How Cisco Is Transforming Customer Engagement Through Automation

Countless companies rely on Cisco solutions for critical operations, from turning on industrial robots to caring for life-saving patients. Therefore, when a sales order needs to speed up or a technical query arises, high-quality and real-time customer service is essential. However, addressing client engagement on a case-by-case basis through multiple IT systems can result in delays and unnecessary operating expenses.

To minimize these risks, Cisco adopted a customer participation platform. Since then, the company has automated nearly 20 of its key business processes and digitized more than 1 million case loads. The result is more than just a frictionless customer experience. By replacing a traditional customer support module with fully digitized, end-to-end customer service, Cisco has achieved significant business and IT benefits.

The rewards of automation

Example: Cisco order system. The company receives a staggering 200,000 requests a year from customers asking to accelerate order delivery. The processing of these requests used to require that the agents perform 122 steps, 20 of which included trimming and pasting the numbers of the sales orders in a hodgepodge of systems.

This has changed since then. By relying on a digital agent to reflect the activities of a live customer service representative, Cisco customers can now change and update shipping dates on the fly, without any human intervention. Another example of on-the-job automation is the use of Cisco technology to detect order entry errors, such as a mismatched address. Through robotic automation and labor intelligence, Cisco systems can not only quickly detect and correct order errors, but also reduce the time needed to process them from eight hours to two, a significant advantage for a technology company of $ 50,000 million that supervises 3 million orders. year.

"Every year, we have to do more with less, so we are always looking for ways to simplify processes and, at the same time, operate at a better cost per service," says Gilles Leyrat, senior vice president of global business services at Cisco.

In addition to faster order processing, Cisco's customer interaction platform has helped reduce its reliance on administrative support agents by more than a third, a "tens of millions of dollars" savings, according to Steve Power. senior director of digitalization at Cisco. This is because the transactions that require a lot of time and high volume, once handled by entry-level agents, are now completely automated using an integrated platform. In fact, 95% of the cases processed through the Cisco online customer service portal are resolved without the assistance of a live human agent.

Other benefits that Cisco realized through process automation:

•     It eliminated millions of hours of client waiting time, since queries that previously took 20 hours to process can now be completed in less than 5 minutes.
•     Average driving time reduced from 45 minutes to 20 minutes.
•     Improvement of team productivity by 25%.

Adding a human touch

Apart from these advantages, Cisco has not completely rid itself of human help. Instead, the company is reinvesting cost savings in the hiring of highly qualified customer service agents, representatives with the specialized skills needed to handle critical customer inquiries.

"We've gone from being a traditional customer service organization focused on delivering cases to one in which people can call and ask questions to get the right answers from the agents who understand their business," says Power.

In addition to improving agent quality, Cisco is also exploring intelligent routing as a means to automatically guide customers to the most appropriate agent. Because in an era of critical operations, customers demand an ability to respond accurately, consistently and quickly, humanly or otherwise.

Learned lessons

Given Cisco's experience, here are three lessons that other business leaders should consider when thinking about automation:

•     Think fast, move slowly. Adopt a piecemeal approach to process automation. Start by digitizing high-volume tasks, such as order processing, to gain a better understanding of the rewards and challenges of reviewing business processes.
•     Do your homework. Automation is not a solution for defective processes. For example, if the process of manually updating customer information has always been plagued by errors and delays, automation will not improve it. Instead, carefully review and modify long-established business processes before reimagining them as automated.
•     Save to invest Improve customer participation is more than automating the processes that consume a lot of time. Find ways to reinvest the money saved in manual transactions in agents of highly qualified clients that can nurture experiences of high contact with customers.