Company: Cisco
Contact: Becky Scott (Program Manager, Social Knowledge Management)
Community: Tech Zone
Lithy category: Support Savings MVP
Cisco is the worldwide leader in IT that helps companies seize the opportunities of tomorrow by proving that amazing things can happen when you connect the previously unconnected.
At Cisco, customers come first and an integral part of our DNA is creating long-lasting customer partnerships and working with them to identify their needs and provide solutions that support their success.
How we're implementing Community to meet our customer care business goals
At Cisco Systems, our customers and partners benefit when our Technical Assistance Center (TAC) Engineers share their expertise by publishing actionable, vital knowledge as content on Cisco.com.
Our challenge was how to accelerate the knowledge expertise of over 4,000 worldwide technical support engineers while sharing critical information across a global population. We’ve leveraged Lithium to engage and motivate our TAC Engineers worldwide to seamlessly transform their knowledge and expertise into knowledge for our customers and partners.
We’ve had year over year success in building a borderless technical support community where the following are now embedded into our normal, everyday workflow:
- skills-based inventory
- skills-based routing
- a reputation engine
- interactive collaboration through gamification
Now, as a knowledge asset is consumed, the reputation of that piece of knowledge grows. Our Lithium community has helped us gain record-high support content satisfaction scores (4.5 out of 5.00), as well as through the number of views of TAC-authored articles (4.7M views of ~2,000 articles). This in turn benefits Cisco, as we’ve realized an approximate $54.2M in case deflection savings for 2015, which is more than double our $25.2M savings from 2014.
The changes we implemented due to cost reductions from community
Lithium has fundamentally changed the way Cisco creates and consumes knowledge in Technical Services.
How do we engage and motivate 4,000+ TAC Engineers globally to transform their expertise into vital knowledge that our customers and partners can use? By hosting a competition with the chance to win a 2-week work rotation at any global TAC location. We called this competition the Knowledge Champions League (KCL).
KCL is a competition where TAC engineers collaborate to create articles within Tech Zone, our internal workflow-enabled community. Articles are published to the Cisco.com support site where customers and partners can access them to self-serve and self-solve. The KCL team that creates the highest volume of most impactful content wins the grand prize.
Although only one team wins, all KCL participants realize the benefits of working collaboratively in global teams across technologies: building their network of contacts, building cultural awareness, and strengthening their collaboration skills while developing articles. Our goal was to encourage this collaboration while creating valuable content for Cisco.com.
How we constructed the KCL Competition:
Phase 1 – The Qualifying period: Each engineer must qualify as a top contributor within their Technology Space.
Phase 2 – The Games: Top contributors for each technology and site (Europe, Americas, Australia, India) were grouped into teams, each with a coach. The team that creates the highest amount of customer-impactful content wins.
Game Elements
The winning team was awarded a two-week rotation to work remotely from a Cisco Customer Support Site.
Our results
By using innovative Gamification techniques and integrating social knowledge and content publishing into TAC workflows, Cisco Services has successfully addressed the challenge of converting the intellectual capital in over 4,000 support engineers' heads into exceptional quality, reusable content. Our Knowledge Champions League efforts fostered sustainable behaviors of collaboration, teamwork and healthy competition resulting in the production of the highest quality, most impactful content our customers can use to solve some of their most complex problems.
