Q&A: Cisco on Building Customer Service DNA

Curtis Hill, Vice-President of Technical Support for Customer Assurance at Cisco, joins Helen Winsor, editor for Call Center IQ’s Customer Management Exchange Network, to discuss building customer service DNA. He outlines the initiatives set in place at Cisco to resolve customer problems, reflects on the evolution of the market over the past 5 years through social and mobile touch points, projects future market advances, and finally comments on what the solution provider market could do to help drive proactive customer value creation.

Hill’s comments come in advance of the 2014 Executive Customer Contact Exchange.

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A transcript of the conversation follows:

Helen Winsor: Great of you to join us ahead of the event. Now, Curtis, first of all I should introduce you. You’ve been touted the customer’s ultimate advocate at Cisco so that’s a great title and accolade. Moving onto the first question, you’re speaking about building customer services DNA at the Executive Customer Contact Exchange next April but what does having customer service DNA look like in real terms and why do you think it’s such a challenge for enterprises today?

Curtis Hill: A great question especially since service is really the lifeblood of any company. But as you start to look at an organisation overall, especially around how they’re built and getting to and evolving to a higher level of service, it’s really about building a DNA into how a customer service operation executes. It really falls into three primary building blocks and they end up being the fundamentals for building everything else on top of.

They really are in the following three areas: The first is about building the right vision, one that you can really see and communicate to others at a high level of customer service. The second is about getting the right people and encouraging the behaviour of the next level that you’re going to drive to, and then certainly building the right organisation. That’s looking at the culture, what the systems of governance are and creating an environment and where the vision can prosper and where individuals can succeed in adopting a new level of service. I think if you look at those three building blocks, they become the critical success standard for any organisation to move to the next level of service and I think that’s a challenge because you’ve really got to find those three key components to be successful now in a service organisation.

HW: Curtis, you said that resolving customer problems is no longer enough. What initiatives have you put in place within Cisco that has taken resolving customer problems to another level, specifically that others can learn from? I know that you’ve undertaken quite a few initiatives over there.

CH: As a company we have and you really look at a lot of things that you do in conjunction with what you have in place. From my experience, there have been a lot of companies that have training to improve customer service but that’s just half of the successful equation in providing value, customer support and service. Most people can be trained to follow a process, to ask the right questions and more certainly they can follow guidelines to resolve issues but really the key here is finding the second half of that equation and making it successful which is something much more difficult to teach. They have to have people that need to focus on areas of personal accountability and personal leadership.

Now, most people understand the importance of providing stellar customer service. We all like that, we all love to get it as customers and we all like to give it as business people. But the key to providing that service is both value added and relevant to the customers having a staff that believes it’s truly the lifeblood of the organisation. These are the kind of folks that are ones who seem naturally born to service customers and unlike most people they understand that each time they pick up the phone or step in front of a customer, there’s most likely going to be a problem that they have to deal with and make sure they resolve it, and it really becomes their passion. So what we really try to do is figure out ways to drive that passion, both resolve and issue balanced for the ease of the customer in a company.

So the initiatives that we have, and as a leader at Cisco, we really work to establish a culture that allows the type of people that we have to make decisions on their own, to make choices on their own and to really allow them to make the decisions that will best suit the situation they’re dealing in. And that really becomes the differentiating factor for us and it makes our customers in a position where we are not renting them, we’re actually owning them. That’s where we want to get to as a company is owning our customers.

HW: The market has evolved dramatically over the last five years due to the introduction of social and mobile touch points. Which key trends do you think other customer service leaders need to be keeping an eye on for the next five years?

CH: This is a great question and more important it’s a great topic because the advancement and the acceleration of especially social media really impact us every day. I think companies are increasingly employing data mining services in order to better understand our customers and that includes everything from the people that post things in public forums. And all that information is now fair game for a company to use which is great because the information about people’s buying habits, their personal likes and dislikes, their product sentiment and even the mood that they’re having that day is so valuable for us as a company to understand that data and more important is aggregation. We’ve got to be able to employ predictive modeling and I think the next few years you’re really going to see companies grasp the idea of predictive modeling so they can figure these things out.

Quite honestly, I think the companies that do not begin to use the information and gain a strong presence in that predictive modelling status will simply be left behind in the customer service industry. We have so many tools that are coming out from an analytical standpoint that there’s going to be a lot of help in that process and it’s really about taking that huge fire hose of social networking data and those investments on the front end to make sure we can be a differentiator over time to make a better service organisation. So I think we have a real great opportunity in that space over the next three to five years.

HW: What do you feel the solution provider market as a whole could do to help enterprises move beyond reactive support and drive proactive customer value creation in their company?

CH: The interesting thing is when we talk about either a service provider in this space or solutions or enterprise; I think we’re all working towards the same area. Some companies do it better than others and it’s really about moving towards more of a proactive method of support, if you will. I think reacting to problems after they occur is usually more expensive quite honestly than addressing them proactively. It also means that problems get bigger than they would have been if they had been nipped in the bud, if you will. A proactive approach to customer service really delivers a lot of benefits so I think companies that really embrace the fact that we’re going to get ahead of that curve are going to be much better off down the road.

So if you look at a proactive approach, first it significantly improves the quality of our customer service; there’s no doubt about that. No matter how quickly we respond to a customer enquiry, there’s still a lag between the customer’s awareness of the problem and its resolution. But with proactive customer service, problems can be eliminated before the customer is even aware they have a problem, and this high quality of service can be a serious competitive differentiator and ensure the longevity of customer relationships.

And the second part of that is that it certainly reduces cost, and as a business owner, by preempting inbound enquiries or problems, proactive service dramatically reduces that cost from dollars to pennies. And the last thing I’d note is that the proactive communication allows companies to support more customers and more products with the existing staffing levels. So when you look at the enterprise and how they’ve got to move forward, it’s really about figuring out how to be two steps ahead of where they are today to take care of their customers.