Cisco Customer Success Boot Camp Activity Report

About Customer Success Activities

Cisco Customer Success Boot Camp is a workshop-style event hosted by Cisco Partner Success. Customer Success Many partner companies participated in this practical learning opportunity to understand what activities they should undertake as they begin engaging in full-scale Customer Success initiatives, what factors pose barriers to these activities, and what a realistic organizational structure should look like. As a partner company that has been proactively and innovatively implementing Cisco’s Customer Success activities, we were given the opportunity to share insights on organizational development and implementation approaches to serve as a reference for companies just starting their initiatives. In this issue, we would like to share with you what we discussed on this occasion.

Background and Challenges of Activities

We have compiled our past Customer Success activities at our company and shared them as candidly as possible, hoping they will serve as a reference for partner companies starting their own initiatives.

First, the challenge in promoting Customer Success within the company is that each department has different interpretations and approaches to the abstract term “Customer Success.” For example, the sales department tends to view it as a measure that leads to increased revenue, while the technical support department tends to view it as an initiative to improve customer satisfaction.

However, Customer Satisfaction and Customer Success are different. Customer Success is the practice of helping customers maximize their business, increase loyalty, and promote the effective use of products and services. Ultimately, we can use the Net Promoter Score (NPS) to measure how much customers like our services and how likely they are to recommend us to others.

How Activities Are Conducted and the Role of the CSM

In Customer Success activities, we listen attentively to customer needs and solve challenges such as improving operational efficiency, automation, and simplifying tasks by leveraging tools and best practices. Through this process, we build trust, leading to opportunities for upselling and cross-selling as clients choose us for maintenance contract transitions or as business partners in new areas.

This approach differs from traditional sales and pre-sales activities, as it targets customers who have already adopted the product or service. Therefore, it is not well-suited for new business development. Subscription-based licenses and SaaS services offer the convenience of monthly payments while allowing users to cancel anytime. To ensure continued use, there must be a compelling reason why our service is the only one.

The Customer Success Manager (CSM) promotes effective use of the service by providing feature introductions, usage methods, case studies from other companies, manufacturer-recommended settings, and best practices. This eliminates the need to consider switching to another provider, establishes convenient and efficient operations, and leads to continued contracts.

Contributing to Continued Use and Contract Renewal

CSM must think from the customer’s perspective about reducing cancellation rates and retaining contracts. If introduced products or services remain underutilized with low usage rates, they may be canceled upon contract expiration. Therefore, it is important to actively encourage its use after implementation and to conduct activities that help users understand how to use it. While the sales department tends to disengage after the sale, and the technical support department struggles to maintain contact without issues, the Customer Success Manager (CSM) is the only role that can establish numerous touchpoints. These include regular meetings, feature demonstrations, sharing best practices, and proposing preventative measures after incidents occur. This activity also leads to subsequent proposal activities, enabling the CSM to share customer challenges, pain points, and feedback from key contacts with the team.

Internal Penetration and CX (Customer Experience) Enhancement

As Customer Success activities become established within the company, the nature of customer inquiries also changes. For example, we will receive more inquiries such as: “Since our contract renewal is coming up in six months, we want to start leveraging the benefits now,” or “As this is an annual contract, we want to build a good relationship and have regular contacts.” Customer Success activities aim to drive revenue through upselling and cross-selling, but they do not necessarily result in immediate sales. In the medium-to-long term, these activities contribute to maintaining and increasing sales by preventing cancellations, maintaining license counts, and encouraging additional purchases.

Funding for Activities and Collaboration with Other Companies

We recommend utilizing sales-based rebates and incentives as the primary funding source for these activities. Working to earn more rewards often ultimately benefits customers as well, creating a win-win relationship. Additionally, since Customer Success activities are conducted with existing customers, they involve less direct competition with rivals and offer the advantage of being easier to share with other companies. While sharing sales techniques and proposals is difficult, Customer Success activities carry a lower risk of customers switching to competitors, making it easier to share best practices and improve the quality of these activities. We actually contacted other companies to share our activities and were able to receive information readily. Using that as a reference, we have been able to devise better activities within our company and increase the number of case studies.

Finally 

These are the topics we covered during the Cisco Customer Success Boot Camp.
If you are interested in our Customer Success activities, please feel free to contact us.
We will explain to you by providing actual examples.