a good thing to do. Um It was not as critical as it is now and now the time has come where really we have no choice. Um I think you can all agree the way that I feel is that people have changed people's expectations. No matter what, who your customer is and what industry you're in and what type of business you have. Um the expectations that people have of the kind of experience they're going to get digitally from a, from a company they're doing business with are extremely high now because they do deal with doordash, Instacart Amazon, you know, all of these other companies that, um even though their businesses are completely different than ours, they're setting the human expectation for what a digital experience is like.

And so companies like ours need to try to compete with that and meet the expectations of the customers where they are. So, um you can see that in some of these stats that can people are just using more digital, a digital interactions than they ever have before and they've switched providers because they're getting a bad experience um in one way or another. And, you know, they're also looking at each other like they're looking to self serve more and do as much as they can on their own. Um And they're looking at their peers and hearing, listening to what they're saying. So given that the time for us to um really make improvements at Cisco to the digital experience we're providing the market has never been more critical. So with that said, some of the things that we're focusing on um in improving that digital experience are things like this.

Um You know, it's our job for our company to cultivate a consistent experience that eliminates the noise in a customer, getting to their value and seeing it really clearly. Um One of the challenges of a company our size is that there are lots of teams, lots of organizations all over the organ, the enterprise that are doing, you know, sort of their own thing and they're trying their best. They're very smart, they're putting together programs and initiatives to help customers use, maybe just their product better or use. Um you know, enter into a program that will help their area of the business. And there's great things happening. The problem is that when it hits the customer and I do mean hit the customer. Um It just see, it's, it's too many things even if it's a wonderful program. Um It is, it's just one more thing that they've got to deal with. It's maybe the 21st interaction that they're gonna have to have with your company. So really the best thing that you can do is simplify and this is what we're trying to do right now, clear the customer's path to value so that we do the work internally um as a company to come together reduce actually, the number of things that are coming at our customers and make it really easy for the customer to get the value that they're looking for and find what they need.

So maybe some of you are experiencing this and um you can understand, you know, this is a, it seems like, oh, ok. That's less work to reduce the number of things that are coming at the customer and come together as a company. But actually with a company this size, it is um, it is quite an undertaking. So there's a lot of our work goes into this type of a thing, this type of an exercise. Um, but you know, we do feel that it's well worth it. This is a quote from JB Wood and it says the number one determinant of market share in every industry will be the digital customer experience. Um And truly the cust it there used to be a time when pe you would talk about digital experience and people wouldn't really know what that was. And I'm gonna speak to that in a little bit to show you how we define it. But now this is table steaks. Um you know, everything, especially in the subscription world needs to be accessible digitally by customers and um so much so that they'll leave a company if it, if they're not doing it well enough. So we're, we're really paying attention now. So with that said, um these are some of the things that we're banking on. Um This is our approach.

So our vision when it comes to digital experience is that we wanna create simple, connected, consistent and intelligent experiences to drive business value for customers and profitable growth for us and our partners. Um in that work. And in that vision, we have a few guiding principles that we're using in order to make sure that we're doing right by the customer. The first is to identify and remove friction points. So when I say when I talk about friction points, that's, um, that's a place where a customer could get stuck or could experience complexity or friction or just something that would deter them from receiving their value or buying something or learning what they wanna know. Um One of the ways that we do this is that, you know, identifying removing friction points being a guiding principle means that we are committing, that we're going to do the work, do the homework to really understand what customers are going through. In order to see where their friction points are. We need to, we need to do research, listen to them, talk to them as often as possible, really hone their voice so that we can advocate for them internally. And this is something that I think serves a couple of purposes for one, it guides us. If we're really listening to the customer voice, then we know what they need and we can truly do the right thing for them. We're not wasting our time. We're not guessing.

We know exactly what they're, what they're looking for from us. So it, it guides us. Another thing it does for us is when we do run into that complexity internally and different teams may be disagreeing about what's needed or what to do if we can bring the customer voice, I find that very few people disagree with that. They recognize that the customer is always right. And if they're saying that it's too complicated or it's too this or that, then that helps us make our decision when we might otherwise come to like a stalemate or spelling out point. So we, we remain committed to identifying knowing and removing friction points for customers. Another one of our guiding principles is that we will always build for scale. So I manage, my team manages some of Cisco's largest digital properties. And um anything that we put into those properties is immediately absorbed at scale. So we have to be building for that scale and building for the masses and doing a lot of testing and making sure that our processes are lock tight, rock solid, um very well tested and can withstand the volume that is going to come when we put something on the Cisco dot com.

Um So everything that we're doing, we're building for scale, we might run proof of concepts or pilots here and there. But you know, the methodology where a lot of folks kind of build for your very tippy top customers that are the largest and you might only ever have a few customers, but they're large using the thing you're building when it comes to digital experience specifically, I maintain that not only because my team manages the largest properties at Cisco.

