How does Cisco look at services as a business line?
We believe that customers would buy solutions to address their business
problems. In the medium terms, we want to move toward providing solutions to our
customers around networking, communications and we want our enabling function to
add value in that direction. We look at services-led and solutions-driven
interactions, and that is the way we want to be approached by our clients for
adding the next level of business value. That is why services are becoming
strategically important and relevant for Ciscos success.
What are the priorities of Cisco Services?
Cisco uses the terminology customer advocacy to denote Cisco Services.
Customer delight and satisfaction is the first priority. For all Cisco employees
from sales teams to services team, incentives are linked to the customer
satisfaction ratings on the basis of c-Sat (customer satisfaction) which is
tracked on a daily basis by our CEO. Customers are of the view that networking
products are good but the network is becoming complex. The topology of the
network is changing drastically over the years and new applications are getting
added to the network.
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What is Ciscos life cycle services approach?
Ciscos life cycle services approach is the crux of customer engagement
wherein we engage with our customers from the business problem definition
perspective. This is applicable to most of the complex networks. One of our
customers was trying to build a network and the client wanted the campus to be
complete from all perspectivesgreen, energy conservation and smart and wanted
to become a role model for what they stood for. We engaged with this customer
from preparing to planning, to implementation to execution of the intelligent
information network.
What happens in scenarios where your prospective customers want to use
non-Cisco products?
Customers business problems and the possible solutions make our intentions
clear about Internet Protocol during the advisory phase of our discussion. We
stay away from specifying vendors. Customers can come up with an RFP and we
could be one of the bidders.
Sudesh Prasad
sudeshp@cybermedia.co.in