Managing a safer return to work with Cisco DNA Spaces — An early report

As pandemic restrictions ease, we’re working to manage a safer return to the office. Our strategy includes monitoring workspace density. If people are maintaining the recommended distance, we’ll consider inviting more people back. If not, we’ll pause.

This blog is an update to the initial plans I shared in Helping to keep employees safe by measuring workspace density with Cisco DNA Spaces. As I write this, we’re using Cisco DNA Spaces to monitor workplace density in 20 Cisco offices, including several in Asia Pacific and Europe. Here are our experiences after the first few months, and what’s ahead.

Counts are accurate

Before using Cisco DNA Spaces to monitor workspace density, we needed to confirm that most people in our buildings connect at least one device—phone, tablet, or laptop. In the first offices to open, Seoul and Beijing, we assigned people to count the number of people entering and exiting each floor lobby. The count closely matched the Cisco DNA Spaces count, giving us the confidence to move ahead.

To make sure we don’t count one person with a connected laptop, tablet, and phone as three people, Cisco DNA Spaces groups all devices that log in with the same username. Privacy is a top priority at Cisco, so we don’t capture or store the username. Instead it shows up as a string of random characters (a hash) that can’t be mapped back to a person.

Grouping devices by username was one of our suggestions as “Customer Zero.” While we’re not the first company to use Cisco DNA Spaces, we are the first to use it to monitor workspace density to plan a safer return to work. As Customer Zero we’re giving the DNA Spaces product team our feedback as a customer so they can continually improve the product. We’re also sharing our experiences with other customers, as I’m doing here, to help them get the most value from their own deployments.

More accurate than the access-control system

Before the pandemic, our Workplace Resources (WPR) team estimated building occupancy based on data from the access-control system. But badge-in data has limitations for measuring workplace density. One problem: it doesn’t report when people exit the building. If 500 people enter a building throughout the day, at 4:30 p.m. there could be 500 people (dense)—or 100 (less dense). Another drawback of badge data is that readers typically are only at the building entrance—not on each floor. We don’t know if everyone is on one floor or they’re spread out across all floors.

Cisco DNA Spaces solves both problems. We can see how many people are present right now. And we can also see which floor people are on. We can even divide floors into zones, measuring density by zone.

What if people are too close?

The sooner we find out that too many people are in a particular zone, the sooner we can take action to get back to target density. Using the DNA Spaces Right Now app, we entered rules—for example, no more than 20 people in building 14, floor 1, zone A. if that rule is broken, the app sends an alert to the specified teams—via email, in a Webex Teams space, or another system. Our WPR team prefers Webex Teams alerts so they don’t have to worry about missing an email.

Beyond density measuring

During the pandemic our WPR team is cleaning surfaces more frequently. They can see which areas are the most heavily trafficked (and need more frequent cleaning) by checking the Right Now app. Some of our other ideas:

◉ Show floor occupancy to employees to help them decide when and where to work. We plan to integrate Cisco DNA Spaces with digital signage and our employee self-check app for COVID-19 symptoms, Cisco Office Pass. Employees will see historical occupancy of different areas of the building at different times. (You might have seen this on store and hospital ER websites). We’ll use Cisco DNA Spaces Firehose API to integrate with digital signage and the mobile app.

◉ Bring more kinds of sensor data into Cisco DNA Spaces, such as Cisco Meraki door intrusion sensors and cameras.

◉ Report the location of things as well as people. We could track expensive engineering and test equipment, for example, and alert security staff when wireless devices leave the building with someone other than their registered owner.

◉ Provide wayfinding (aka blue-dot navigation) on a mobile app. We’re already trying this out in the Cisco LifeConnections Health Center.

◉ Improve safety during disasters. When a building is evacuated, we can check if any devices remain connected to Wi-Fi. We’re thinking that employees who want to associate their name with their location will be able to opt in.

Lesson learned: check if building maps are accurate

Here’s a lesson learned from our experience as Customer Zero. Be sure to double-check access point locations, height, and orientation on building maps before uploading the maps to DNA Spaces. In our case, inaccurate building maps complicated deployment for the first few buildings. The maps had “drifted” over time as building layouts changed and access points were installed and moved. If an access point isn’t where you think it is, the reported location of devices connected to that access point won’t be accurate.

