Alpa Mehta | Customer Advocacy Marketing Manager, EMEAR
Advocamp 2018, 1-5 October 2018, Toronto
We were excited to attend the annual ‘Advocamp’ conference for Advocacy marketers across the world, hosted by Influitive- masters of advocacy marketing. 240 attendees joined onsite and 3000 virtually to discuss hottest trends in Advocacy.
Highlights:
Hear from our latest team member, Barbara Fontela Baro about her Advocamp experience in her own words here!
Award winners! We proudly won the BAMMIE (Best Advocate Marketing) award for ‘Best Advocate Generated Content,’ inspired a new ‘Customer Experience’ award category and to make it a ‘hat trick’, Valerio bought home the ‘Golden Pen’ award for Upshot generated content!
Check out the Advocamp blog
Thank you for partnering with us in the last year - here’s to an exciting year of more customer generated content!
A Day in the Life of an Advocate
Enrico Sorge, Gateway Rockstar and Cyber Security Solutions Expert at Italtel spent the day with us, telling us about himself, his passions, career and thoughts on Security.
Here’s his write up of the day!
How is Cisco Becoming a Customer Powered Enterprise? (CPE)
See how these customer insights are driving our customer obsessed movement!
Useful Links:
Involving Sales in Customer Advocacy Involving Customer Success in Customer Advocacy FY18 Advocacy Report FY18 Team Video!
Questions? Contact the team!
Follow us on Twitter keep up with the latest hot news!
David Jux | Customer Interaction Centre Strategy and Execution Global Customer Marketing Engagement
We are excited to announce that this month we will officially re-launch the fourth Marketing Customer Interaction Centre (CIC) for India based out of Bangalore. This follows the successful launches of CICs in US & Canada in November 2017, LATAM in February, the EMEAR region in March 2018 and APJ region in Singapore in June 2018.
As per previous launches, I am grateful for the support of Daryl Thomas whose expertise and knowledge meant the team were quickly set up and connected to the rest of the CiC network across the globe and of course Erwin Angeles, who leads the Singapore & India CIC team, for all the support and effort to get us here. Special thanks must also go to the local Marketing teams headed by Prabhjeet Singh, the GVS team led by Dheeraj Gauba, both in India and the APJC Digital Marketing team led by Hari Chazhiottil who have already triggered a cadence of coordination.
With all these teams supporting CiC, we will continue to aim to work more effectively now and in the coming days. With an intense focus on a consistent customer experience, all advisors across each location have gone through a global standardised training program based on the Global Virtual Sales (GVS) & CS curriculum and now with the new CIC team structure, the teams have been set up to provide the best customer experience aligned to their needs.
On top of this training, the CIC Advisors will continue to spend quality time with the business leaders to get an understanding of the needs of the business in each region.
What is the Role of CIC – Cisco’s Marketing Frontline?
Watch this short video to see how the new CICs will be different to the contact centres of the past.
Why Should You Care?
Pascal Landermann, Head of the GCME team, claims that now, more than ever, we must work togwether globally to change our internal processes and practicies across Sales and Marketing to build a customer first view:
to create a joint Sales and Marketing operation for pre-sales qualification to deliver a seamless experience for our customers.
The animation, embedded in this video, shows the impact of the new capabilities the team have developed, on the experience of a typical fictional Commercial customer, Grande Hotel, in dealing with Cisco and …more importantly it shows how our practices will need to change to make it happen.
If you would like to visit the EMEAR CIC team, please contact Charlie Morgan-Harris ...and watch out for the China CIC coming soon!
Because customers are the lifeblood of our business, we are transforming our Marketing contact centres into true Customer Interaction Centres (CIC) to help keep our finger on the pulse.
As per previous issues’ news, we continue to share some stats and examples of customer feedback the team have received so far and, in this issue, we are also excited to welcome our second APJC regional team based out of Bangalore in India. We now have five CIC teams live and running!
As the Marketing Frontline, our teams continue to speak with thousands of our customers every week.
So, watch out for future issues as we continue to share our progress with you.… In the meantime, however, if you want to come and meet the Marketing Frontline team in person, please contact your relevant regional CIC lead:
EMEAR: Charlie Morgan Harris US & Canada: Michael Stillson LATAM: Jenny Ayala APJC: Erwin Angeles
Building a strong connection with our customers, so they can be excited about the Cisco brand takes a special kind of person! The teams are continually updated with the latest developments.
We had some great training sessions in September where the full Americas team learned about Licensing, LATAM team reviewed Security and the EMEAR team covered Collaboration & Meraki.
The teams also had the opportunity to hear the latest news shared at GSX, so they can talk authentically about our products and services with our customers.