But also just because if the end goal of a digital experience is to scale completely and reach everybody that you need to reach, then you might as well put that into your initial build, put that scale into your initial build build for the masses from the get go make sure that you've got automation where you need it, you've digitized as much of the process as you can.

Um And you're building something that if not, if, if, if it's not immediately upscale, it could easily get there. So that's another one of our guiding principles. Um And another is end to end experience that maze that I showed you earlier. That's what happens when teams really only focus on their work and they only think as far as the experience that they're building, we're committed to looking outside of our own work and actually getting a view of the end to end experience that, that the company is creating. Um We're, we're, there are lots of digital teams at our company, but we're the only one that is sitting outside of a specific business unit or a specific organization that is dedicated to one part of the life cycle or one motion or one sub segment or one product, one product line.

Um We're the only one that's sitting in kind of a general organization. So, um with that, we're using that to make sure that we're, we have the responsibility of looking end to end and a lot of times acting just as a connector instead of a builder that might be what's needed. So, um we're making sure that we're doing that end to end work and doing the connectivity where we need to and even folding our own work if that's what's necessary. All right, now, I talked about um the fact that when you look at, when you talk about digital experience, some people don't necessarily know what you mean by that. So I do wanna talk a little bit about how we define it. Um We define digital experience or the way that I think of digital experience is essentially that your customer is going to experience content from you in each of these channels. And um that content can either be separate and disconnected and unintelligent and just kind of what you think they might need to hear in any one of these places or it can all be part of a connected journey for them.

You can do the work on the back end to bring together and just literally integrate and connect the system and the data that make up each one of these channels and that serve that content in the right place at the right time in the right way. Um And bring in capabilities that make it, that make that experience omni channel, personalized, data driven, um automated. And then what we call guided, which is are we actually serving as a guide to the customer to give them the instructions they need, are are we intelligent and intuitive enough so that they understand how to navigate the web, that is our company on their own. So when I talk about digital experience, it really is all encompassing of the channels you see here on the front end and everything that goes into connecting the back end so that you can orchestrate and that experience can be toggled between these channels as the customer is driving their experience.

So, um you know, this might look different in different companies, but uh this is what we're looking at when we talk about digital experience. Ok. So um you know, I talked about how one of the challenges that we had at Cisco when we set out to do digital experience and do it in a way that was conducive to a subscription company where we could act more like a like we are a staff company, which we are actually one of the biggest software companies in the world, even though I'm not sure people think of us that way.

But we have become that. Um So when we set out to make that transition and apply this level of focus to digital experience, um so that we could be easy to do business with, like I mentioned, one of the challenges is that Cisco is just a huge company and we have lots of different organizations, lots of different teams part of doing this is to do the work behind the scenes, to connect with all those teams and convince everyone to act together and unite instead of acting on their own.

Right? Ok. Well, another one of the nuances that we needed to pay attention to with our business when we started launching, launching, um specifically the full life cycle portion of our digital experience, like um we call them guided journeys and we're looking post purchase to stay with our customer after an order after the sale, one of the things that we needed to do was to pay attention to the fact that we have a very valuable and very large and meaningful partner ecosystem.

We, we sell through partners that is the bulk of our business and it, we are always going to be a partner first. Uh We're always gonna take a partner first approach. So, um with that though, does it does add some complex complexity when you're working directly with the customer on their life cycle experience and giving them instructions on what to do on an order that somebody else placed really like they've been working with the partner?

So how do we do that? We knew right away that we needed to do, we needed to take these actions and build this digital part of our business, not just with the partner in mind, but with the partner at the forefront. So uh I came from the partner space in the partner world and so did a lot of my colleagues. Um So we know the value that our partners bring and we just had to figure out how to apply that to digital journeys or a digital life cycle experience. Um And actually in true, in true form, in keeping with our guiding principles of simplifying and uniting and coming together. Uh I feel like the approach we took was actually a fairly simple one, doesn't mean that it was easy to do. But I think the approach is fairly simple. We simply invited the partners to do this with us and they said, yeah, so and then they helped us build it um very similar to our approach of under, you know, um identifying and removing friction points for our customer. We do the same thing with our partners. We do a lot of partner research. We work with our partners hand in hand to figure out what we're going to what would be the best thing to do in this digital world. And um we've co built this, we've designed this with our partners from the get go.

So what we do um specifically in our post purchase like a digital customer success world, we have an initiative called Life cycle Advantage, a program called life cycle Advantage that a partner can sign up for. And what that does is that it does bring the partner in so that they're playing a role in the customer's experience. So we're not going to the customer on our own, on business that the partner is a part of and representing it as if they're not, we're going with the partner together um and jointly guiding the customer through their, their life cycle. So what that looks like is that we've got um in our, on our website, we've got a portal where partners can go, they can see we share data with them as much as we can. We share data back and forth. Um In all, you know, we're, we're following all privacy rules, but we share the data that we can um to the extent that we can validate each other's data. And then we include the partner logo on the uh notifications that we send out to the customer. So the customer experiences a journey that looks like it's coming from Cisco and the partner and the partner, we're sharing data with them, they're sharing data with us and both of our businesses benefit from it. So seems sort of simple, but honestly, it's worked tremendously.

