 Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live 2020. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Cisco Live 2020 in Europe. In Barcelona, I'm John Furrier, my co-host, Dave Vellante. As Cisco announces all the speeds and feeds of the engine of innovation, the question is what's in it for customers as applications become the center of the value proposition for customer, changing over their business models and transforming their enterprises. We've got a great guest here, Alistair Wildman, head of EMEA, Europe Middle East and Africa, customer experience group at Cisco, also owns customer experience worldwide, bringing a methodology for customer success in a modern era of computing and enterprise. Alistair, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Thank you for being here today, guys. So we were talking before we came on camera about your role, where you've come from, and pioneering what I call this modern customer success experience kind of vision. I mean, we've seen CX around, there's been kind of like pre-cloud, cloud, and now as you've got Edge and more distributed computing, where apps are driving real change. It's more complex, so simplicity is the key message. How do you get customers to that success milestone? Explain what is customer success in a modern era. So let's go back to 2007, 2008, when the first big cloud companies actually decided they need to focus on adoption and people using the cloud technology. Salesforce and Adobe were the first two. They built a customer success function that was really focused on explaining how the user was interacting with the functionality of the product. So are you building dashboards? Do you have people logging in? Are you going to renew, was the big question. And so the customer success really started as a kind of feature function group that was just helping people to become time to value and get more experience. Where we've gone to now in 2020 is the technology is very, very complex now. And inside Cisco, we've got incredible products that are new software-based products and lots of telemetry and data. But the customer has a life cycle. So the way that customers engage with technology, we call the life cycle. So from buying it, to onboarding it, to implementing it, to using it, to adopting it and then scaling, okay. And it's a really predefined stages of that life cycle. You can't just go straight to adopt. You have to do the onboarding implementation phase because if they don't onboard it and implement it, they'll never get past that stage. So what we're doing at Cisco is we're taking a digital approach. So we're building a customer portal. Into that portal are 38 different feeds at the moment of information. So a lot of customer success information, so all the success tracks or the product information, but they're all based on the use case of the customer. So if the customer is bought a wireless access solution, then that portal will mirror that wireless access solution and all the content on that page will dynamically be about that solution, about where the customer is on the journey. So if they're onboarding, all the information will be about onboarding. When they go past onboarding, all the information will then change to the next stage and then change again to the next stage. So what you're doing is you're dynamically changing all your content, all your information to align with the customer's journey. And then the key thing is you have experts. Now that could be the customer being an expert. It could be Cisco helping or our partners, of course, who give us that huge scale. And we know where the customer is on the journey, so we can come in and help them and move them along that journey. So you're bringing an expert network into in real time. You got to know when to do that. Exactly. So this is why I was saying in the early days of customer success, it was just, hey, let me explain about the product because you're not using much of it. Now it's okay. I understand where you are on the journey and I'm going to help you with what I think you need to do right now. Now what you do tomorrow will change. So tomorrow I'll come back and give you a different set of advice and guidance using telemetry and data. And my experts and my experts might change because as you go through this journey, you might need different people to help you on the way. But we're all aiming on getting the customer through to the value point. So the contextual relevance of the stages, does that accelerate the timeline? That's exactly it. Is that the key problem you're solving? That's what we're trying to do is to try to get our customers to value quicker. So anytime anyone buys any technology they have a business case, okay? That business case is normally put in a drawer after they've made the purchase. We take the business case out of the drawer and say, okay, what are you trying to achieve? Under what timeline? And let us map that with you, okay? And normally there's some kind of services team that do an implementation, okay? But after they leave, the customer still needs support on that journey. Because just the implementation's just the first phase. That's only gets them through the door. That doesn't get any value because they probably aren't even using the technology at that point. So if you look at the network controller, DNAC, you know, it's a brilliant device where you can automate the whole of the network, the whole network in one device. But customers need help, not only setting it up, enrolling the devices. DNA sentry. Sorry, DNA sentry, I apologize, shouldn't use acronyms. But customers just need help to not only set it up and enroll the devices, but actually to use it and then understand that all the data and telemetry that's coming out of it so they can make the best decisions for that network. So you've got this context of where environment, which is obviously data rich. Where does the data actually come from? Variety of sources, I imagine. Yeah, so we can get telemetry out of most of our products now. So everything that we do is open APIs. So we take the telemetry out of the products and we can see how the customer is engaging with that particular solution. And based on that data, we can make our analysis of what we need to do to help them. And it will be different for every customer, for every solution on every part of that life cycle journey. And what are the channels by which a customer interacts? Is it all channels, phone, chat? So the portal is literally, it's a portal the customer logs into. So it's got all the customer success information. It's also got all the install base. So all the products that the customer has are in there as well. So for example, So it's their rendering of their environment. Exactly, it's a digital view, all the