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Helping to keep employees safe by measuring workspace density with Cisco DNA Spaces

Employee safety is top of mind as pandemic lockdowns ease and we gradually welcome employees back to the office. We’ll bring back employees in waves, starting with the 20-30% of employees whose jobs require them to be in the office, like engineers with hands-on responsibilities for development, testing, and operations. Before allowing additional employees to return, our Workplace Resources team wants to make sure the first employees are practicing social distancing—not standing or sitting too close or gathering in large groups.

We needed a solution quickly, which sped up our plans to adopt Cisco DNA Spaces. It’s a cloud-based, indoor location services platform that turns existing wireless networks into a sensor.

Quick deployment

Cisco DNA Spaces is a cloud solution. We deployed the connectors, which run on virtual machines, in about a day. Connectors retrieve data from our wireless LAN controllers, encrypt personally identifiable information, and then send the data on to Cisco DNA Spaces. Provisioning accounts in the cloud took just a few hours. Adding buildings took just minutes to add to Cisco DNA Spaces, as did uploading building maps. In total, we were able to onboard multiple sites in just two days and extend to production sites in four. That gave us time to vet the use case with Workplace Resources and collaborate with Infosec on data privacy and security.

Measuring workspace density to adjust the pace of return

To date, Cisco DNA Spaces is used for ten branch offices and three campus locations in the United States and Asia, with many more planned and underway.

Workplace Resources will use Cisco DNA Spaces to see where people gather and at what times. Based on that data, Workplace Resources will take actions such as increasing or reducing the number of employees on site, closing or opening certain areas of the building, posting signage, etc. After taking an action Workplace Resources can check the Cisco DNA Spaces App to make a data-based decision on whether to invite more employees back—or pause. A colleague compared the approach to turning the faucet on or off.

We receive alerts when density or device count in a certain area exceeds our thresholds, using the DNA Spaces Right Now App. It shows wireless density in near real-time, for a site, building, floor, or zone (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Right Now App dashboard

Respecting privacy—no names

When employees return to the office, they’ll use a mobile app to attest that they don’t have a fever or other symptoms before they are allowed into the facility. Then they’ll badge in and use Wi-Fi as they would ordinarily. No change to the user experience.

The change is that Wi-Fi data we’ve always collected now feeds the analytics (real-time and historical) in Cisco DNA Spaces. As people move around the building throughout the day, Cisco DNA Spaces plots the location of devices connected to Wi-Fi (Figure 2). To respect employee privacy, we capture device location only—not the owner’s name or any other personally identifiable information. As an example, we can see that three people were in the break room from 3:00 p.m. – 3:45 p.m., but not who they are.

Another one of our suggestions as Customer Zero was making it easier to define zones, or specified areas of a floor. Workplace Resources finds it more useful to monitor density by zone rather than an entire floor or building. Other potential improvements have also been detailed by Cisco IT to the product management teams responsible for the DNA Spaces solution. Including various potential enhancements and new features, which in time will hopefully automate a number of currently manual tasks, expand APIs, and hopefully offer other benefits not only to Cisco IT, but other customers as well.

Figure 2. Cisco DNA Spaces shows where people gather in groups

Getting an accurate count

While Cisco DNA Spaces gives us a good idea of density, we keep in mind there’s a margin of error. For example, wireless location data can be accurate to within about three meters. So it might appear that people are maintaining social distancing when they aren’t—or vice versa. Also, two connected devices in a room doesn’t necessarily mean two people. One person might be using two connected devices. Or there might be three people, one whose device isn’t connected to Wi-Fi.

To make our density estimates more accurate, for the first few buildings to re-open, Workplace Resources is correlating Cisco DNA Spaces data with badge-in data. If 20 people badge into a building and Cisco DNA Spaces reports 60 devices, for example, we’ll estimate one person for every three devices shown.

