Vishakha Radia Explains How Cisco’s Customer Business Transformation Helps Customers Drive Business Relevance

Transcript for Vishakha Radia Explains How Cisco’s Customer Business Transformation Helps Customers Drive Business Relevance

Blair Pleasant: Hi, I'm at the Cisco Collaboration Summit; with me is Vishakha Radia. Vishakha, tell us about the Customer Business Transformation Group and what it is that you do?

Vishaka Radia: Hi, Blair. Thanks for having me. The Customer Business Transformation Team, CBT, is part of Cisco's Collaboration Technology Group that as you know, has combined both the previous WebEx, Unified Communications, and IPT UC Group, as well as the former Tandberg and video organization. All of these have come together now into the Collaboration Technology Group.

What CBT does is work with our customers directly on our new innovations and drives business relevance by driving those business pilots, working with IT, and obviously our field, but really looking at a customer's business process and looking at how we can improve it using Cisco's Collaboration Technology. We then go on to quantify and identify the business value. It's the business value that really shifts a customer into thinking through what the benefit is to their business so that they end up buying the technology in order to address that business need.

Let's take a look at two examples. One is going to be more of a horizontal example and one is going to be a more vertical example. CBT has vertical expertise across retail, healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, et cetera, to really help our customers and partners drive this kind of transformation.

First example; now this is of course using Cisco Jabber. Think of a situation where a customer essentially has a sales force that needs to get approval on their deals. In this particular case, there was a customer that we worked with that needed to have their sales force – needed to have up to three approvers to approve a deal. It would take three-to-five days for this deal to be approved. There was about, per sales manager, 15 deals that needed approval. As you can imagine, the end customer was not very happy with these response times.

What did Cisco do? Cisco used Jabber. This enabled the partner sales manager to view the approver's presence status in real time. Now, the sales manager via instant messaging and if necessary, escalating to a voice call, could accelerate the approval process.

What was the result of that? Remember that three-to-five days for the deal approval request? Now we are down to one-and-a-half days. Sales managers now have 60 hours to be more efficient and productive a month. And most importantly, the time-to-approval meets and exceeds the customers' expectations.

Let's look at another example now; this time in the retail area. In this particular case, the corporation would really use video conferencing on a single collaboration platform. What was really cool about this is they extended video from corporate down immediately to the retail stores through their mobile devices.

What did this mean? Now, corporate has the ability to look at virtual store tours, look at visualization of displays, and look at visual collaboration or of any successes or concerns. The ability to interact directly with that retail professional on the floor and to drive those point-of-sale displays so they could really achieve their objectives was key.

This isn't just about the travel savings. Of course, that happened. This is about improving consistency of store layouts and displays and driving a sales improvement of 10 percent, which is what we measured.

It's also increasing the success of store promotions, increasing sales by one percent. These are the kinds of things that Cisco Jabber is enabling, things we could have only before previously only imagined.

Blair: Thanks so much, Vishaka. We really appreciate it.