complexity behind, brought in with a recommendation engine using AI and ML. But also if there is an, say we have an advisory okay on the products or some of the sales of the switches go end of life, the software, we can actually tell the customer through the portal they need to do something. Now that could be the partner that helps them or Cisco or do it themselves. So again, we're trying to proactively help our customers so they can see more value. So Dave and I were talking yesterday and we're doing our analysis of the industry and we were commenting around the 10 years back. So we've been around 10 years, our 10 year first days this year and 10 years forward. But we were pontificating on the role of media and how the world's changed some more networks and peer review. How are you guys looking at that peer review? Because you can have experts, some will be Cisco champions, some will be Cisco employees, customers. How do you integrate community? You guys thinking about that at all? Yeah, so that's really interesting. So within the portal that we've got, the customer experience portal, we actually have a communities tab where the customer can go in there and chat to other customers or other partners in their community who can ask like-minded questions. So yeah, we think that communities play a massive part. I mean, we're sat in the DevNet area here. And the DevNet is half a million network engineers. We want that there. That's an expert network right there. Absolutely. Is that what you're talking about with the expert network? I don't know. So an expert could be a customer and we need to help them get the skills to become experts. It could be Cisco and our professional services teams. We've got 30,000 people in my organization globally. Or it actually could be the partner because the partners have 300, 400,000 people. So experts can come from either of those pools. But the main thing is that we understand what the customer's doing with the technology, where they are in that journey and then we help them with the next step. You've mentioned partners a couple of times. We talk a little bit more about the partners, what role they play, what type of partners we talk about. We talk about big SIs, we talk about smaller guys in the channel, all the above. How do they play? Yeah, so actually it's a really good question because what we found is that we think about 50% of the partners will want to come on this journey with us and that's of all different sizes. So currently some of our biggest partners are the service providers. You know, the big guys in Europe, it's kind of T-Systems and BT and OBS. They're very keen to get involved because they have thousands of customers at Cisco. And they're already providing some of this already through their own channels. So by adding the customer service motions from Cisco into their existing customer service and success, they can actually build a more holistic view. But you're right, there's some really great niche partners who've really picked up on this. And also we have incentives where we incentivize partners through different programs. We've moved a load of money from the front end programs to the life cycle. So if a partner sells a solution to a customer and that partner has got the right certifications, either people who know what they're doing and they want to take part in that customer success motion, we will monetize it for them and we'll incentivize them. And they have the right to lead and we will support them. We'll stand behind them and we'll help them. And that doesn't have a whole program of how we enable them. This is a channel game changer. Yeah. Think about the channel marketing, intimacy perspective. How are you looking at that? Is that a disruptive opportunity? Is it kind of bumpy roads? Is this synergy there? I'm almost imagining the internal conversations with the channel. The way we're looking at it is that we think that partners have lots of IP that's pertinent to themselves. It's their own IP. We have this idea that we can deliver an accelerator which is like a four to six hour workshop and we have an ATX which is basically a Webex information. And we want the partners that are leading those customers to put their own accelerators in so they can actually monetize their own IP in a post sales motion. Because at the moment that's quite difficult to do. So actually our view is that partners will scale this and as the partners learn the success motions, they'll start to create all their own little accelerators which they will monetize with those customers to help them. And then you might have a partner that works in financial services. He might create IP that's only applicable to that vertical. So he becomes a champion in financial services. Again, you'll have other partners that are geographically based. And so yeah, we're still building the model out. Is that private labeled or does that just go branded? So we have some generic content that we give to all the partners in the program, okay? If they're in the program, they've got their people trained, they can have our content. But then in the portal, if you're the partner and you're the customer, as you look in, you can see the partner who is supporting you. You can then put your content into the portal that your customer sees only. So you can't, so no other partner can see that and no other customer can see that. So we're actually opening a channel to help our partners go to market and monetize it. It's a digital rendition of physical world, virtual first. Give us an update on status, how long it's been in place. This is a really big, we believe, part of the collaboration first, kind of mindset. You see the successful companies more virtual than ever before. Yeah, certainly. So we're currently coming out of our early field trials. So we've got a very small number of partners and customers engaged at the moment. We're going to go into a limited available launch in the next couple of months in Europe and we're probably going to have scaling up to about 100 and 150 customers. And then at the end of the year, sorry, our fiscal year, which ends in around July, August. Around that point we spent, we'll go general availability on intent-based networking will be first. So we'll do all the use cases and intent-based networking and then we'll do security and they'll do use cases and security and then we'll probably do ACI, which is the day-center automation and then we'll do collaboration. It's just going to be an added value, freebie throw-in or added cost item. So currently, customers buy support. They buy a hardware support package and they buy a software support package and maybe they have some add-ons, some migration support or some high availability support. What will happen in the future is the customer will decide