Lesson learned: accurate floor maps are important

During initial rollout we realized that some of our floor plans were inaccurate because of “drift.” That is, over time, the floor plans tend to diverge from access point placement data. In buildings where we’d recently upgraded infrastructure, the maps are accurate and include the height and azimuth of the access points. That’s not the case for buildings that haven’t been refreshed for a while. Cisco IT and Workplace Resources are currently updating the maps for sites where accurate information is important to plan a return to the office at a safe pace.

Before we return: checking office network health

As part of our return-to-office process, we’re evaluating each location against a readiness checklist. One item is network readiness.  While sheltering in place, Cisco IT staff has been turning on Cisco DNA Assurance in more locations. On one pane of glass we can see a holistic view of the health of all wired and wireless infrastructure in a given building. During the lockdown we’ve been keeping a to-do list of hands-on tasks—e.g., re-patching cables—to complete before employees return to the office.

More plans for Cisco DNA Spaces

Bringing employees back to the office at a safe pace was our incentive to deploy Cisco DNA Spaces.  We in Cisco IT eagerly implemented it via our Customer Zero program, which involves road testing new Cisco products or using existing ones in new ways.  As Customer Zero we help improve a solution by giving feedback to product engineers about bugs, additional features, and the user experience.

Later we’ll use Cisco DNA Spaces in new ways—for instance, showing the closest unoccupied conference room, tracking the movement of things in our supply chain, and tracking janitorial services. This will help us know where we have cleaned recently and ensure efficiency and effectiveness based on usage of the space.

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As the landscape evolves, so must the enterprise backbone

Most organizations today take advantage of cloud services. From software as a service (SaaS) to infrastructure as a service (IaaS), these cost-effective solutions help accelerate business and offer new opportunities for innovation.

Within the Cisco network, we’ve seen an impact from changing traffic patterns as our clients adopt to Cloud Services. We see more and more traffic going to the Internet and cloud services, and this level of traffic is growing at a very fast rate. This change meant we saw a 200 percent increase in peak Internet and cloud traffic within just 12 months. During that time, growth across our internal, private enterprise backbone also rose steadily, primarily due to large transfers between data centers. We quickly realized the traditional enterprise network is not ready to deliver the scale and resiliency needed to support this drastic shift in traffic patterns.

Technologies such as cloud, bring your own device (BYOD), and Internet of Things (IoT) require us to think differently about security. The enterprise network is becoming more segmented and each segment has different connectivity and security needs. Previously, the private backbone was a single, flat network; it now needs to deliver multi-tenancy and the ability to extend security segments across the globe.

These challenges have put us on an evolutionary path from a traditional enterprise backbone design to a software-defined and cloud-ready backbone. (Figure 1)

Figure 1. New software-defined design in the Cisco Cloud Backbone

From an enterprise-like backbone to a service-provider-like backbone

Cisco IT is deploying a new global backbone powered by Cisco ASR 9000 Series Aggregation Services Routers running Cisco IOS-XR software. This highly scalable and programmable platform provides a strong foundation for the new backbone and will allow us to operate more like a service provider for our internal clients.

Although our initial priority is to address Internet and backbone scalability challenges, we also need to offer more advanced services to support our users. For example, can you imagine a day, a few hours, or even a couple of minutes without access to the Internet and your business-critical SaaS apps? To avoid this potential disruption, our new backbone needs to deliver an always-on and excellent user experience. It needs to detect failure conditions and automatically steer traffic over resilient peering connections across the globe.

By more intelligently routing traffic over the new backbone and augmenting it with cheaper bandwidth, we hope to increase capacity without affecting our telecom budgets. By supporting multi-tenancy, the new backbone will be able to deliver customized services for each of our internal tenants and extend security zones globally.

From the beginning, we are taking a “no command line interface” approach, which will allow us to deploy and operate the new backbone through software. The goal of this approach is to translate the user’s intent and program it into the network within minutes instead of days.

Where Are We in our Journey?