We've gotten huge results. We can see that all of our KPIS go up when we're working with partners in this way. So it's been very valuable for us and go on to our next slide here. And you know, another thing that we're doing is when I talk about, you know, understanding the customer experience and trying to unite and come together and simplify things. The bottom line is does does the digital experience positively impact our business metrics or not. And you know, we need to make sure it's our commitment that anything we're doing digitally is going to have a positive effect on the business. This is also a way that we do unify the business and get buy in across the company from different stakeholders. So, um you know, one of the uh things that we do is that we, we're looking at the business metrics that our stakeholders use and we're trying to figure out are we impacting those same metrics? And are we having a positive effect on the business and hold ourselves accountable to that? You can see here, we have, you know, specifically in some of these initiatives over a million customers digitally engaged, 7000 partners enrolled in the approach that I talked about where we're jointly working with our partners.

Um in our program life cycle advantage, we've got um we see business impact to where product usage rates from customers, the customers using our product go up almost 50% when we're engaging them and guiding them digitally. And especially when we're doing that with our partners.

Um Customers are getting 250% increased faster time to value. So the customers are benefiting, we're benefiting the partners are benefiting because customers are realizing value and renewing at higher rates. And in fact, they're 1.7 almost twice as likely twice as likely to renew if they're engaged through this process digitally. Um and we can see, you know that they have these customers who are engaged through this process have a 33% higher NPS rating for Cisco. So, excuse me, so it's really working across the board for our customers. Um And from a partner standpoint, we have uh 24% higher contract retention that they're experiencing. There's a higher partner renewal rate by 14%. Service is a tax rate by 12%. And what that really results in for our partners is not just an increase in business. We pay out rebates on these things. So the partners that are participating with us in this approach are getting rebate payouts at 250% higher than partners who don't participate with us in this way. So, you know, in short, by providing customers a simplified personalized and intelligent all encompassing digital experience that helps them navigate and doing that hand in hand with our partners.

We're definitely positively impacting the business and improving the um experience of our customers, fueling growth for our partners and for our business. Um You know, so this has been our approach and you know, I'd love to, to learn more about the approaches that you've, that you've taken, I'm gonna go ahead to the Q and A I see that there is um one question, how well do your silo leaders listen, when you point out friction from the end to end any tech techniques to help get everyone on the same page.

So I'm gonna answer this question live. Absolutely. I have tips on this. I have three methodologies. There's three tips that I use to get people to listen when we're working with siloed teams, um which is almost always by the way. Um Now, so one of them is like I said, identifying and removing friction points, but one of them is to elevate the customer's voice. There will inevitably be disagreements about what to do and what, what the best strategy is to take in any given scenario that you're talking about with one of these departments or divisions or teams. And I always use the customer's voice as the tiebreaker. So if there's a disagreement between two teams about what to do or between my team and the other team about what to do, um because I have done the homework to know the customer voice, I've spoken to many customers about their experience at large and my team is constantly doing that kind of research to pull it all together and understand what customers think and what they're saying and what they're asking for because they've got that on hand.

Always, I'm able to pull those kinds of nuggets out and use the customer's voice to settle a disagreement. So that's one tactic I use elevate the customer's voice. The other is to document ruthlessly. So one thing that we've done, um especially when trying to unify the experience, we've got a methodology around. You could call it journey mapping or experience mapping or a service blueprint services blueprint. Um People call it different things, but essentially you need some way to actually document what is happening in the customer experience and put that up in front of people. So if you can put it in front of people and they can actually see. Oh, all right. I see that I'm doing this thing over here while this other team is doing the same thing, this very similar thing to the same contact for the same sort of business purpose. Oh, and there's a third team over here doing this, like if you can document it from the customer's point of view and literally just pull it up often and show people that very few people will just will disagree that you should simplify when you can actually show them the overlap.

What I find is that when people are behaving in silos, it's not because they want to or because they have to be right. It's because they just simply don't know what the other teams are doing. They, they just really don't know, they don't think anyone else is doing anything. So in their mind, they're doing the right thing and they're doing a good thing, right? But um you just have to show them. So the first is to elevate the customer's voice. The second is to document so that you can show people what the customer is experiencing in a simple way that they can understand the third tip I have is to adopt their business metrics. So what is the goal of this team? What are they going for? What do they want out of, uh you know, for their business? Can you adopt those same metrics and KPIS and show improvement in them and really hold yourself accountable to that and come and report back to them. Here's how I've improved your business by using this method of digital experience. So, um I think those are my best three tips on that front. OK. Any other questions that anybody wants to put into the chat or the um Q and A? OK? If there's no more questions, I think that that concludes our session.