21 Given Cisco’s rapid growth in the early 90s, and the lack of skilled engineers to provide technical assistance, the goal of automating Customer Care was to scale Cisco’s support operations to meet customer needs while improving customer satisfaction and reducing support costs. While there were several things Cisco could have automated, they started small by simply building a web site for technical information and upgrades. Over the last four years the company has deployed several additional tools: The Installation and Configuration tool eliminates hardcopy documentation with web based instructions and procedures. The Software Library electronically distributes Cisco network software, significantly lowering time required for network upgrades. On average, customers and partners download more than 50,000 pieces of software each week. This represents 90% of all software distributed by Cisco. CiscoWorks allows customers to walk through a problem detection routine and hone in on the likely cause of a problem. Through Bug Navigator, Cisco reveals all its bugs to customers and enables them to take measures to identify, prevent, and repair the bugs. The application proactively helps customers fix bugs thus saving valuable time for customers and partners and eliminates an enormous number of potential calls to Cisco’s Technical Assistance Center. The Problem Notification tool lets customers know when problems have been resolved. Finally, the Problem Resolution tools let customers get quick access to information and answers to technical problems. Open forum and the troubleshooting engine allow customers to quickly access information and answers to technical problems without waiting for someone from Cisco’s technical staff to do this for them. The trouble shooting engine uses a knowledge based tool to direct the user to answers which directly correlate to the question asked. Open forum allows customers to talk openly about Cisco products and assist each other with valuable information. If a search does not produce the correct answer, customers do have access to a live engineer. In addition to these tools, Cisco also allows customers to track case status online whenever they want to. Today, a majority of Cisco’s support is performed on line and we only have 1000 engineers in 4 TAC centers worldwide handling only the most difficult support issues. Cisco also allows Partners to grant access to end customers to see the Support site on the web. This includes the troubleshooting engine, bug alerts, open forum etc. They can also grant access to creating cases directly with Cisco through CASE Open/Update/Query. This allows Cisco to help the end customer directly if the partner can't solve the problem.PICA started in 5/95, and now has 9000 accounts enrolled in it.
21 Users say that over 70% of the time they use CCO -- 60% for technical support and 80% for general product and marketing questions -- their questions are answered on-line. Users have readily integrated this way of interacting and working with Cisco -- the system handles over one million log-ins per month by registered users and the typical user logs in eight out of twenty business days a month. The use of our support tools has resulted in 98% accurate, on-time repair shipments and an increase in customer satisfaction by 25% since 1995 Annual cost savings from online customer support amount to over 365 million dollars. These come from three main sources: Cisco ships less than 10% of its software on CDs or disks. The rest is all downloaded off the net. At $100 savings per download, that represents almost $250 Million in annual savings. Close to 500 engineers are avoided on account of Cisco’s online self help tools like Bug Navigator and Troubleshooting Engine. This leads to a savings of close to ~ $75 million annually. The elimination of paper based documentation has yielded ~$40 million in annual savings And Cisco's customer satisfaction rating has improved by almost 25%.
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