if they want a level one, two, three or four, engage them. And that will include hardware support, software support and customer success motions in one block. And so the customer will decide for this particular solution, I need a lot of support, so I'm going to have level three and they get a lot more of everything or they can have level one, which is quite frankly, they do most of it themselves. That is available today, but it's in different programs. So we'll bring it into a single program to make it really easy for the customer to choose how much help they want from Cisco and partners. So we're thinking about the different products that you just mentioned, whether it's ACI and tent-based networking security, even within security might have a stealth watch. Cloud and yeah. So you're bringing a common methodology to all those domains, correct? And then they're feeding in to that portal, to that content, how does that all work? So yeah, so we've basically, as a company, we've decided that this is the customer experience portal is the single place where customers will go to for post sales information and success. So all the product groups now are building, everything that's built now is APIs and telemetry that we can use inside the portal. So that's why we started with the intent-based networking because DNAC has brilliant telemetry, so we could start there immediately. So every release of every product, we talk very closely with the engineers to say, okay, we need this telemetry so we can put it into the customer experience portal so we can build this motion. And it will go, as you say, by the use case, by every solution stack all the way down to the ground. This is going to take us quite three to five years, but we're on the journey. You have a North Star and it drives standardization and that's what the customer wants to see. When I show customers this portal and they go, oh, that's my install base. Okay, and there are my advisories, oh, and that's my success motion and that's why I'm on the journey. It's like an eye opener and they really like it. I think the journey is also a progression of learning too and you think about not only just solving the business problems, learning and getting faster and being more agile in progress. So within the portal, we have certifications, we have e-learning, we'll have DevNet. So we're in phase 1.1 of the portal, but eventually everything will be in there. So everything that the customers do post sales with us or partners will be in that portal. And the customer's going to see the progress of what their own team is. Exactly. What's your team look like? I mean, you've got a developer organization, you've got programmers, building out the portal. So in a mirror, we have 6,000 people in my organization. We mainly do support, professional services, customer success and we do renewal guys. In the headquarters, I have a fantastic team under the leadership of Tony Colon who's coming from salesforce.com. The whole portal is built on top of salesforce.com which is our customer master. And we've got a whole team that with salesforce, we're building it together. So I don't have the engineers in my organization here at Amir, they're in the headquarters and probably a few in India and different engineering centers. But yeah, it's a big investment for us. And you guys have obviously, it was announced last year, we covered it at the Salesforce Relationship. It's pretty solid with Cisco. You're building on that, you mentioned that. I got to ask you as an expert, and you're coming from Salesforce so that you can get higher there. I got to ask you as an expert in customer success, what's your vision of the modern era? A lot of things going on right now. The game is changing horizontally across every use case, every vertical industry, customers at the center of the value proposition, the apps are driving the change. How does that actually change some of the customer success formulas? What goes away? What comes in? What do you see happening? So I believe that there's three things that will happen in customer success in the next couple of years. Number one is partners will adopt it and scale it properly. At the moment, the partners are not that involved with the cloud companies. It's basically cloud director customer. So we need the partner to be massively part of this and part of the monetization. The second thing is we have to build a success motion that includes hardware, okay? Which is really difficult, because a lot of hardware is bought perpetually, not on a subscription, so how do you measure success? But we're doing that right now, particularly as we look at network as a service and all the different, and you've seen the business models changing very quickly. And the third thing is that customers are really happy now to engage post sales, but when you put something in front of them, they've got to add value. So I believe that the post sales success teams are going to get much more technical in nature and specific about what they do when they're with a customer. So almost I have people in my post sales organization who are as technical as my delivery team or my services team, and that's important that you get people who can really move the needle when they're in the room. I think that's a smart, and I think a lot of people in the sales careers have always said get the right resource in front of the customer at the right time to close the deal. That's shifting to post sales where having the right resource in person at the right time in front of the customer is the same thing. I mean, I watched the announcements this morning, okay? I'm a technically-minded person, but I'm not a CCIE, okay? I came from the application side, and I just thought, wow, there's some amazing things being announced here, but how do you do it all? I mean, you've got announcements in all these different areas. For me. Well, and if you're a customer, you probably start thinking, how do I really take advantage of all this great technology that Cisco's building? This is why we build this methodology with a digital portal, with experts, and data, analysis, and content to help them on that journey. Yeah, we were commenting. It's like the engine is all the tech. The car is what customers want to drive to the outcome. Definitely, yeah. Wild Times with Alistair Wildman here inside theCUBE. Great guests, really important conversation. I think customer success is going to be disrupted in a positive way by data, video, people, collaboration. The tech starts to change the game. Certainly, customer success. Thanks for sharing this story. Thank you, I love it to meet you both. Thank you very much. Cheers guys. See you live in Barcelona. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back with more after this short break.