Marketing folks know this better than anyone, the narrower the customer segment more targeted the product or the service can be. Technology vendors and their eco-system partners who are serious about creating differentiation, closely align and tailor their services to their target audience leading to customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Over the years, the target audience or customers for Cisco solutions has expanded from Network engineers and Architects to include DevOps, Secops, AIOps personas and more. This is due to proliferation of network connected users and devices, complexity of data and software with AI and machine learning, cybersecurity, etc., These folks are responsible for performance, reliability, security and extensibility of Cisco solutions. When these Cisco solutions are attached with Cisco Success Tracks, guided journeys are activated for the ‘Use Cases’ that the customers choose to execute through the digital platform called CX (Customer Experience) Cloud.
As Cisco customers start to navigate their preferred Use Cases across well defined stages or pitstops, they would be in need for Services across several pitstops that is aimed at efficiency and optimization of the network infrastructure. These services can range from architecture strategy services, assessments, migration planning , health checks, software integrations to advanced feature deep-dives. That’s where Cisco CX partners steps in to create and deliver value-added services for their customers. Through the PX (Partner Experience) Cloud, Partners gain visibility into their customers use cases, lifecycle stages and plethora of telemetry based Insights from their customers infrastructure that allows them to conceptualise, develop and position right services.
Cisco Partners who are serious about monetizing these services need to strive for tight alignment of services with their customers needs, characteristics and behaviours. A deep understanding of customer personas, use-cases, business outcomes, partner capabilities and pitstops are fundamental to create differentiation in the marketplace.
Below framework highlights two service profiles as examples. Service profile 1 is a service that the partner creates for their banking/finance customers who purchased Campus Network Success Track and decided to execute Network Observability and Insights Use case for AIOps persona in Use stage that delivers improved compliance as business outcome. That’s a lot of targeting, but this is the kind of rigour needed by Partners to create targeted and specialised services for their customers. This is what i meant by ‘narrow customer segment’ in the first paragraph above.
With the above building blocks as the foundational layer, Cisco Partners aim to create use-case aligned service catalogues that contains menu of services for different customer pitstops, personas and partner capabilities.
Cisco Partner Success team runs Service Creation engagement workshops with Partners to convert the above framework into a set of tangible service offers. Partners can contact their respective Cisco account managers for more information.
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