Cisco Unveils Online Partner Satisfaction Tool

Using the online tool, which will be available in October, Cisco partners can give feedback about their relationships with the networking gear vendor, specifically around seven process areas. They include overall satisfaction, presales, tech support, global services, training and development and tools.

Kevin MacRitchie, Cisco's vice president of worldwide channels operations, said the move to expand partner satisfaction metrics is a natural extension of the company's efforts over the last nine years to measure customer satisfaction across all levels of its business.

"We believe that we have to view our partner community as an extension of our own sales force," MacRitchie said. "We have to begin to share with them the same tools, the same data, the same analysis information that we provide for our own business operations in the way we turn and choose to invest dollars or headcount or other resources and make business decisions against what our customers are saying is working."

The new tool comes shortly after Cisco made some big changes to its channel program and sales organization, including a new engagement plan that brings partners into prospective deals at a much earlier point, letting them wrap more of their own services around Cisco products to create more profitable engagements that also deliver more value for the client. For the plan to work, Cisco knows it needs to forge stronger ties with its solution provider partners.

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For the last nine years, Cisco has measured customer satisfaction across its seven operational areas, and five years ago the company started surveying end users about their opinion of services provided by Cisco partners. So, today, when partners sign on to the Cisco partner site, they see a customized view of how their customers rank them in overall satisfaction. It also lets them compare their specific rankings against the average, both worldwide and regional, to see where they stand against the overall industry, and lets them compare their scores by time period so they can identify specific trends that may have impacted customer satisfaction.

Now, with this new tool, the company will add solution providers' perspectives to the mix so they can talk about how Cisco as a company is serving the partner community.

"As we focus on the longer term picture of customer loyalty and now partner loyalty--our partners' loyalty to Cisco--we want to make sure we begin to ask the right questions of our partners about what we can do better at Cisco and then operationalize or systematize that information so we can track it better and be more effective in the way we resolve those issues," said MacRitchie.

In addition to inviting feedback, the company said the online tool is designed to allow Cisco channel account managers to correct specific issues with customized action plans, which are based on personalized content sent directly to them from channel partners who complete the survey. Partners will also be able to collaborate with Cisco channel managers to find a workable resolution.