Building a transparent Notification Center to Enable Customer Control

Personalization is critical to a guided customer experience. It helps build trust, foster relationships, and enables a deeper connection with customers.

At Cisco, we have been trying to help our customers along each step of their post-sale experience for nearly a decade. And as a key part of that experience, we want our customers to have more control over what communications they receive – a more intentional step towards the right message, right person, right time goal that we are all striving to achieve.

Before we could begin, we took a thorough inventory of what exactly the post-sale experience for customers today looked like.

Evaluating a disconnected customer experience

Over the years, we’ve built several programs where customers could sign up for various post-sale notifications to help guide them on their path to success – but they were fragmented and lacked transparency.

One of the customer pages from the legacy experience

For instance, a customer could access a link via an email where they could enroll or unenroll from a specific Cisco product architecture. There was no way to access the link again if the customer changed their mind after unenrolling. It also was not totally clear to the customer exactly what they were unenrolling from.

Similarly, a customer could enroll in a digital journey from a form on the main website, Cisco.com, but they could not see what else they were subscribed to. There were 6+ programs of this nature that evolved over the years – each designed to help provide the customer more control over their experience, but lacking a critical ingredient – transparency.

Thus, began an initiative to build a Notification Center that was flexible, centralized, and personalized just for what a customer was eligible to receive. One tool for a customer to rule their post-sale experience.

Rooted in research

We built the Notification Center collaboratively with our customer research and design team, evaluating all the different existing programs we had, we defined MVP parameters that would enable us to evolve the data model to support a more cohesive experience. We experimented with design, naming conventions, login experiences and more. Each piece of feedback helped our design team iterate and ultimately finalize the MVP requirements so our Orchestration & Notification team could build out the digital experience.

The research as well as consultation with Forrester served as the foundation and guiding principles as we went through the development process. These principles included:

• Build an experience that fosters trust and respects customer privacy and choices​
• Collect only data we can act on​ – do not collect unnecessary data
• Design scalability and flexibility, between MVP to future platform​s
• Design consistency ​
• Configurable UI that can be personalized based off of customer eligibility for products and services
• Flexible data model that can handle changing products and services
• Strict adherence to Cisco data security and privacy standards

The new interface replaces two of our previous data collection customer experiences that were linked in our emails. Now customers have full access to:

• View all subscriptions associated with their email
• Activate/Inactivate subscriptions for Renewals, Services, and Adopt Emails at the Use Case or Solution level
• Continue to nominate contacts for respective subscriptions
• Provide feedback on the experience directly to the experience design team

This new system supports all of our critical integrations with Snowflake, Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC), Cisco Single Sign On, and it can be integrated across other channels as well.

Implementation Changes

This new approach to subscription management not only transformed the front-end customer experience, but it also changed the granularity of data we were collecting. To enable it, we designed an entirely new back-end process to support the front-end application. We also had to make some significant changes to the data model and our custom activities in SFMC.

The new experience design

• The Notification Center UI, built on an SFMC Cloud Page, is supported by a Python-based Flask API, acting as an intermediary connecting the front-end with the backend database.
• We made the strategic decision to use PostgreSQL as our backend database, hosted on Google Cloud Platform’s Cloud SQL instance, to replace SFMC’s native Data Extension for storing customer choices and Custom Activity log data. We chose this because of the advanced data capabilities, indexing options, ACID compliance for data integrity, trigger support, and scalability.
• The database shift significantly reduced our reliance on SFMC as a database. This change decreased the overall number of SFMC API calls from 18 to 13 and increased the Custom Activity processing efficiency from 52 to 70 requests per second while concurrently reducing latency from 60 seconds to approximately 13 seconds.
• Digital journeys executed through SFMC previously had Cisco product architecture level entry criteria, meaning customers qualified for journeys if they bought a particular product. With the introduction of Notification Center data, we are mapping at the use case level, so we can build our journey segments based on the particular reason a customer bought a product. This transition has increased the granularity of our data while enabling a more personalized customer experience.
• Additionally, we enabled a daily sync between the Notification Center customer database and Enterprise Use Case Eligibility data to ensure Notification Center UI displays content in accordance with each customer’s eligibility criteria for a specific use case.

Source: cisco.com

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An always-on strategy to find extraordinary talent for CX Centers Americas

Cisco is widely recognized for helping companies transform. To give our customers a solid foundation to achieve their digital transformations, we have improved our workplace, services, supply chain and security. Ours is a journey to drive workforce innovation, as part of our own digital transformation.

Recruiting extraordinary talent is essential to fuel our constant evolution. Within Cisco’s CX Centers Americas, our highly specialized Technical Consulting Engineers (TCEs) are our competitive advantage. The TCEs in CX Centers solve our customer’s biggest challenges. We do this through our technical expertise, a customer experience to count on, and innovation that puts intelligence at our customer’s fingertips. And we are constantly looking for team members to join our team.

