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2021 Customer Awards: Cisco Systems, Inc. - Best-in-Class: Community
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: https://community.cisco.com Kudos Category: Best-in-Class: Community 1. Describe your community(s) and how you decided to start a community or grow/change it in the last year? (user request, Khoros suggestion, internal idea, etc.) What is the purpose of your community? Cisco Community is renowned for crowdsourcing deep technical knowledge, product capability guidance and troubleshooting advice. As a result of becoming an essential, go-to resource for users, the community is the second-most visited Cisco digital property. The emergence of COVID-19 dramatically changed people’s way of life. They switched from working and connecting with one another in-person to an entirely virtual experience. In response, Cisco Community launched a customer-facing Webex Community to help support this adaptation to a digital world. The Webex Community provided information and support to government leaders, businesses, and professionals, which allowed them to continue working, and teachers and students to continue learning remotely. Most importantly, Cisco Community allowed people to remain connected in a period filled with uncertainty. Since its launch, we’ve continued to build on the vitality of the Webex Community. Webex Community Ecosystem Expansion - As COVID-19 shifted the way we work, the need for virtual collaboration grew, and the number of meetings on Webex saw an increase of 230% all in a short span of a few weeks. Launched in the middle of a pandemic, the Webex portion of the community was a resource that people didn’t just want, it was one that administrators, adoption champions, and end users needed in a time of uncertainty. Webex built a home that has now grown to more than 100,000 unique visitors engaging every month. The massive growth of the user base is attributed to the growing proactive content being added each month, such as the “Walkthrough Wednesday” event series that walks administrators through new features, and the “Adoption Spotlights” events that hosts influential customers sharing how they use Webex in their organizations. Driven by the rapid growth of the Webex Community, we developed a larger community ecosystem that contains the Webex Beta Program, Webex Ambassadors, and Webex Experts. The Webex Beta program offers early field trials. The Webex Ambassadors offers opportunities to get prestigious Cisco verified learning certificates for free. Webex Experts offers opportunities to meet with the larger BU and to co-create live events. The slogan for the Webex Community Ecosystem, “Level up your knowledge. Your network. Your voice.”, exemplifies our vision and commitment to our Webex customers. Webex Employee’s Favorite Feature of the Month - The Webex Community empowers customers and partners alike by supporting successful product adoption. To accomplish this, Webex uses contests and giveaways to promote engagement in the community, while still supporting its larger business goals. In a new campaign called “Webex Employee’s Feature of the Month,” we created a new post to highlight a game-changing feature for those working from home – the Background Noise Removal. The post contained information on how this feature works, how to use it, and we invited community members to share how the feature is helping them stay focused at work. Each response to the post was entered into a giveaway for a free Cisco 730 headset. In three weeks, the post received 63,000 views and 536 responses. During that time, adoption of the feature increased from 1.75 million meetings to 4 million meetings. The Power of Recognition - The community team is always looking for new ways to innovate. One thing we value is learning how our work is improving the health of the community. The long-standing “Community Spotlight Awards” program highlights community members’ outstanding content and engagement. On a monthly basis, award winners receive community-wide recognition via a prestigious badge that displays on their profile. Analyzing the award winners’ contributions three months prior and three months after they are recognized revealed that their community contributions (posts and replies) increased by nearly 22%. When we added Webex specific Spotlight Awards, their contributions increased by 145%. Two of the Webex Spotlight awardees have been named Cisco Designated VIPs (our “Top Contributors” program) in 2021. In May 2021, the Webex team reflected on its first year of operation and hosted the Webex Community Birthday award show that highlighted the contributions of the Top 25 Webex Community users. All attendees received a box of the latest Webex swag. Aha! Portal - The rise in customer adoption and usage of Webex , necessitated the need for a central product idea repository that has visibility to our product team. The launch of the Webex Community was the perfect time to provide a formalized way to capture the authentic voice and needs of our customer and funnel them straight to our product team. Cisco uses the Aha! Portal as a tool for ideas from employees and partners. The flexibility of the Khoros platform made it possible to embed a public Aha! Portal directly into the Webex community. This created a streamlined experience for customers and intake process for the product team, resulting in an improved the feedback loop for customers. We named it the “User Community Feedback Portal”. Member use of the portal caught the Webex world by storm. Today, the User Community Feedback Portal has received nearly 3,000 posted ideas, and more than 300 of them have come to fruition. One idea that was particularly monumental was the Linux Support for Webex. This product idea was discussed internally in February of 2020 and was determined not a priority item by the product team. That very same idea was posted in the User Community Feedback Portal on the second day the portal was active. The Webex community rallied behind it, and the idea grew to more than 1,700 votes with 700 different companies supporting it as well as 200 partners. Upon seeing this interest and demand, the product team saw there was a true need. The community directly brought an idea that would shape the future of collaboration. This is only one idea out of 300 in the first year that has now manifested into reality. Webex’s use of Aha! proved so successful, adoption was expanded to the Customer Connection program, which houses the Cisco Community’s most loyal users. Leveling up the Webex Community’s usage and the inclusion within Customer Connection added extra weight to each vote, supporting the voice amplification mission of the Customer Connection program. 