Although standardization and simplification has always been top of mind for Cisco IT, over the 20 years of its existence our backbone has become a complex environment. This complexity makes the transition to a new backbone design a high-risk and cumbersome effort. Before using the new backbone design to deliver more advanced services, we know that it’s key to take the time to build a rock-solid foundation. This foundation work includes:

◉ Deploying Cisco ASR 9900 Series routers in 13 colocation facilities and Cisco campus buildings globally

◉ Addressing challenges of Internet route table growth

◉ Implementing a hierarchical Global Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) AS109 network

◉ Migrating existing tenants onto the new backbone

When the foundation work is completed, we will evaluate user needs in order to focus on deploying network capabilities that deliver the most business value.

Future objectives include improvements for:

◉ Delivering global network as a service

◉ Speed of delivery through programmability and automation

◉ Assurance through streaming telemetry

◉ Multi-tenancy and traffic steering through multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) and segment routing

IT needs to assure the enterprise backbone evolves to support internal business users. Cisco IT has started this transformation. Our users expect ordering IT network services to be as simple as shopping online. This new backbone will enable us to more efficiently connect our clients to Internet and SaaS applications, extend security zones globally, and interconnect sites, private clouds, and public clouds.

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The Agility Quadrant

Last evening, I had a lively discussion with my friend Paul on the state of agility in his organization, a midsize company of about 6000 employees. He mentioned that agile is the flavor of the year in his organization and that their executive Samuel had set a goal “We shall be agile by the end of this fiscal year!” He further mentioned that Samuel had directed all his reportees to comply and put Melissa in charge of the transformation

Melissa was Paul’s manager and – guess what – in their last one-on-one discussion, she tasked Paul with this responsibility. So, the responsibility of agile transformation had been delegated to Paul.

My next question to Paul was on his action plan. Paul mentioned that he had been given a good budget. So, he had reached out to the best vendor in the market to come in and ensure that “We shall be agile by the end of this fiscal year!”

Clearly, Paul and his organization had not heard of the Law of Conservation of Agility, which states that:

Agility can neither be delegated nor be outsourced; it can only be cultivated by self and instilled, ingrained by leadership, within and outside.

Let’s try understanding the implications of delegation and outsourcing of Agility. I love to explain this through the LIDO Quadrant.

1. DI —The Quadrant of FRUSTRATION

This is where Paul’s organization started. Leaders have heard the buzzword “agile” and wish they could use the adjective for their organization. There is no effort in place to change things from the top. Agile is considered as a thing for IT and more specifically software development portion of the entire value stream. Leaders expect the people to adopt agile practices. Leaders believe that agile is a shiny cloak that can be worn over the same old dirty clothes without any effort of cleansing the clothes and the body that clads the cloak.

Organizations in this quadrant have a bunch of employees with fancy certifications who are expected to help transform people into agile beings. Employees in such organizations end up taking the same instructions as before from the leadership by standing up instead of sitting down(through Daily Stand Ups). Concepts of continuous prioritization at the portfolio; framing and evaluating the hypothesis behind portfolio initiatives; funding value streams as opposed to projects remain alien concepts.

The empowerment and transparency tenets of Agile are conveniently overlooked. Employees continue to work on fixed scope and delivery date mechanisms but are expected to provide status updates daily.

This is the quadrant of demotivation and frustration where employees feel micromanaged in the garb of Agility. The most likely comment that you may hear from organizations in this quadrant is “Agile doesn’t work!”

2. LO — The Quadrant of INSECURITY

This quadrant is a mixed bag. Leaders understand the basic but outsource the transformation completely to outside consultants. Outside consultants can be wonderful agents to educate an organization and kick start the process of transformation. However, familiarity and respect for the organization’s culture is very important and is the critical missing piece here.

An internal Agile Centre of Excellence can vastly mitigate the cultural shock. Purists may agree that you cannot do “part time” agile. At the same time, agility is not a cookie cutter that can be applied to any organization. The focus needs to be on values and principles of agility and not on mechanics of Agility like how to use an agile project management tool or how to settle the debate on a user story being five story points or three. An internal Centre of Excellence with the right coaches can be a great recipe for success as it helps people soak in these concepts.