CX Centers Americas Approach to Hiring the Best

We partner with Cisco’s Emerging Talent Recruiting and CX Academy (CXA) to bring the best talent to CX Centers. Our vision is to deliver an extraordinary customer experience. Our TCEs make that happen. We provide them with the tools and knowledge to excel in their jobs. Our training builds a solid foundation that allows them to have both technical skills and be customer obsessed.

Since our TCEs come from all walks of life, we want to make the best of their talent journey. We have designed two streams of engagement based on the population of the person interested in joining us: emerging talent and professional hires.

Emerging Talent

TCE (Technical Consulting Engineer) Graduate Program: After being recruited from universities and undergoing an interview process, new employees go through a six-month onboarding training supported by CX Academy. The TCE Graduate program runs two times a year, following typical university graduation dates. During their first six months at Cisco, we train the new hires from the macro to the micro level. New TCEs rotate through four different teams within a technology group before being placed on one of the teams to begin their team-specific training. Candidates are also exposed to other experts and leaders through activities including Executive Fireside Chats, Living Cisco’s Principles, Coaching Sessions, and more. We accept around 80 new hires annually with this program.

“CXA provided a challenging and collaborative learning environment that allowed me to expand my soft skills and develop acquired technical skills in the field of networking. I learned how to be a successful TAC engineer thanks to the work that my mentors, my trainers and my cohort put in to develop training materials that allowed me to capture the relevant content.”

—Mariana, TAC (Technical Assistance Center) engineer, TAC Collaboration Team in Richardson, TX.

Co-Op / Intern Program: After undergoing interviews, students are welcomed to the Co-Op for six months on a full-time basis, 40 hours/week. The Co-Op program runs twice a year in US with ~20 co-ops per cohort. 70% convert to the full-time Technical Consulting Engineer role post-graduation. Students start by learning the fundamentals of the TCE role, spending the first three months of the program supporting simple cases, and slowly increasing in number of cases taken and difficulty. All of it under the supervision of a mentor. At the mid-point of the program, the Co-Ops join the Technical Assistance Center (TAC) teams to learn one of the teams’ technologies and begin to support cases in the queue. Pre-Covid, Co-Ops spent the beginning of their experience in CX Labs, learning the basics of the hardware used to recreate cases.

The internship is a three-month summer experience, currently for returning Co-Ops only, in which they will return to the Technical Assistance Center (TAC) team they had previously supported.

At the end of the experience and depending on performance, the Co-Op will receive an offer to return as a future Co-Op, Intern, or receive a full-time TCE offer.

“Being a TCE Co-op was the best professional experience I have ever had and prepared me for taking on the role of a full-time engineer. Everyone I talked to and learned from offered help and wanted to see me succeed in my role.”

—Anthony, TCE (Technical Consulting Engineer) Co-op

Pre-Apprenticeship and Apprenticeship: The Apprenticeship program is the same as the Co-Op program; the difference is the population we source from. These programs are especially designed for those coming from any walk of life. Candidates could be in the process of achieving their Associates degree, switching careers, or exiting the military. We have partnered with Wake Tech Community College in North Carolina and Collin College in Texas to source candidates who are currently enrolled in a Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) certification course. If these institutions have students who are interested in a TCE Apprenticeship, they join the pre-Apprenticeship to receive professional development sessions hosted by Cisco. After attending at least 80% of the professional development sessions and achieving the CCNA certification, candidates are eligible to apply and interview for the TCE Apprenticeship. The end goal for pre-apprentices is to become TCE apprentices and ultimately TCEs.

The apprenticeship pilot started in the Fall of 2021 and is planning to run twice a year. We started with five apprentices, all officially registered as apprentices with the state of North Carolina. There are also currently 30 pre-apprentices, with plans to enter apprenticeships, which started in March.

PEX (Practical Experience Program): PEX is a rotational program that provides individual contributors with their first opportunity to manage people. The Program is designed to give aspiring leaders practical, hands-on people management experience. Managers are responsible for managing a cohort of 5-10 new hires for the first 6 months of the 12- month CX Academy program. Responsibilities include onboarding of new hires, mentoring/coaching throughout the program, performance management of new hires, collaborate effectively with local and global team members, build relationships with stakeholders, and own the planning/delivery of projects.

Professional Hire

This track is for experienced professionals. It was created to standardize the experience of the new employee and includes a diverse range of activities for the new employee, the hiring manager, and the mentor to make the best of all recruiting steps for the first 90 days (about 3 months).

Source: cisco.com

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