So far in FY19, we have 771 leads valued at $11.8M in SQL with a 26% conversion rate.
The customer contacted Cisco to understand more about security products. The advisor was able to explain the technical features in a simplified manner so that this customer – who didn’t have a technical background – was able to understand it. The customer most appreciated the advisor for his support. “In the end, it is all about people!” [Cisco Sales]
Offering a seamless experience is key for us if we are to make it easy for our customers to do business with us. Our Advisors and SMB Sales teams are working closer every day to reduce the response times and so create a much smoother handover process for our customers.
“This was a hot lead – had a follow up call w/ TN ANG last week about this and we were able to flip them to the newer Catalyst line. Great work!” [Sales Account Manager]
Having the chance to listen to thousands of customers every week gives us a real taste of what is top of mind for them. This month we have learnt...
“I find it frustrating sometimes when searching Cisco web pages, but your techs can always provide me a good link.” [Cisco Customer].
“I am hoping cisco add categories into their chat system (e.g. Sales, Technical).
Then your customers who have technical questions will go to different section other than sales to get their answers”. [Cisco Customer]. “Information about licensing is limited.” [Cisco Customer].
“Confusing info on web site - sorted by live chat assistant.” [Cisco Customer].
“We would expect you design the Bill of Material so that we can take help from the local distributor with pricing” [Cisco Customer].
As of today, a huge portion of inbound chats coming into our CICs are not relevant to sales, so this month we are improving our existing drop-down menu so that our customers will see “Please make a selection” for the chat option. This way we will find out exactly why our customers are contacting us so that we can direct them to an appropriate source of help rather than assume it’s a presales enquiry. The form is updated for all countries globally in English, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian.
As you would know from previous issues, we also collect the Net Promoter Score (NPS) and now further qualitative feedback regarding these chat sessions via our new post-chat survey. With this insight, we aim to consistently measure, monitor and enhance customer experience during the need qualification phase of the customer journey. The survey is rolled out to all countries globally where we offer chats in English.
In the recent chat NPS analysis, the team reached a score of 21, with 403 out of 756 customers being Promotors (Likely, or very likely to recommend Cisco), over 82% of whom gave a score of 10 out of 10 for their experience in dealing with Cisco. Below are just some of their comments:
“I didn't just get an answer. I got just what I was asking for in less time than it took for me to ask the question. Aston is very knowledgeable, and our chat session felt very friendly and upbeat. Thank you, Aston, for your help and attention today.” [Cisco Customer]
“Justin was on top of my request and provided the information I was looking for”. [Cisco Customer]
“All my questions were answered... no fill or fluff. greatly appreciated.!” [Cisco Customer]
“Brett knew exactly what I wanted and provided it immediately. Thanks for the help.” [Cisco Customer]
“You answered all technical questions with speed and efficiency!” [Cisco Customer]
“Sarah is a perfect member of support team. That was the best and clearest chat I've ever had in online scenarios. I really appreciate her.”. [Cisco Customer]
“Leah was very good. Did not feel like a chat bot. Was knowledgeable and polite and got the job done...just what the doctor ordered...” [Cisco Customer]
“My question was answered immediately; agent Anna was very professional and friendly.” [Cisco Customer]
“Took the time to work with a disabled Vietnam Vet.” [Cisco Customer]
Stefania Di Stefano | Program Analytics Manager, Global Customer Marketing Engagement
This month Next Best Action (NBA) was awarded the Best in Class Program of the year at Sirius Decision 2018 European Summit for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Solution against tough competition from HP, VMWare and Paloalto.
Following extensive pilots, around the globe, NBA has shown substantial improvements in the rates of engagement with prospects and customers.
What is Next Best Action?
Next Best Action (NBA) is Cisco’s in-house solution that is continuously optimizing and learning how the customers choose and prefer to engage with Cisco. It combines predictive analytics based on data, advanced statistical methods, customer behavior patterns and automation to address each customer. It captures both the digital and offline footprints of our customers, so we get a better picture of where our customers are on their journey and every time their needs and preferences change, using artificial intelligence, NBA continuously re-calculates and learns.
The first is the ITSMA Marketing Excellence Awards Program which honors the marketing programs, campaigns, and new initiatives that have demonstrated superior performance in the four most critical aspects of marketing success: strategy and planning, innovation, execution, and business results.
NBA has been recognized as a finalist in the innovation category and in the Capitalizing on Marketing's New Tools and Technologies category.
The ITSMA Marketing Excellence Awards program, in its 21st year, focuses exclusively on marketing for B2B services and solutions, and highlights the most important dimensions of a strategic, comprehensive approach to marketing. For more than 20 years, ITSMA has led the way in defining, building, and inspiring B2B marketing excellence. With a dedicated focus on services and solutions for the connected economy, we provide our member community with insight, advice, and hands-on help to strengthen reputation, increase revenue, and deepen customer relationships.