Organizations in this quadrant may see initial signs of success due to “compliance” but it ultimately wears off as the outsider vs insider debate catches on. Employees tend to have a sense of insecurity as they are often expected to change their way of working based on the view of people who do not have a complete stake in their success. The most likely comment that you may hear from organizations in this quadrant is “Do we really need agile?”

3. DO — The Quadrant of INDIFFERENCE

This is the quadrant that Paul’s organization landed in after starting with DI, the quadrant of frustration. Organizations with large wallets often end up in this because they think that agility can be bought. Statements of Work with outside vendors are created with the expectation that they bring the magic potion that can transform the organization. There is a lack of sincere attempt by the leadership to imbibe and practise the basics.

This quadrant gives you the myth of agility. Leaders feel they are agile because they have invested in the best vendor and the vendors provide vanity metrics to show the organization is now agile. Everyone is happy and the organization claims victory. The myth “we are agile” has engulfed the organization.

Organizations in this quadrant end up going nowhere. Agility, which talks about taking a product view as opposed to project-centric view, itself ends up being a project! And once the project ends, things are back to the old ways. The most likely comment that you may hear from organizations in this quadrant is “Who cares!”

4. LI —The Quadrant of RELENTLESS IMPROVEMENT

This is the quadrant where leaders inspire the organization to agile maturity through their actions and practices. Leaders understand the values and principles of agility and catalyze the mindset transformation of their organizations. They do so by empowering in-house change agents and leaders. These change agents are mindful of the culture of the organization and have a good understanding of the precise areas to focus.

People feel happy about the change as they see every level of the organization living those values. They get the feeling that “we are all together in this.” They understand that it is not a directive but a transformation. This is the quadrant of relentless improvement.

Organizations in this quadrant are likely to be on the path to relentless improvement through continuous learning with the help of small experiments and sticking to the ones that are helpful; all the while remaining grounded to the values and principles of agile.

The most likely comment that you may hear from organizations in this quadrant is “Agile makes sense!”

Which quadrant is your organization in? A lot of organizations start with DO or DI. The really successful ones make it to LI, the quadrant of relentless improvement. Paul’s organization may take some time to reach there.

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MCE: Enabling Customer Success in an Increasingly Connected World

Organizations need to be agile, flexible, and visionary. Now with My Cisco Entitlements (MCE), you have a platform that can help you achieve this.

I am proud to share Cisco’s official introduction of My Cisco Entitlements (MCE) for our customers and partners. MCE is a comprehensive lifecycle management platform that is robust, unified, and secure. Based on Smart Accounts and ISO Compliant Application Programming Interfaces, MCE provides customers and partners the flexibility to self-manage all Cisco IT purchases. We anticipate that MCE will rapidly lead the way in how our customers and partners manage their post-sale Cisco IT assets and entitlements.

Helps Organizations Maximize their ROI and Minimize Risk

This innovative new platform empowers organizations to maximize their return on investment, reduce risk and protect investments. It provides real-time insights into all Cisco services, subscriptions, licenses, and devices throughout their lifecycle. With a comprehensive view, IT and network administrators have the visibility and control they need to make well-informed, cost-effective,­ and compliant decisions.

IT Teams Drive Improved Business Operations

By generating MCE’s dynamic analysis and reports, IT teams have access to valuable information to drive improved business operations. For example, the last day of support (LDoS), renewals, and subscriptions are effortlessly identified by using sort and filter features.  As a result, cost is optimized and risk is reduced as they proactively plan usage and renewal of products and services.

Customers Manage Investments With Cisco More Effectively

Customers can also maximize the return on their investment by leveraging products and services usage insights. This customer-based platform simplifies how end customers manage their investments with Cisco effectively. In the future, Cisco partners can build and monetize asset and entitlement management practices for their customer base.

Taking Smart Accounts to the Next Level – One Unified Platform

As you may recall, Cisco introduced Smart Licensing and Smart Accounts to simplify and streamline software purchases, transfers, and activations for our customers. Built on the foundation of Smart Accounts, MCE takes this same concept to the next level with the integration and management of all licenses, devices, services, and subscriptions on one unified platform. MCE offers customers crucial insight into what they own and how to manage their assets even more effectively. Even better, it provides secure and consolidated user access.

