How Cisco creates new value via global customer service

In Bust the Silos: Opening Your Organization for Growth, Hunter Hastings and Jeff Saperstein offer a new concept for business growth in today's global economy. It is called “demand creation”: the design of new organizational structures and processes to make managing the demand for a product or service a process‐based, predictable, and repeatable science. The challenge is how to harness the capabilities of new productivity tools with new business processes for success. Hastings and Saperstein argue that forward‐thinking organizations must work differently: in roles, not just jobs; in new forms of multifunctional teams, not just departments; in networks, not just rigid structures; and in listening to escalate responsiveness, not just communicating to get the message across. We all now operate in a highly connected, rapidly evolving, customer‐centric, and knowledge‐driven environment. Yet, most of our current management practices, organizational models, and job functions are not effective in serving our customers. Value is created through relationships with customers. Companies must adopt principles and practices that encourage every individual in the diverse groups of employees to have a shared sense of purpose to engage in more effective ways of working together to build customer intimacy and loyalty. This article profiles the Cisco Customer Interaction Network and the transformation of its global operations from call centers to customer‐relationship builders. It addresses the following questions:

• Why is being adaptive necessary for organizational survival?
• How does one design a customer support system that listens and teaches rather than just fixes problems?
• How does one take full advantage of the Web for customer support?
• How does one give front‐line professionals the training and tools to be consultants rather than mechanistic problem solvers?
• How can evolving metrics be a game changer?

The article is adapted from Bust the Silos: Opening Your Organization for Growth by Hunter Hastings and Jeff Saperstein (BookSurge, 2009). © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.