You Blog, you Tweet, and we listen. Cisco’s Technical Services uses the voice of social media and the power of big data to capture unsolicited customer feedback. Better yet, how do you know we really care? When you’re down (or your network that is), we’ll be there. Cisco Technical Services proactively monitors, acts and reacts when customers experience large scale outages. With the real-time power of social media, Cisco is transforming the direction of technical support from a reactive service to a proactive partnership. In this day and age every company worth their salt has an online presence to interact with their customers and Cisco is no exception, providing award-winning online support and communities, but how many companies actually take social media’s unsolicited feedback to heart and go above and beyond? How many really and truly listen, learn, and drive change? Even better, how many proactively monitor, act and reach out when customers experience large scale outages that their end customers are buzzing about on social?This Shorty Award is all about Customer support and Social Media, and Cisco is all about supporting customers and keeping them happy using social media. More than ever, customers use social media platforms to stay connected and voice their opinions, both good and bad. It’s expected that brands are listening and responding, but what about taking action? Why should Cisco Services Social Sentiment program win? The Pivotal Shift from Reactive to Proactive Support and Customer Partnership It’s an easy formula. First we put our best and brightest people together to create an innovative proactive listening program. And because they are obsessed with customer happiness, they are monitoring social media trends 24/7. Traditional support models rely on the customer to initiate the support interaction, but with our social outage monitoring program, Cisco is turning this paradigm on its head. A customer may comment via social media about a cell provider’s widespread outage. Cisco Social Sentiment resources spots the trend as it occurs on Twitter, verifies the event is valid, gathers more information about location, scale and the affected company’s communications about the status, if any. Support and account teams are mobilized, even in the case where Cisco equipment is not involved, offering support and services, and strengthening the customer/vendor partnership. In the past 10 months, the program has notified our support and account teams of 130+ outage events affecting a wide array of customers from Service Providers to Airlines. In one case, a Cisco VP was about to walk into a meeting with a large airline who happened to be experiencing a network down event causing a social media uproar due to ground delayed flights and lack of updates. Armed with information, even though Cisco equipment was not involved, the VP was well prepared and able to extend an offer of assistance. How it works, an example: * End customers take to social media to complain about a wireless provider’s widespread outage. * Cisco Social Sentiment resources notice the trend as it happens on Twitter and validates the event. * Once validated, account managers and support teams are notified of the event. For critical events, an immediate executive notification is dispatched. * Cisco gears are set in motion to engage the right resources and ensure actions are initiated to stop the outage and get the customer back in business. Cisco wants the customer to know that we have their back in time of crisis, whether that is engaging Cisco Services to isolate the issue and establish an action plan to drive restoration of a customer’s services across multiple states, regardless of issue source, or escalating and targeting resources on a customer’s existing service request related to an issue impacting sales in their storefronts to speed resolution. The Cisco Services Social Sentiment listening program enables Cisco’s proactive partnership in the customer’s success. Listening, Learning and Taking Action In addition to finding opportunities for proactive support, the Social Sentiment team drives systemic improvement actions based on customer sentiment expressed in social media. The power of big data analysis is realized to its fullest potential. The Cisco Social Sentiment program combs though over 235,000 posts in more than 15 subject areas per quarter for customers’ sentiment about their experiences with Cisco Services and the opinions they share with peers, including core Cisco Services functions such as entitlement processes, software licensing policies, technical support delivery, documentation, software quality concerns and web tools. The team is instrumental in providing proactive customer support, increased customer loyalty, potential sales and stronger partnerships by providing key stakeholders with vital data used to drive action. Going beyond feedback collection, the program seeks to effectively drive change including: * Improvements to Cisco online resources like the Bug Search Tool (BST) and the Support Case Manager (SCM) tool. * Bring the social voice of the customer to the forefront in support of correcting product quality and serviceability issues by distilling trending insights from the Cisco Support Forums where 360k registered users seek self-support. * Improvements to Cisco technical documentation, enabling self-support and driving case-avoidance. * Policy and support changes to Cisco’s software licensing customer experience, leveraging social listening for guidance and Cisco’s blog space for communication around future plans, effectively closing the loop. * Feedback to the Technical Assistance Center (TAC) that drives superior customer service through online tools, email and telephone support operations. Social media is by far becoming a key channel for customers to voice their opinions and Cisco is not only listening, but taking action to positively impact the customer’s experience with Cisco Services. The Social Sentiment team is continuously seeking new and innovative ways to ensure the customer’s voice is heard loud and clear and Cisco never stops listening, learning and driving change. We care, we listen, we fix, and we make customers happy all within the power of the social network.
This white paper should be considered as part of our awards application: https://www.dropbox.com/s/9dzqxsjxaeahps8/cisco_socialsentiment_whitepaper.pdf