The unified platform has been in pilot for the last five months, with more than 400 customers participating in beta testing. Since we began the pilot program in February, based on customers’ feedback, we’ve been able to uplevel MCE’s capabilities to better serve end users needs. Now, MCE is available to anyone who signs-up via this survey and has a Smart Account with Cisco.

Customer feedback from our pilot users has been incredibly positive. The most common feedback is that they love the one-view dashboard, sort, and filter features, and how key information, such as the last day of support and service coverage, is consolidated into one view. MCE simplifies the way information is managed.

We continue to integrate future release features and capabilities to enable our customers to be successful in an increasingly connected world – with security as a top priority. We can expect the increased use of telemetry in the coming year will provide proactive device health information and drive automation to workflows as needed to avoid delay and overhead.

My Cisco Entitlements connects your Smart Account, licensing, asset management, entitlement management and services to drive your digital business. As customers continue to find new ways to maximize ROI, reduce risk, and protect investments, MCE is poised to lead the way in the digital transformation era.

In the coming years, it’s imperative that every leader in every industry and organization is lock-step with the quickly shifting landscape of technologies to be competitive, increase revenue streams, and meet the needs of their customers. MCE is our solution to help meet these needs as technologies become even more and more complex. This solution offers our customers and partners a new way to protect their valued investments and minimize risk.

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Localization: 6 tips for success

Software localization is often an afterthought instead of being embedded into projects from the start. In 2017, we started a localization project for the software-fulfillment process in our Tokyo office. The regional team had approached us because partners and end customers were having a “broken” user experience—from commerce applications to fulfillment process—because some applications were in Japanese, others in English.

In 2014, we had launched a corporate extended relationship management (xRM) project, which included localizing major partner and customer-facing applications. The project had a multi-language data foundation. However, constant updates to the software and newer projects were causing us to fall behind. In addition, we faced challenges in getting partners to align with our software subscription business strategy mainly for a localized user experience. For most projects, localization support was added long after the release of the application or new capability.

Since the Tokyo project, we’ve brought localization into the initial phase of software development. Here are the six guidelines we follow.

1. Define success

The time and resources spent on localization can be hard to justify in quantitative terms because outcomes can be subjective and difficult to evaluate. For the Tokyo project, we measured success based on:

◈ Establishing strategic self-sufficiency by addressing/removing customized localization work-arounds by various users.
◈ Providing a smooth user experience between commerce and fulfillment applications.
◈ Storing consistent user language preferences and sharing user language preferences across applications.
◈ Making it as easy to add a new language during software product planning as adding a new user story.
◈ Accelerating go-to-market.
◈ Giving us a competitive advantage in international markets.

2. Realize that localization is foundation work, not an add-on

Our original localization initiative tried to address the problem after new applications and features were released. Our analysis of the software-fulfillment process in Tokyo showed that this approach led to production stoppage, re-engineering, and increased resource requirements to identify customer impacts and application dependencies. Thinking about localization from the initial phase of software development avoids these risks. To achieve this, we re-engineered the architecture to be ready for internationalization. According to Wikipedia, internationalization (i18N) is the process of designing a software application so that it can be adapted to various languages and regions without engineering changes. Localization (l10N) is the process of adapting internationalized software for a specific region or language by translating text and adding locale-specific components.

3. Know the stakeholders and key partners

Assessing localization requirements requires an understanding of all stakeholder groups, which often have a wide variety of backgrounds. Regional teams drove the discussion, but the Cisco IT architecture framework team was also involved because they owned the application platforms. There were many stakeholders like Japan sales operations, Japan strategy & planning, corporate business team, corporate IT team, global translation services team, and the architecture framework team. To achieve our localization goals within the target timeframe, we took the following steps:

◈ Aligned the business outcomes with the country’s go-to-market strategy
◈ Established a partnership with the architecture framework team to enable scalable internationalization
◈ Scheduled regular team meetings to enable dynamic collaboration across all functional teams responsible for software business adoption
◈ Implemented a phased approach to localization, starting with the highest-priority applications

4. Obtain buy-in from key stakeholders

The localization process is complex and requires commitments from business leaders as well as engineers. To obtain these commitments, we:

◈ Established dynamic teams, consisting of members from across the globe including various stakeholders who could participate in reviews and take necessary actions.
◈ Educated upper management about the importance of dynamic team sync up meetings on a regular basis.
◈ Assigned dedicated teams to re-engineer the architecture to be internationalization (i18N) ready.
◈ Encouraged dynamic team collaboration by scheduling regular meetings at times that worked for team members in different time zones.
◈ Analyzed application dependencies during the project to ensure smooth project sign-off to avoid release time surprises and re-work.

