Computacenter Shares Insights and Best Practices on the Platform that Provides an Exceptional Customer Experience

After much anticipation, we have launched Cisco's Partner Experience (PX) Cloud in General Availability (GA) worldwide! Starting this week, Cisco partners that resell Success Tracks will now get automatic access to the PX Cloud platform, the Cisco CX single pane of glass, to manage customers' lifecycles.

The partner's edition of the customers' CX Cloud, the PX Cloud, is partners' digital gateway to real-time data and analytics, service creation, monetization opportunities, and insights for best-in-class proactive support. Now, partners get 360-degree visibility of their Success Tracks customers' data and tap into a suite of APIs for predictive telemetry insights and much more, all in one place.

Figure 1. CX Cloud and PX Cloud working together

But what do all these features and capabilities do for partners, their organizations, and customers? Learn firsthand from Cisco's partner Computacenter, an early adopter of the PX Cloud, who used its APIs and analytics to enhance accurate account intelligence and improve customer engagements throughout the lifecycle.

Figure 2. Julie and me (source: Julie Greene)

Today, I am thrilled to talk with Julie Greene, Cisco Business Development Director at Computacenter. A strong customer success advocate, Julie is an expert IT industry veteran who has been at the forefront of Computacenter's CX transformation journey to share best practices, lessons, and advice:

Denzil:Julie, let's get started -how did you hear about PX Cloud?

Julie:I remember when Cisco first announced the PX Cloud at Partner Summit in 2020 and how the entire audience was enthralled by its potential. My team and I at Computacenter couldn't be more excited to see all this potential becoming a reality now that PX Cloud is generally available.

Denzil:Yes, and at Partner Summit 2022 we said PX Cloud would be GA in March 2023 and we delivered on that commitment! We are super proud of that. Before we get into your experience with PX Cloud, what has motivated you to build a CX practice at Computacenter?

Julie:Cisco has been part of my professional journey for the past two decades. I started my career at a Cisco partner company and continued this path while experimenting with different roles and areas of the business. It's been quite a ride!

One of the most notable changes I have seen at Cisco was its service portfolio's evolution over the past few years. From collecting hardware data for break-fix purposes to fully embracing the power of APIs, digital platforms, and insights into the customers' IT environment, we have come a long way to deliver our customers the proactive and predictive support they need. Let me tell you when we started our journey in CX and why.

Seven years ago, my team and I at Computacenter created a CX practice in the US called Assure. We had two main objectives with Assure: first, implement a sales motion where our customer success managers, sales, and solutions architect worked together to support the customer throughout their lifecycle. It was an extraordinary cultural shift for us.

Second, we wanted to enable our teams to easily access timely and accurate account intelligence data. And that's where Cisco comes in with the APIs, telemetry data, insights, and analytics through PX Cloud.

Figure 3. Julie Greene presenting at Cisco Live EMEA 2023 in Amsterdam (source: Computacenter LinkedIn page)

Denzil: Tell us more about the role of Assure in the Computacenter's customer success practice and how Cisco CX fits in this model.

Julie:We have a mature customer success practice at Computacenter US. Our teams and customers have welcomed and positively adopted the Assure program's methodology and premise, so much so that we moved our practice to Europe early this year, which is very exciting for all of us.

In a nutshell, ASSURE focuses on five main touchpoints of the lifecycle: Adoption, Services, Software, Utilization, Renewal, and Evolvement. We work hard to accurately identify and track our installed base data throughout this process.

Once we mapped this data, finding out how to deliver and make it simple for our internal teams to consume and utilize was a big challenge. To become agile, we had to cut down on the administrative burden of capturing and analyzing the data from multiple sources and tools.

We solved this pain point by simplifying the access to data and insights through a single platform, the Computacenter's Lifecycle Services & Asset Intelligence Portal. Today, we have over 35 Cisco APIs in that portal including Meraki APIs and consolidated 6 Cisco platforms into one. Not only did it streamline the consumption of the data, but it also accelerated the decision-making of our team to engage the customers with the right offer at the right time.

Denzil: That is phenomenal, Julie. I agree that data must be timely, accurate, and, more importantly, actionable. How are you using the PX Cloud's insights and analytics to drive action in the context of the customer lifecycle?

Julie:Besides the APIs, the PX Cloud enables us to create and publish our branded offers to our customers into their CX Cloud. We have developed technical workshops, assessments, and services that showcase our Partner Lifecycle Accelerators in multiple architectures. These unique solutions are positioned in the different stages of the lifecycle, from adoption to renewal. As customers look to upskill and learn new insights and best practices, featuring our expert services on CX Cloud has been a huge game-changer.

Figure 4. Cisco lifecycle racetrack illustration

Denzil: What would be the key outcomes your team has achieved through the CX practice? And can you tell us how the customers benefit from this approach?

Julie:The main positive changes to our CX practice entail three things. One: how our teams collaborate, innovate, think, and act more strategically and intentionally with the customers' lifecycle in mind.

Two, we are getting better at enhancing data accuracy and timeliness every day. With the help of advanced APIs, AI, and machine learning, we can deliver true proactive and predictive solution support spanning the customers' entire IT environment in a programmatic and scalable manner.

Three, and it's an excellent segue to answering your second question, it's about deepening our customers' relationships, building loyalty and trust, and helping them achieve their outcomes.

Within the CX practice, we support our customers to save costs, reduce downtime, and accelerate time to value, among other outcomes. More importantly, we want to enable our customers to provide an excellent customer experience themselves -for example, a hospital improving patient care or a financial bank securing its operations for its clients.

Denzil:I like the use cases you mentioned there, Julie. To wrap up, can you share the top takeaways?

Julie: Adopting a CX mindset and methodology is a tremendous transformation journey for us and the entire IT channel ecosystem. Change is hard, but if you persist through -and learn from -the failures and challenges along the way, I assure you (no pun intended!) that your efforts will pay off.

I also want to plug your fabulous new CX Partner Perspectives Podcast I was fortunate to be a guest on and share more insights on Episode 2 -"Computacenter Drives Customer Outcomes with Cisco CX.  Lastly, I highly encourage partners to leverage the power of telemetry, insights, and analytics and use them to their advantage. Make sure you make the most of platforms like PX Cloud to deliver an exceptional customer experience!

 

Get ready for PX Cloud:

• Partners who resell a Success Tracks contract to customers will automatically be onboarded to PX Cloud
• Access PX Cloud
  • Complete on-line learning
  • Log in to the platform
• Request customer's approval to access their CX Cloud data

 

Visit Cisco's PX Cloud SuccessHub for more information and as always, check out SuccessHub

 

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