An international panel of marketing executives and experts will select the winners, who will be announced at a special awards ceremony during ITSMA’s Annual Marketing Conference in November.
“Finalists for this year’s program are truly inspirational,” said Dave Munn, President and CEO of ITSMA. “B2B organizations are consumed with business transformation for the connected economy, and Cisco is one of them leading the way with strategic insight, guidance, and revenue acceleration.”
“Award finalists demonstrate tremendous innovation and impact across the most important aspects of strategic marketing,” said Munn. “In every category, our judges have been impressed with the creativity, agility, and results that continue to raise the bar for all of us engaged in B2B marketing.”
Global Annual Achievement Awards for Artificial Intelligence: Awards.AI.
The second award programme is the Global Annual Achievement Awards for Artificial Intelligence: Awards.AI.
Founded in 2015, Awards.AI is the first and biggest global annual achievement awards for artificial intelligence. Their focus is to support the AI community by recognising the hard work and dedication of those working in the field. The Award Winners will be announced during a separate Ceremony in December.
NBA automatically helps Cisco marketers target the right customer, at the right time, with the right content, through their preferred channel. Consequently, the process became much more cost effective as we are sending far fewer emails with much better results of engagement whilst improving the customer experience.
Watch this quick video to find out more.
Tetyana Oleynik | (Adecco at Cisco)
Cisco Virtual Forum was held for CIS countries and Russia. It consisted of 13 technical webinars for IT-specialists on Networking, Security, DC and Collaboration.
Main objectives:
Some valuable facts:
Results:
Follow-up: webinar recordings are being promoted to acquire new contacts and leads.
Thanks a lot to the project team, who made this happen:
All the presentations and recordings are available on this page.
Facebook posts with webinar recordings
Nana Masiero | Marketing Lead, Denmark
North Sales VP Niklas Andersson decided to increase sales investment in marketing last quarter but issuing a pitching competition for +$500k. The money was to be rewarded to the best marketing projects across the North countries. Each country made a pitch on topic(s) relevant to their market. In Denmark we choose to focus fully on Security as we know it drives cross architecture business and is amongst the top priorities for our customers.
The Danish Shark Tank project was rewarded with $70k that has been spent on two areas: Telemarketing to create lead gen and Thought Leadership to create awareness on the full security portfolio from Cisco.
Telemarketing
The Umbrella team then created the trial a long with us uploading the leads via MRM. Once the leads were available our two GEO TAM’s distributed the 870 e-leads to 6 selected partners who has by now (2 months later) created 188 SQL’s and the first two deals are closed, we expect to close deals worth of close to 2M USD.
Thought leadership
Cisco has been through a massive acquisitions transition in the security area and we felt it was time to showcase how we cover all aspects of security. We embarked on journey together with the 6 partners from the telemarketing campaign and created an insertion with 17 articles, based on stories from customers, partners and Cisco. It has been distributed together with the largest daily business paper Borsen (print) and are used digitally in Computerworld, largest daily it-tech media, where the three trials for security solutions are generated more leads for Cisco.
Nicolina Stefansson | Event Manager Sweden
Cisco Connect Stockholm 2018 took place at the Royal College of Music in their concert hall, “The Kings Hall”, which is one of the best in Sweden. Secure Digitalization was the theme of the event and it was reflected throughout the day in the keynotes, exhibition and power sessions. With a mix of internal and external speakers, with both technical and
more inspirational sessions, we met our audience that were a mix between managers, engineers and c-level customers. The overall score for the event was 4,5/5 and some of the speakers got record breaking scoring as high as 4,7.
We maximized Cisco Connect by organizing pre and post events in conjunction with Connect so that the customers could meet with our engineers and AM’s in a more intimate environment. This year we had a DevNet-event, Hacking Lab and public half day. This attracted more than 100 customers and most of them also attended Cisco Connect.
Cisco Connect Stockholm was promoted in social media, TM-campaign, cisco.se and of course by sales. 595 people attended the event and we had more than 50 direct leads, 296 contact uploads and partner leads with an overall value of 3,501,000 USD.
Click on this video for a flavor of the event (in Swedish)
Evelyn Ferraro | Marketing Manager
We joined a project organized by a media supplier, Digital 360, dedicated to the innovation and aimed to promote the digital culture in Italy.
Our case has been validated by a jury of 73 CIO of the most important Italian companies among 40 other projects and has been voted, in particular, for these criteria:
Cisco won the Manufacturing Award with “L’Industry collaboration che accelera il business di Del Brenta” with Del Brenta Customer.