5. Know the difference between machine translation and localization

Localization is more than simply translating existing web properties. More broadly, it’s adapting content and applications for regional or local consumption. This sometimes requires modifying the flow of the user interface or requires changes to the source language (English for instance) itself and other site elements to match the user’s cultural expectations.

To ensure the quality of localization, we:

◈ Aligned the user interface to follow same user preferences across different user applications
◈ Localized every possible user interface flow
◈ Asked linguists to review application screens
◈ Utilized appropriate change management to review with teams so that no gaps arise when changing the user interface in one language, impacting the core (English) user interface flow and vice versa.

6. Speak directly to the customers in a language they understand

This guideline applies whether you’re building a website, customer application, or partner application. In a Harvard Business Review study, 72% of consumers said they’d be more likely to buy a product that’s in their own language and 56% said this was more important than price.

Progress to-date

Globalization and internationalization are becoming a standard for every Cisco IT project (Figure 1). Once the projects get realized, if the project has gone through localization, it can increase the business opportunities among international customers. The data gathered with a localized user interface can give clear visibility for data analysis.

Figure 1

We are working to make localization a business priority in other regions. To support that effort, we are building a strategic and holistic operating model and framework for localization across products, IT platforms, technical support documents, and channel programs portfolio

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Cisco IT Helps TAC Team in Mexico Get Back Online Fast Following Major Earthquake

Our colleagues in the Mexico City office had a close call on September 19, 2017, when the magnitude 7.1 Central Mexico earthquake struck. They were already outside of their building, ironically, having been evacuated as part of a scheduled earthquake drill.

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Introducing New Enterprise Controls for Cisco Spark

Making the Impossible, Possible

Last year, one of my colleagues went to a start-up conference with 2,000 people. On stage, someone asked the audience how many were working on consumer apps. Almost everyone raised their hands. Then the person asked how many were working on enterprise apps. This time only three hands went up. Three.

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Ten Technologies to Consider for Contact Centers in 2017: Part 2

Hybrid Services – Integrating cloud services with existing on-premises customer care services is currently a hot topic, not just in the contact center domain but throughout Unified Collaboration and other IT groups.   Hybrid Services architectures allow our Cisco IT teams to deploy some of the latest cloud technology, while knowing the investment made in the present premise environment can be leveraged.  Currently here in Cisco IT we’re exploring several options for our internal contact centers.

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Ten Technologies to Consider for Contact Centers in 2017

The line made famous by the Rolling Stones, “Time waits for no one”, is especially true for technology. A little over two years ago I wrote a blog titled “Ten Things to Consider for a Better Contact Center”. While all of the items mentioned are still relevant, the Contact Center technology space has gained significant investment in new capabilities since that blog was published. Contact Centers have expanded their technology reach and with that comes the importance of understanding how new technology improves customer service. Properly understanding and implementing the various new offerings may help to greatly improve the widely held corporate goal of increasing customer service, both quality and satisfaction.

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Ten Things to Consider for a Better Contact Center

The contact center is the front line for handling customer inquiries. Corporations large and small understand that it’s important to respond to inquiries quickly and effectively. A lot of money is budgeted for customer care departments to meet this growing need and respond via one or more customer contact channels. As evidenced by many stories in the news recently, one small, wrong move and your company could end up on the wrong side of a social media story gone viral. How many times have you heard of someone tweeting about being stuck in a plane on the runway for a few hours? It can make the nightly news and stir up bad publicity for the airline, potentially resulting in customer service headaches for months or years to come.

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