- Ki-l AOV and align CX to drive actual revenue growth or ARR. ARR growth will automatically drive adoption. This includes all revenue streams i.e., S/W, TS and AS. We have created 2000 plus people SUCCESS organization supporting a fake AOV, its fake movement, its fake tooling and the resultant fake back-scratching. This investment in billions of dollars during the last six years created an ecosystem wide dilution of our customer facing-capabilities in TAC, AS and Sales (SEs and AMs). Possibly, it also impacted the R&D dollars at the company level. This was a scam perpetuated on Cisco. Hold everyone responsible who propagated this scam.
- Remove the CSE role. It is sacrilegious to have a persona non-grata who does not add value to a customer. This is empire building. Adoption of software is a technical role to begin with. 90% of our CSEs cannot have a substantive conversation with the Customer Execs. Instead, strengthen the Delivery Role and have the same person be a persistent face of CX to the customer. These people are already embedded in the accounts. Where Delivery doesn’t have presence, create a Partner Strategy. Pay partners a point more. They already have an interface there since they are selling the product in smaller accounts.
- Remove the CSS role. Adoption doesn’t happen by opening ‘TAC Like Cases” in the CSE tool. Re-distribute this technical talent to TAC, AS and the SE organization; on merit. Define the SE role to have Pre-sales and Adoption Targets. These people have persistent relationships and know why a product/software was sold to the customer to begin with. Good SEs have already been doing this for decades without the nomenclature of adoption. Make adoption as a BCS/LCS deliverable. AS NCE and SE can partner to drive adoption.
- Identify and get rid of people/management who do not understand our business. Find out who all got promoted twice in the last five-six years in the name of “Transformation”. These people and their promoters have been looting this company. Hold them accountable. Otherwise, good people will continue to leave.
- AI is going to eat our lunch if we do not get ahead. We have been investing in Success at the expense of technology. TAC needs to be the best Customer Service organization on this planet using AI. Our customers should feel compelled to buy from Cisco because of the quality of Support and the Product Capability. Nothing else will matter in the end. Our product and support capabilities need to once again become a competitive differentiator. Rehire Joe. Yes, we need leadership please.
- Review the CX Org Structure pre-MM and evaluate if it was more technology and business centric for Cisco Business. Given the diversity of our portfolio, we will be best served with deep pockets of technology expertise by Architectures.
- Regroup the BDM/SDA team and CXPM. These are our growth engines. Not one person in these organization can face any of our customer today. Sad. Make the BDM/SDA role a career path to top Delivery people and make this true Customer Facing Business Development team. CXPM should be restructured to drive “white spaces” and ‘growth based” offers. Each offer owner should be held “accountable’ for the offer performance. CXPM and respective Architecture teams need to be in a co-lo org.
- Reform all KPIs, publish them and share progress. Take feedback if a KPI is fake. No point saying we grew Success Tracks, or LCS by 196%. It makes no sense since the new offer just replaces the old one but the KPI is only on the new SKU.
- Create a decent budget for the CX team to spend time with the customer. Save money from CSEs and Success and put where it will count. We are a technology company and now lacking competency in technology expertise in both TS and AS.
- Meet “truth tellers’ in Sales, and CX. Find them. Get unvarnished feedback. Help stop the Spin Machine. Masses will align when they see our leadership is sincere and driving the right cause. Make us feel proud about our leaders.
22 replies (most recent on top)
I'll gladly be your #10, anon.
Credit to someone smart who posted to fix the partial mess -
CX Engineering - Dissolve
CX Customer Success and CSE org - Dissolve
CX Product Management - Dissolve
CX VP - 25% Pay Cut, No Bonus
CX Sr Dir - 30% Pay Cut, Bonus 12%
CX Dir - 35% Pay Cut, Bonus 10%
CX Sr Managers - Make them IC's
Amazing that the author has painted a picture of AS and Delivery as the good guys and the saviors. Not realizing the partners actually do their best avoid them.
Customer Success was an answer to shortcomings of the delivery team who would reply to every requests from the customers and partners: Not in our scope. Or We charge hundreds of dollar per hour to do what should be already included in the product.
As a partner of Cisco, we avoid AS and delivery people like a plague.
Liz will speak how she will accelerate with a big smile and a new outfit next check-in. Nobody will understand what exactly she will push and focus on. AI will play a big role.
Hope only, no plan. You will learn once again that we only can do it together and without adoption, no renewals. Not her fault that expensive, clueless CSEs, CPEs or whatever CX role has no customer impact, they're the reason we have less customer facing meetings / AMs / PSSs jobs and not even T&E to go to Live. So - good luck.
CX and PX need to fire product managers and engineering directors, who do not have experience neither technical nor functional. Full of junk and d-mb engineering directors cutting big Cisco's paycheck. They nod the head and take orders from top without even using their brains. Cisco has promoted and harboring engineering directors which needs 50% cleanup
Going by Liz’s track record , she’ll “fix” CX the way a disoriented bull fixes a china shop once it gets inside.
I hope you put this in your V2MOM.
good luck with that, its a club and youre not in it.
