Cisco Systems Inc.
Company: Cisco Systems Inc, San Jose, CA
Company Description: Cisco Services is looking to delivering Smart Interactions, a vision that brings communities, self-support & assisted support into a unified customer experience enriched by our Smart Services capabilities.
Nomination Category: Customer Service & Call Center Awards Achievement Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Award for Innovation in Customer Service
Nomination Title: Cisco Support Community and A New Era of Social Support
Tell the story about your organization's innovations in customer service since the beginning of July 2011 (up to 500 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes:
Our vision for the future of technical support is one in which customers collaborate and co-create solutions when and where they are needed. The social insights from the collaboration are combined with our application and network intelligence to create a truly personalized and proactive support experience – and new business opportunities for Cisco and our partners.
Our journey began over 10 years ago when we established Cisco Support Community. Our guiding philosophy was, “No single company knows everything; the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ is always greater than proprietary knowledge.” For years, our community remained a small “niche” destination for “community aficionados”. However, this all changed 4 years ago when the community hit an inflection point. We saw a rare opportunity to leverage new technologies such as mobile devices, social media and open Web Services. We also recognized the business pressures on Cisco and our partners showed no sign of easing. We had to act.
Our community has grown 15x in size since then and more than doubled since July 2011, surpassing 2 million monthly visits, reaching users in 6 languages and seeing customers generate nearly 30,000 questions, answers and documents every month. Our industry-leading expert and community recognition programs have brought hundreds of Cisco experts to millions of customers through Webcasts and online Q&A sessions and empowered an elite group of customer experts known as Cisco Designated VIPs to lead and contribute even more. Today, our 26 VIPs contribute over 15% of our community’s entire global knowledge.
Our innovation has brought our community to mobile and social media users.
Today, our community has over 90,000 customers using our iPhone/iPad/Android mobile apps to access technical support on the go. The community is also connected with over 350,000 predominantly young and emerging market users on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and YouTube. Social media have become a key channel for customer listening, expert sessions and direct 1-on-1 troubleshooting support. The true power of social media lies in their virality. Our 350,000 users are connected to nearly 100 million friends and colleagues – and, each week, approximately 4,000 users create new stories about us on Facebook alone.
We believe the future of technical support hinges on bringing Web and community intellectual capital directly to customers in THEIR service environments through open Web Services. This new strategy is already creating a powerful “wisdom of the crowd” model for Cisco’s entire partner eco-system.
The business and customer impact of our strategy has been significant. Cisco Support Community is estimated to generate over $200 million in annual cost savings for Cisco by resolving over 1 million troubleshooting cases that would otherwise end up in more traditional channels. Our customer satisfaction continues to reach a new high – having surpassed 4.2 on a 5-point scale. Nearly 50% of qualified customers who visit our community find resolutions they are looking for. As our community continues its exponential growth, we expect the financial impact to grow, our customer loyalty to strengthen and our social insights to become the driver of Cisco’s future business.
Provide a brief (up to 100 words) biography about the leader(s) of the nominated customer service organization:
Tom Yoritaka is a Director in Technical Services at Cisco, responsible for Cisco Support Community, mobile and social media support, Web Services offers and social analytics. He has successfully put the new community/social support model at the heart of Cisco’s services strategy and driven significant financial results. Prior to joining Cisco, He was a Director at Yahoo!, responsible for key Web Services technologies. Prior to joining Yahoo!, he held several product management positions at Microsoft. Earlier in his career, he was a management consultant at the McKenna Group and the Boston Consulting Group, supporting executive clients at multinational corporations worldwide.