'Make customer loyalty a competitive weapon'

His strategy says, "Don’t lose customer focus because they
continuously need additional and targeted support services, which can be met
only through experts, leading practices and tools." For Wim Elfrink, senior
V-P, customer advocacy group, Cisco Systems–the man who successfully built the
customer advocacy field organizational model and various customer advocacy
global partner programs for the company–the strategy has been paying very
well, so much so that under his wings, Cisco Services has won many prestigious
awards for its leadership role in ensuring customer success with networking
solutions. Most recently, the company won the Top 10 website award from the
Association of Support Professionals. This prestigious honor was based on the
outstanding online technical support provided by its Technical Assistance Center
(TAC) website. In an interaction with Shubhendu Parth of CyberMedia News
Service, Elfrink, who reports directly to Cisco CEO John Chambers, talks about
the changing face of customer services and support and the ‘Cisco approach’
to the whole concept–if you can present value, customers are willing to
invest. Excerpts…

Customer
support and satisfaction are perhaps two of the highly abused words today across
the globe. What is the relevance of Cisco’s Customer Advocacy organization in
such a scenario?

Yes, a lot of hype has been built around customer satisfaction across
companies and the world but at Cisco it is a religion that is deeply embedded in
our culture. In fact, all of John Chambers’ staff meetings always open with
discussion on feedback and satisfaction of critical accounts. It is imperative
at Cisco to make customers satisfied and make customer loyalty a competitive
weapon. We even compensate our partners based on client satisfaction index
through lot of discount and incentive schemes.

Is there any key differentiator between your offerings vis-a-vis the
so-called sexed-up ‘customer services’ offerings in the market?

The difference is in the ‘Cisco approach’ to the whole concept. The
mission statement of our customer advocacy group is to ensure worldwide growth
in customer satisfaction and to accelerate customer success. The value for the
customer out of our services and support offerings comes in terms of reduced
operation cost, increased credibility and reduced time to market. We try to
position our services and support offerings not as a cost but as a value
proposition that ought to have sufficient tangible return on investment (RoI).
While customers feel confident talking service level agreements (SLAs), we try
to build a matrix and do a gap analysis of the customer’s needs. This helps us
define what we can achieve together. The matrix helps us clearly define and
quantify tangible returns in terms of percentage of reduction in the operational
cost and the time to market. The Customer Advocacy organization includes all
Cisco services–professional, consultative and technical services, customer
services, and customer success engineering.

In the current market scenario, where customer spending is extremely low,
are corporates actually signing up for services and support with Cisco or other
companies in a big way?

Cisco Services is a growing part of Cisco’s overall business with revenues in
excess of $3 billion. On the customer spending part, it needs to be understood
that while CIOs are under tremendous pressure to justify any IT investment, not
all IT spending has been curbed, thanks to the world of networking that is still
evolving to provide more relevant applications. The networking had started with
just connectivity and then we moved on to managed networks–services. Today, we
are talking about IP telephony and storage and a whole range of new
applications. Newer applications are being constantly developed and integrated
with the networked environment, making it more intelligent and increasing its
relevance and importance. Hence, there is a willingness to spend. True, the
overall industry spending on IT has gone down, but the percentage of our
services and support revenues has moved up from 13 percent to 20 percent over
the last three years. This also proves that the way we have been positioning our
services and support offerings is right–if you can present value, customers
are willing to invest.

Is that the only trigger and is networking the only area attracting
corporate investments?

Besides networking, security is certainly the other big driver of IT
spending today. The continuous emergence of newer and critical applications over
enterprises’ external and internal networks has triggered off the need for a
more secured environment. Nobody wants to deal with companies having
inadequately secured networks. What this means is that investments are happening
in all critical areas of network and network is the business. Moreover,
corporates want more RoI during these stressed times–faster access to
information and lesser downtime. The five 9s have now become six 9s–99.9999
percent.

Talking about security needs and 99.9999% uptime, as also Cisco’s growth
in the services and support revenues during the last three years, do you think
the 9/11 incident actually had a positive impact on the company’s business?

I think it’s more the viruses, the worms and the hackers. It is not so
much about the incident as about the recent spate of attacks from the hackers.
Our learning from customers suggest that the biggest threat for all comes from
inside. On Cisco’s growth in services and support revenues, I think it has
more to do with our nature of business than the 9/11 incident.

What is the global trend in customer service and support segment? Do you
see a deviation from that in the Asia-Pacific region, particularly in India?

I think services as a sector is hot in all industries and across the globe.
The relevance of services and support business is increasing because networks
have now become more intelligent. On the global front, there has been a
tremendous change in the trend during the last four years. Today, services
include business process reengineering. It is also about how to derive maximum
value out of IT architecture and infrastructure. However, technology buyers want
to know the relevance and what it can do for the company in terms of RoI.
Interestingly, while the IT budget percentage as part of companies’ revenues
has gone down worldwide, there is still a big willingness to spend if you can
present the value and relevance of the investment.

How big is the customer services and support opportunity for you in India
and how much have you invested here?

India is emerging as a tremendous services market. Cisco’s focus in India
is to provide end-to-end services to its customers–right from device level to
the business level. As per Frost & Sullivan, the advanced and technical
support services market was estimated at $48 million in 2001 and is estimated to
grow at over 13% year-on-year till 2008. We are very bullish about the Indian
market and have made substantial investments in scaling up support services. In
fact, Cisco probably has the most extensive support infrastructure as compared
to any other networking vendor in India. Our multi-million-dollar logistics
facility in Bangalore enables us to ensure prompt delivery of spare parts to
customers. We have also invested heavily in setting up six rapid fulfillment
depots (RFDs)–one each at Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, and
Kolkata.

Shubhendu Parth/CNS in New Delhi