We are in the midst of the era of customer and workforce experience. I read one report predicting "by 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator." Consumers and employees are more loyal to companies that go beyond products and services to deliver unique and rewarding experiences for new insights, flexibility and value.

To help our customers accelerate participation in the trend toward digitization, we're launching this week a new set of Digital Capabilities in the context of Digital Ceiling, Customer Experience and Workforce Experience.

These new Cisco Digital Capabilities are simple solutions proven to improve customer and workforce experience to increase revenue and competitiveness, enable new business models, and improve customer and employee retention and loyalty. Each of these involves putting together connectivity with rich analytics, providing insights that can be harnessed by our customers in new ways.

Within the Customer Experience Digital Capability, we're launching three key offers to help transform the customer experience:

• Virtual Expertise: Face-to-face, real time personalized interactions from anywhere, anytime and on any device
• Mobile Experience: Create differentiated, relevant experiences through mobile devices
• Intelligent Branch: Provides a rich, comprehensive, simplified experience across a varied, yet unified set of applications throughout a customer's journey

And in our Workforce Experience Digital Capability, we're introducing Workspace Productivity to increase employee engagement and productivity, and enhance innovation by transforming the workplace into a flexible, collaborative environment that helps empower today's digital workforce.

Here at Cisco, we're seeing tremendous benefits from the Workforce Experience Digital Capability, with about a 40 percent reduction in both real estate costs and workplace services.

I've personally experienced some of the game changing results enabled by Workspace Productivity. Our team just moved to a newer, smarter workspace, and with Workspace Productivity, the way we work, interact and use our time has dramatically changed for the better.

Our new building has no assigned workspaces. Workspace Productivity assigns us workspaces of the right size, configuration, and capabilities for our people and for the work we need to do. We're working smarter and collaborating with each other in more meaningful ways with less time spent managing meetings and finding the right workspaces.

We've had flexible workspaces and virtual meetings for years, but these capabilities bring with them administrative overhead. In the past, if a previous meeting ran over in the conference room we had booked, we would wait patiently outside tapping on the glass while furiously texting and emailing new meeting details. It was a huge time sink. Now, with Workspace Productivity, we have the option of having the meeting automatically "move itself" to another nearby available conference room and instantly inform all the attendees of the changes.

As with all of these new capabilities, Cisco software and network technology are what make it happen, but we don't need to think about it. It all works seamlessly in the background delivering a whole new kind of experience for our employees.

I've posted here several times recently with a focus on Customer Experience, so I concentrated this post on Workforce Experience. I'll be sharing a broader perspective here soon on the benefits of the Customer Experience Digital Capability.

For additional information on all of the capabilities we've launched today, please visit Digital Solutions.

More than ever, I'm seeing how customer and workforce experience are key in how companies differentiate themselves, enable new business models, drive revenue and loyalty, better engage with customers and employees, and deliver key business outcomes. Please join the conversation and tell me how you plan to transform your customer and workforce environments to compete in the experience age.