2. Tell us about how you made it happen? Did you stage it first? Who got an early look? How did you drive adoption? Did you get executive buy-in? Did you have any key iterations? Webex Community Ecosystem expansion - The Webex Beta, Webex Ambassador, and Webex Expert programs were separate and going through a restructure in the later part of 2020. It was a perfect time to give each program a new, refreshed look, feel, and meaning. Our team created the Webex Community ecosystem, where the community engagement acts as the foundation, with growing opportunities to level up your knowledge, your network, and your voice. Additionally, as members grow their engagement within the programs, they are required to give back to the community. As members level up in the programs, they are given extra community access and privileges. The Webex Beta program needed a new home that centered around engagement and exclusivity, thus we expanded a private area in the community-based Customer Connection program where the product team could host their betas and have real-time conversation and feedback with participants. The success of the Webex Community convinced leadership that the beta program could thrive in this environment. The beta program continues to evolve in structure, gather direct feedback and shape the future of collaboration. The Webex Ambassador and Expert programs included developing certification badges, a member directory, and integrations to pull those certifications to the community platform. In the coming months, the program is set to launch a new learning management system, providing more certifications for FREE. The Ambassador and Expert programs fall under the same leadership as the Beta program and the Webex Community. Thus, as the Webex Community grew and developed a reputation, it made sense to make the other disparate programs an opportunity for members to level up. Cisco leadership supported us and encouraged us to build a common culture within the community ecosystem. We continue to build a cohesive experience and seamless presence with the support of our leadership. Webex Employee’s Favorite Feature of the Month – The “Webex Employee’s Favorite Feature of the Month” campaign was created in March of 2021. Under the leadership of the Webex Adoption director, a new initiative was created called Feature of the Month. When we heard of this, we wanted the authentic voice of the customer to be the centerpiece of the campaign. We want to hear HOW people are using the feature, and HOW it could be better. We worked with our product seeding department to secure 12 Cisco 730 headsets as a giveaway product for 1 random respondee of the dedicated FOTM post. Given the Adoption team wasn’t totally familiar with the benefits of the community, we had to walk them through what could be and pitched a bigger project that included an outreach email, how-to GIFs, and the community post. The adoption team created the emails and GIFS, and we created the post in community. We also worked with our social team to promote the “Feature of the Month” post and contest. Power of Recognition - The community has been hosting the “Community Spotlight Awards” for many years, and we know that our community members can feel the love. However, we never learned how this recognition affected engagement in the community. With new drilled-down data from the Webex Community, we were able to pull all the data from the first six months of award winners and recognize members based on their actions of posting and replying. Aha! Portal – The success of the “User Community Feedback” portal wouldn’t have been possible without leadership support and existing product adoption from our product team. We tried a few different iterations of connecting the portal to the community such as a link in a drop-down menu, but soon developed an embedded interface directly in the community. 3. What were the results? Tell us how it impacted your customer experience or the outcomes you seek as a business. Please include metrics if possible. Webex Community Ecosystem Expansion – The Webex Community ecosystem is alive and active, providing extended opportunities to earn FREE certifications, test features before they go live, and connect directly to the Webex product team. Thus, a knowledge sharing network was created, continues to grow and continues to influence product direction. Webex Employee’s Favorite Feature of the Month - We worked with the product team before launching the promotion to understand the best way to track the feature adoption. We later found that the number of meetings using the feature grew from approximately 1.75 million to approximately 4 million in the span of three weeks. Aha! Portal - Launching and managing the idea portal within our community has increased positive rhetoric from community members, who feel like their voices truly matter. One community member who initially critical of Cisco, has now transformed his opinion throughout the year. He posted “The community does a very good job in compensating/closing that gap … since I can confirm that Cisco is listening to customer feedback, please allow me to remind you to share your ideas and suggestions on how to further improve Webex here.” It’s amazing to see how, with the implementation with of the portal, one of our biggest critics has turned into one of our biggest fans - and is consistently promoting the use of the idea portal with others.2020 Customer Awards: Cisco Systems, Inc. - Keep Calm and Carry On
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: A new Webex Community for end users in Cisco Community 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. 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. A blog in the community that received almost 50K views and 70 Kudos. The blog contained helpful information about the assets available to users. Promoting the Cisco Community on our Cisco.com pages. Webex Community – Launched May 4th. Comments from the Webex Community users: TechZone Webex Warriors – Employee Community Comments: Events to support our users during COVID-19 Comments from Community Live Webinars and Ask me Anything Events Participants: Business Continuity Blog: 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. 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: Events to support our users during COVID-19:2020 Customer Awards: Cisco Systems, Inc. - Best-in-Class: Community