“ LC will indeed fix CX, removing inefficiency and dry out layers and layers for fat. ”
Like she “fixed” ET&I with a concrete overcoat and threw it in a lake? What are you , a Cisco Certified Crystal Ball Watcher? Reality: she has never had a positive influence in any venture she has taken over, only over a select few of her lackeys (of which, you maybe one) whom she has protected and empowered.
She needs a road map to find her butt when it itches. An impersonified train wreck. CX is as good as dead and buried.
ET&T, TTG, CoE - All absolutet failures over the years. Although they had some good people at the technical and first level manager levels, there was a need for NEW services to be developed/tested/documented, etc. none of which happened, ZERO. "Who was the one leading those?" I would ask. If you guessed LC, ding ding ding. Another checkbox with the credentials to destroy what's left. Here's the kicker - lot's of directors came out of ET&I (promoted to). Big failure org with big promos for dead weight. That's MM quality work so don't look for anything to get better from that standpoint just because they canned MM. That was only a start. You don't want to wish people out of a job but there's still a whole lot of people that do not need to be employed at cisco in any capacity, let alone one with directional influence.
CX is doomed purely because of decisions made by MM in her first few months in Cisco. She destroyed, overnight, delivery capabilities that will never be recovered.
Example, I was in a global AS team with dedicated sales and delivery resource. We were highly profitable but we were very much focussed on Plan, Design, Implement work.
Almost on her first day, MM decreed that a) there would be no global teams and b) she was not interested in PDI, only Annual Recurring Revenue.
All our delivery resources were moved into their respective country teams and made generalists, they were no longer directly available for our projects, we had to compete for those resources and ARR projects trumped PDI every time. As a result for the next few months we were out promoting and bidding for projects that we knew we could never fulfill.
Not one of those delivery resources is still with Cisco, they’ve all moved to competitors where they can do the project work that they enjoyed.
As for the sales/bus dev staff, also all now gone.
Now, maybe MM made the right call strategically, but from the coal face it feels like we threw away a lot of revenue opportunities without having anything to replace it. PDI services were always the lead-in to ARR and that pipeline was cut off.
Did anyone actually subscribe to Business Critical Services?
…then quit last year when I saw the writing on the wall… rejoined Cisco this year.
Wow - saw writing, yet rejoined Cisco. Hope this time is different.
LC will indeed fix CX, removing inefficiency and dry out layers and layers for fat. …just what Cisco needed…
She “restructured” ET&I needlessly every 4-6 months as of late 2019. Repeatedly Destroyed culture, months of research work , laid off highly productive researchers, PhDs, engineers. She is originally Indian and made the head of research at Openshift ( previously ET&I) an Indian from the same state as herself. I am from India, worked as a developer there for ET&I , first supply chain and then Blockchain, and then quit last year when I saw the writing on the wall. I rejoined Cisco this year. She completely destroyed whatever genuine little research was left and gave the ~entirety~ of research funds that she could scrape through to RK, her crony the Head of Research. He does nothing productive with the money - no productivity, no research, nothing relevant to Cisco that the company could develop into a solution and get some business. He uses the communal , language and regional relationship with LC to strengthen his position and muscle out anyone he sees as a threat. As a result , innovation is dead at Cisco.
If LC is going to run CX, I’d strongly advise the CX guys to run for the hills.
Too late. Centoni isn't the right person. She acquired useless startups one after another. Clearly has no clue.
Liz fix CX?
lulz 😂
CX is doomed. It is too late to heal the permanent damage that is already done to the company.
Ha! if only ARR automatically drove adoption. Sales, consistantly over sells product to the customer, collects commission and kicks it over the wall. Customer is pi---d and won't buy more. Meanwhile there are dark licenses and hardware in their offices. That's how we got into this mess. Sales needs to be paid on adoption not garbage sold.
Twenty two plus years working in CX, and finally it has become clear this is a sinking ship. Famous MM and mafia friends of CRM gang she brought created a safety zones of maneuvering and fake KPIs by adding layers upon layers of middle managers who had the sole interest to keep themselves on top leadership, got rich, promotions and RSUs while the real engineers and architects who really mattered were sinked and the dead bodies out of ship in LRs. No consensus in decision making was required as anyone who spoke or questioned was shown the door. Such drastic change in Cisco culture while ELT is glowing in Cisco as #1 place to work! 😀.
Can Liz fix CX? Only time will tell.
Although I love the text from the OP and would be happy if any of the points were to be executed. I am realistic enough to know this will never happen. The point of no return has reached and we are sadly just sinking. Our leadership created the iceberg and although we cannot execute on anything real, we did manage to hit the iceberg at full speed.
I work in CX but sadly not the se-y part just poor old tac and can see over the last xx years it has gotten worse to the point where I stopped trying save stuff.
Our team has been under headcount for atleast one year. Our leadership fails to acknowledge , let alone fix it. As running ops is not sxy. Works for me. This is how you get engineers to people who just cash the pay check every month.
Put it in your teamspace!
You missed out “Bring back Joe”.
LC’s rise to the top has always baffled me. I’ve met a lot of incompetent execs in my time but none as bad as her. I can only assume she holds some incriminating info on CR.
A one time special LR that doesn’t include bottom workers, but managers & above. Clean the slate with a bold transformation move. Will restore faith in employees morale.