During this business meeting, we explained how Cisco Webex Teams helps Del Brenta Keep Pace with the Fashion Industry.
Del Brenta is a leader in Italian-made and international fashion creations; they manufacture heels, wedges and platforms for the biggest footwear brands in the world.
Del Brenta has chosen Cisco technology to connect all the actors in the production process including suppliers and customers, and everyone in the company through Cisco Webex Teams. Among the main advantages: time optimization of important professional resources, reduction of costs related to travel and transfers, eliminated the loss of information that previously circulated via email, on sketches photographed, etc.
Marketing activities & results:
Around the Award Cisco Italy did some digital activities like Social/Digital post, Cisco SMB customer takeover podcast: Del Brenta, etc.
Want to see more:
Art: Cisco Webex Teams, in Italy fashion is faster thanks to collaboration
Art: Digital360 Awards 2018
Cisco SMB customer takeover podcast
Dulce Rabassa | Spain Partner Marketing & Communication Manager
Dimension Data Spain Planned, Designed and Created an Onmichannel Campaign implementing a mix of Digital, Social and Traditional Marketing. Knowing how to combine Sales and Marketing Teams with Strength and Success. Aligned Cisco EN, Meraki & Security Solutions and contributed to incremental growth in SQL pipeline, new bookings and brand awareness. A great Campaign, combined Digital Demand Generation Strategies with Telemarketing, Social Tools (LinkedIn, etc.), Customer Segmentation, a traditional event “Technology lunch”, and a Call Out Day: “Rock de Core” with Meraki & Catalyst 9.000 from which they were winners. Dimension Data had the goal of increased the existing and new EN, Meraki & Security Customers and therefore realizing increased revenue. The Objectives were through the combination of Onmichannel Strategies, implementing a mix of Digital, Social and Traditional Marketing, and increment growth in SQL pipeline and achieve a SQL ROI more than 1:40.
They have perfectly combined an Onmichannel Campaign, managing Sales and Marketing Teams with Strength and Success. They have followed the Cisco Architectures Strategy using content facilitated through Partner Marketing Central, presentations, Cisco videos, sales content, and in collaboration with Cisco Marketing and Sales.
Results
SQL ROI 1:74 Pipeline generated: $ 1.600.000 Number of leads generated: 80
Elena Prassaki | Marketing & Communications Manager, Greece-Cyprus-Malta
In September´18, USA returned to Thessaloniki International Fair as the honored Country at the most dynamic exhibition in southeast Europe that will bring together government and business leaders, “doers”, influencers and 300.000 buyers and professionals.
The theme of the USA presence was “Harnessing the Power of Innovation and Creativity”, aiming at showcasing America’s leadership in driving ingenuity and creativity in a variety of sectors from technology to education.
Cisco was an honored exhibitor of USA Pavilion at Thessaloniki International Fair (TIF18 #TIF #Thessaloniki). This time our theme topic was around Technology Innovation. Innovation is part of Cisco’s DNA and that’s why we decided to attend. We presented our global Innovation Centers, which are foundational to our approach. Based on this, we fostered strategic relationships, co-innovated with key customers, ecosystem partners, and startups, and we presented our strong partnership with Intel.
Main Messaging / Focus:
Country Digital Acceleration, addressing digitization efforts strengthen economic, social, and political benefits (Intel Partnership, Industry Solutions, Innovation (Tech) Centre, Networking Academy / CSR, 28 Presentations delivered by Cisco, Intel and Ecosystem Solution Partners, Media Announcements jointly with Government Authorities)
Outcome: Why Cisco Participation was Important?
Cisco exposure at Government, entire local market and Media, Enhanced cooperation with major Partners, Created ground for ecosystem partners to present their added value ready-to-go market solutions, Customer executive round tables (ex. Security club, DC/Cloud club - vertical or direct sales), Leads / Major Customer Meetings, Huge Media Exposure. And had the opportunity to do Post Event Activities (Interviews, Cisco Academies, etc.)
Websites of the Thessaloniki International Fair & American-Hellenic Chamber of Commerce. Detailed microsite for Cisco’s presence at TIF 2018 (Includes agenda, presentation details, location, contact persons etc.), Invitation, Welcome Letter, Web banners, Pre-Event Social Media (350 likes, 150 k reach), During Event Social Media posts ( 2,3 K likes, 90 K reach), Press / Radio / TV Interviews , Press Clippings. Cisco booth (mockup) & Post Event Activities.
New thinking. New ways of doing things. All focused-on innovation and creativity. And all resulting in solutions that produce revenue, while solving our customers' most pressing business challenges.
Want to see more? PPT Report
