Top 5 Takeaways from the Cisco CX Specialization Certification

Cisco sees customer experience as a key differentiator for the future of business because of its ability to impact customer retention and growth. It’s so important that Cisco has created an entire program around it and is requiring all Cisco Gold Partners to complete the Customer Experience (CX) Specialization Certification by March 2021.

Not only will the certification help Cisco Partners gain a competitive edge in a world where quick time to value is imperative, but most importantly, the program will teach the basics around CX and what it takes to build a digital customer journey that delivers value at every stage. Customer success is a key part of driving the overall CX vision to ensure that customers are engaged in a proactive manner.

Totango and Cisco joined together to walk-through the program requirements and the best way to accelerate certification.  If you are a Cisco Gold Partner, we highly recommend watching a replay of the event above.

Here are the top 5 takeaways for the Cisco CX Specialization Certification

1. Customer Success is a growth strategy
2. Invest in the right customer success technology partner
3. Take advantage of Cisco incentive payouts (offset technology costs)
4. Guide your teams at scale (make everyone a hero)
5. Leverage the latest customer success best practices

5 Things You Need to Know About Cisco CX Specialization Certification 

1. Customer Success Is A Growth Strategy

Why is customer success so important? Well, to start, it’s completely different from customer support. It’s not about retroactively helping customers reach their goals once they have raised their hand to get help. Instead, customer success focuses on delivering the right value to customers at the right time in their journey.

By proactively managing the customer lifecycle you can pinpoint when customers need help before they ask, identify growth opportunities before renewal time, be alerted to at-risk accounts in enough time to course-correct and more!

2. Invest in the Right Customer Success Technology Partner 

Your time is better spent focusing on your business strategy and not on building entirely new systems. By choosing a customer success technology partner, you can knock out more than half of the requirements for cx certification in one place. It’s a head start that allows organizations to get right into the nitty gritty of real-time customer journey analytics and start building playbooks to tackle common customer scenarios.

Here are just a few ways customer success technology helps organizations:

• Creates a 360 customer view by connecting data silos
• Identifies at-risk customers and upsell opportunities quickly
• Automates playbooks and email campaigns
• Presents detailed customer journey analytics and team impact
• Coordinates mutual success plans in one place

3. Take advantage of Cisco Incentive Payouts (Offset Technology Costs)

Get rewarded for driving the right activities at each customer stage! Use these payouts to help offset the initial technology costs. At this time, there are three opportunities to earn incentives.

• Lifecycle Practice Advisory
  • 6-hour virtual session with $5k full investment with 3rd party consultant
• Customer Success Optimization
  • 15k co-investment engagement and mentorship with Customer Success Solution Provider to drive the below business outcomes
• Combined investment no matter where you are in the journey
  • Up to $25k co-investment with advisory and optimization united to create one comprehensive offer.

But don’t delay,  they are on a first come, first serve basis.

*Reach out to Totango for a Cisco CX Assessment and get the  latest information regarding the Lifecycle Advantage Incentives.

4. Guide Your Teams at Scale (Make Everyone a Hero) 

Impossible to be everywhere at once? Maybe not. With the right technology partner, automating your playbooks and initiating first steps is made easy. Instead of just having a few heroes in your organization that you can rely on to pull through and make the best of a tricky situation, enable everyone to use the latest guidance and best practices. Identify opportunities and escalations ahead of time and kickstart those first few steps. Or better yet, automate all the steps!

Guiding your teams also becomes easier when you can get clear visibility into what your team is working on. Make use of customer success reports to help manage and align your teams on organizational goals.

5. Leverage the Latest Customer Success Best Practices

Fortunately, customer success is not a new practice. Instead of starting from scratch, make use of ready-made templates in Totango built alongside the best customer-centered organizations in the world.  Need playbooks for your teams to use when a customer drops down to poor health? Done. Don’t know what to say to your at-risk customers to get a meeting scheduled? That’s okay, there’s a template for that.

When you get started with best practices, those organizational goals seem less daunting. It also gives you a place to start in a focused fashion and rapidly “learn-by-doing” as you try what works and what doesn’t work for your customer audiences. You can then take that knowledge and iterate to your heart’s content.

Key Requirements to Be Aware of for Cisco CX Specialization Certification

Incentive Requirements

Cisco incentives help pay for your customer success investments. There are two deadlines that need to be met by their partners in 2021.

1. All partners that have been granted early access to the Advanced CX program need to have the technology requirements completed by March of 2021.
2. All Gold level partners have to have the CX Specialization Certification completed by December of 2021.

Technology Requirements

Cisco has made it clear that you can’t just use any technology platform to accomplish the CX certification. It has to be purpose-built for customer success and there has to be a methodology in place. Here’s a quick snapshot of the tool capabilities required.

 *See how Totango meets all of the Cisco Tool Requirements

Accelerate Your Cisco CX Specialization Certification

You need a platform that works with you to automate your processes and guide your team 24/7. All of this needs to be set up in a timely manner which is why quick time to value is a priority for Cisco Partners. More than 80% of the Cisco partners that have completed the Cisco CX certification requirements have a customer success platform.  Of those platforms chosen,  Totango is ranked  #1 among Cisco partners.

Why is Totango the top customer success technology partner? The guesswork around customer success is taken out and made simple. Certification is a breeze with pre-built Cisco SuccessBLOCs, toolkits that make it easy to focus on the different customer lifecycle stages and deliver outcomes at scale. Drive onboarding, adoption, expansions, and renewals while accelerating your incentive payouts for each stage.

Totango’s customer success operating system leverages the latest customer success best practices to help your team get up and running quickly. Chat with the Totango team to learn more about how you can accelerate your Cisco CX Certification.