Cisco provides world-class customer service with Pega

The Business Issue

Cisco helps run the fastest data networks for the largest companies in the world. If its network goes down, businesses come to a screeching halt. That’s why Cisco is on a mission to provide world-class customer service, meeting (or exceeding) expectations 100% of the time.

The Solution

Cisco used Pega technology to digitize customer service and provide better real-time responses across the entire global service chain. Intelligent routing and service automation ensure the right agent handles the right issue, right away, while helping Cisco deliver the accurate, consistent service that its customers demand.

“It’s not just about saving costs and automating processes,” said Cisco’s Gilles Leyrat. “It's also a way for us to invest in people and to truly provide the best experience possible.”

The Results

• Eliminated 4 million hours of customer wait time
• Cut service costs by 80%
• Reduced average handle time from 45 minutes to 20 minutes
• Removed up to 93% of human touch on non-value-added work
• Improved dispute management by 12% and team productivity by 25%

Transcript:

Gilles Leyrat: World-class customer service is a project that we started about a year ago, and it's really at the core of the transformation and digitization of my function.

Steve Power: We've gone from about 80 percent of our population of agents being back office to a much stronger proportion of elite agents who can have a conversation with the customer, understand the problem, and manage that problem on their behalf.

Gilles Leyrat: We use Pega's system as a way to embed the best practices coming out of our agents, and build that into the applications.

Sesh Tirumala: We do 50 billion a year, so we have a lot of transactions, so automation is very important in such a way that we've got a frictionless superior experience for our customers, partners, supply chain, et cetera.

Steve Power: In the areas where we've got high degrees of verification and execution, we've been able to remove the human touch from something like 93 percent of cases, that's saving about 80 percent of the costs that we had before.

Gilles Leyrat: Pega is helping us achieve our visions of our world-class customer service by providing this backbone that we need to use to link up the different parts of our processes. One of the key things that world-class customer service is providing is to really automate, simplify and automate our processes, and Pega's system is at the core of it.

Steve Power: We're improving the experience because we're removing lots of wait time from the customers. Some examples of 2 million hours from expedite, 4 million+ hours of wait time from the time it takes us to fix service quotes, and we're doing all of this improvement in experience, and this improvement in agility whilst cutting our costs.

Sesh Tirumala: We've seen at least 10 to 12 percent improvements in terms of our dispute management, and then overall team productivity in terms of about 25 percent.

Steve Power: On average, the handle time has gone from about 45 minutes down to about 20 minutes.

Sesh Tirumala: By leveraging and deploying Pega in terms of intelligent case routing, it allows us to route the case to the right agent.

Steve Power: We really see Pega as the intelligent brain around executing across the digitized process steps.

Gilles Leyrat: So all digitization is not just about saving costs and automating processes, it's also a way for us to invest in people, and we can reinvest into much more sophisticated agents and people that can actually connect dots, people that can actually engage very well with customers, to truly provide the best experience possible for customers and partners.

Sesh Tirumala: Where we are looking to go in the future is digitization of our entire operations processes all the way from lead management to opportunity management, coding, ordering, shipping and collections and billing. Our ideal goal is to deploy and leverage Pega to optimize the whole workflow.

Gilles Leyrat: So the way I'm looking at digitization is not a way of cutting costs. It's about raising the bar for the whole team, it's about making sure we can actually take advantage of automation, take advantage of globally consistent processes, and have people really spending their quality time with customers, engaging with them, understanding issues, providing the best experience possible. That's truly at the heart of what we're doing.

Steve Power: The thing I like about Pega as we've gone on this journey is the integrated platform and all of the capabilities we have there. We keep discovering how we can push the envelope, and so far, we've not found the limits of that boundary of how far Pega can take us.

Speaker 4: Our world is constantly changing. Only Pega lets you build for change.

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