Public

2020 Customer Awards: Cisco Systems, Inc. - Keep Calm and Carry On

2020 Customer Awards: Cisco Systems, Inc. - Keep Calm and Carry On

Cisco brand logo.PNG
Company: Cisco Systems, Inc.

Company background: Cisco proves that amazing things can happen when you connect the unconnected. By creating long-lasting customer partnerships, Cisco works to provide solutions that fuel their success. In 1984, Len Bosack and wife Sandy Lerner, wanted to email each other from their offices at Stanford University, but the technology didn’t exist. This is how the multiprotocol router was born. Since then Cisco has shaped the future of the Internet by creating unprecedented value and opportunity for our customers, employees, investors and ecosystem partners and has become the worldwide leader in networking - transforming how people connect, communicate and collaborate.

Contact: Monica Lluis

Title: Global Community Manager Lead

Related URLs: Cisco Community (external): https://community.cisco.com and Cisco TechZone (internal community): https://techzone.cisco.com 

Kudos Category: Keep Calm and Carry On

1. How did your team shift your existing strategy to better engage customers during a crisis?

The COVID-19 crisis forced a major change in the way people and businesses work and stay connected.  The reach of Cisco communities on the Khoros platform combined with Cisco’s decision to provide free Webex licenses and security products provided a truly powerful set of tools that allowed government leaders, business, and professionals to work remotely and teachers and students to learn virtually.

A multi-pronged COVID-19 business continuity strategy was developed that included:

  1. A new Webex Community for end users in Cisco Community
  2. A new Cisco-internal “Webex Warriors” community. Given the unprecedented increase in case volume in the technical support organization, a new space in our Cisco internal TechZone Community was created to give our volunteer army of 1,425 support engineers a place to work together in support our customers.
  3. 16 “Community Live” Webinars and 52 “Ask Me Anything” events in seven languages were held to provide specific information based on the questions addressed to technical support and the community.
  4. A blog in the community that received almost 50K views and 70 Kudos. The blog contained helpful information about the assets available to users.
  5. Promoting the Cisco Community on our Cisco.com pages.

Webex Community – Launched May 4th.

image.png

 

Comments from the Webex Community users:

image.png

 

TechZone Webex Warriors – Employee Community

image.png

 

Comments:

image.png

 Events to support our users during COVID-19

image.png

 

image.png

 

 

Comments from Community Live Webinars and Ask me Anything Events Participants:

image.png

 

image.png

 

Business Continuity Blog:

image.png

 


2. What operational processes did you create or change to respond in a time of crisis?

  • Webex Community:  A new Community Manager was hired specifically for the new end-user support community, focusing on launching the community and building awareness. Prior to COVID-19, Cisco Community forums focused on Webex topics such as adoption and administration. We followed our standard onboarding process to bring the new community manager up to speed and to accelerate the process for launching the Community.
  • TechZone Warriors: The call went out for volunteers to help with the massive influx of Webex cases.  A volunteer sign-up page went up and documents and FAQs on how to participate were created  New instructions for volunteers were defined showing how to grab cases from the backlog and how to reference the community discussions on the cases in the database. The result?  Our 1,425 volunteers handled more than 24.9K cases – greatly reducing the strain on our Technical Assistance Center (TAC) support resources and efficiently providing our customers the world class support to which they have become accustomed.



3. What success metrics did you use to determine if your shifts in strategy and process had the desired outcomes? What were those quantifiable outcomes?
Webex Community: We accelerated the launch of the end-user community to support our customers in this pandemic.

image.png

 

TechZone Webex Warriors:

  • More than 1.4K volunteers signed up to help reduce the amount of cases
    • They took 25K cases and resolved more than 18K.
    • Volunteers helped with more than 30% of all cases that arrived into TAC in May.
  • Webex Warrior Community Metrics:

image.png

 

Events to support our users during COVID-19:

image.png