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: https://community.cisco.com Kudos Category: Best-in-Class: Community 1. Describe your community(s) and how you decided to start a community or grow/change it? (user request, Khoros suggestion, internal idea, etc.). Cisco Community is a combination of two external communities – the Cisco Support Community and Cisco Communities - that were merged in July 2018 for the purpose of providing a single site for customers and partners to interact, share information about Cisco Products, technologies and solutions, as well as learn about the latest and greatest in new products. Community members can also participate in Cisco-hosted events and host events to share their knowledge, expertise and experience with others. Cisco Community, where 96% of the answers provided are from external contributors, continues to steadily grow in membership and engagement as we strive to provide the best experience for our users. The enhancements below have been instrumental in improving our Easy of Use metric from 8.02 in fiscal year 2019 to 8.11 to fiscal year 2020. These are some of the key enhancements since July 2018: Security Category Restructure: During the merger of the two communities, we chose to retain the names of discussion boards in the Security category to prevent further disruption for our users. Over time, it became clear that we needed to restructure the security category to provide a more seamless and cohesive experience for our users and to more closely align with Cisco.com security product pages. We also heard from our top contributors who requested we streamline the discussion boards and labels to enable users to ask and answer questions more efficiently. As a result of the restructure, not only the visits increased 16%, and the number of questions posted grew 9%, but more importantly, the replies went up 22% and 29% more helpful votes were given. This is because it is easier now for users to engage and find the information they need. Jive External Communities: In November 2019 we migrated the remaining Cisco external private communities hosted on the Jive Cloud platform. We leveraged the Group Hub functionality and integrated 380 groups into Cisco Community. Webex Community: Cisco offered free access to its collaboration Webex products to help address the increased demand for remote workers due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, our technical assistance centers experienced an astronomical increase in requests for support. In order to help millions of users (teachers, remote workers and health care providers), we created a new Webex Community. Events to support our users during COVID-19: To support our new users who had taken advantage of our free trials of Webex and Security products, we hosted a series of Community Live Webinars and Community Ask me Anything events from March through June 2020, in multiple languages. 2. Tell us about how you made it happen? Did you stage it first? Who got an early look? How did you drive adoption? Did you get executive buy-in? Did you have any key iterations? Security Restructure: Our approach to this project was to listen to feedback from our community members, specifically the top contributors, and to input from the different business units at Cisco. We worked cross-functionally to achieve these results and performed a mini-migration of content from the existing discussion boards to the new streamlined structure. Not only did we move content from one board to another, but we also removed any existing labels and applied new appropriate ones. We finalized the new structure on February 22, 2020. Jive external Communities: Our approach to this project was not simply to migrate all the forums and content from Jive to Khoros, but to streamline the entire experience for our users and provide a consolidated community structure. We wanted to create a user interface design that aligned with Cisco’s new digital personality with convenient usability and personalization improvements. We started by doing an in-depth cleanup of private groups, users, and content and planned to migrate what was relevant. We migrated 380 private communities (out of 482), and 13.3K users (out of 30K). This project was the final piece in our consolidated community plan, but couldn’t be executed until the Group Hubs capability was available in Khoros. We were one of the first customers to adopt this feature for our users. Webex Community for end users: With COVID-19 pandemic, Cisco has helped the world by providing free licenses to Webex and security products to allow people to work remotely and teachers and students to learn virtually. Webex is one of the few Cisco products that is available directly to customers via the web or mobile apps, but it did not have a singular community for users to engage with each other and experts. We fast tracked the launch of the Webex Community and featured it in a prominent place within Cisco Community so users can find the help they need when they need it. Prior to starting this, Cisco Community forums focused on Webex topics such as adoption and administration. The Webex Community visits have grown by 372% since launching in May. Contributions have gone from 17 before launch to 1,068 after launch (representing 6182% growth). Events to support our users during COVID-19: During this unprecedented time, we quickly organized ourselves to support the world with tools that allow people to connect with others remotely and securely. Government leaders, teachers, and remote workers in all industries need to work from home. To help new users, who may not be technically savvy, participate in Webex meetings, connect to their companies’ intranets, etc., we provided a series of how-to webinars and moderated discussions. The events helped address specific questions in the community and reduce the number of cases being opened with Cisco’s technical assistance center. The moderated discussions, called Ask Me Anything, are one of our most popular events in Community. Here is how they work: We open a topic-based discussion thread for two weeks and assigned experts promptly answer questions during this timeframe. We hosted each Ask Me Anything event in seven languages simultaneously! Our local language moderators helped with the translations of the questions and answers. This is the first time we have hosted these “Ask me Anything” discussions across our local language communities simultaneously, and our users were very engaged and found these events quite useful. In total we had 51 Ask me Anything events that generated more than 62K views and 880 kudos. We also hosted 16 Community Live Webinars with over 4.5K registrations and 2.4K attendees. During the live webinar there were over 321 questions answered live, and the overall ratings were 4.61 (out of 5). 3. What were the results? Tell us how it impacted your customer experience or the outcomes you seek as a business. Please include metrics if possible. Overall Cisco Community CSAT (Easy of Use) Monthly average: It increased from 8.02 in fiscal year 2019 to 8.11 this fiscal year. This increase is significant! Security Restructure: Jive external Communities: Traffic grew 35% from the four months prior to the migration to the last four mounts (from 7.5K views to 11.5K views) Webex Community for End users: Events to support our users during COVID-19:
