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A lot has changed over the past three years in how Cisco CX (Services arm of Cisco) is transferring over its homegrown insights and automation capabilities to their partners through several programs. This creates new opportunities for partners to layer-on value added services on top of these capabilities. These capabilities from Cisco CX are stacked on top of Cisco’s core architectures. They align with specific partner service delivery entities like optimize services, support, customer success, assurance and change management services. In this article, i share a general framework that allows partners to gain holistic view on the new value-added service creation opportunities.

But lets take a step back to understand a phenomenon more common to tech industry when the lower layers in the tech stack gets commoditised and as a result the upper layers in the stack becomes the new playground for innovation and customer value creation. This is applicable to technology services as well where the traditional post-sales service delivery modalities that is rooted in break-fix, reactive and manual processes are no more competitive differentiators and in fact witnessing revenue decline. The new playground for Cisco partners is higher up in the stack that entails insights and automation capabilities that is rooted in proactive, preemptive and predictive services. Velocity matters in this new paradigm of post-sales service delivery in how customers are serviced and supported.

So where is the sweet spot for partners in this new paradigm of post-sales service delivery ? What are the value creation opportunities ? Where can they innovate and improve their top line ?

Where is the partner value creation opportunity ?

The below framework depicts five individual stacks, each stack representing Cisco platform at the bottom that is overlaid by Cisco CX tools and capabilities, and the top layer represents the innovation and value creation layer for Cisco partners. This value creation layer is aligned with specific functions(support, optimize, customer success,etc ) within the partner services business. The value creation layer is the innovation playground where the partner gets opportunity to created differentiated services across different stacks. All the 5 stacks are wrapped with advanced insights and automation capabilities that is available for partners to leverage.

How can partners innovate ?

Innovating new services across the stacks is a cross functional effort that requires different composition of teams and processes. For example, Service Creation for Cisco Success Tracks requires folks from customer success, delivery and pre-sales teams who leverage user centred approach to create differentiated lifecycle services for customers. Similarly to create a digital customer experience requires a different team composition and process. Service Creation for Services-as-Code requires netops and devops teams coming together to develop practices and methodology to deliver the services for customers. Below table gives a glimpse into the people and process details for different stacks.

In order to help partners in this value creation process and incubate new practice, Cisco partner success team runs service creation workshops across different stacks. For instance, the Success Tracks service creation workshop leverages user centred approach and process to ideate differentiated lifecycle services that aligns to specific customer use cases. Similarly the API/Automation workshop is intended to help partners to deliver digitized CX for their customers. Partners can contact this email alias partnerservicecreation@cisco.com for further details on these workshops.

In summary, the insights and automation capabilities from Cisco CX sets a strong foundation for Cisco partners to start creating innovative services that solves customer problems and deliver unique outcomes.

In the end, i would like to leave you with one of my favourite songs

WINDS OF CHANGE, SCORPIONS ENJOY !