In today's fast moving and unpredictable world, organizations need to adapt and transform faster than ever. Technology plays a key role in this transformation, and Cisco and our partners have the opportunity to support customers through this journey like never before.

In previous blogs and articles, I have described how important is for our partner community to build a Lifecycle Practice to create the best possible Customer Experience for their clients. Now, I would like to bring your attention to one of our most comprehensive services offers that will help you start this journey with your customers.

As you might recall, moving from a break-and-fix to a lifecycle approach requires Cisco and our Partners to look at all angles when including their Support Services with the solutions they design and build. Yet, in today's complex environments, it is no longer enough to only provide hardware or software support in isolation. Moreover, solutions are not made up of just one software developer or manufacturer.

Our partners need the backing of Cisco to add their own additional services, including design and implementation services, but also to focus on the more value added Lifecyle services, leveraging automation and creating their own services catalogues. In addition, offering hardware and software support separately, and also third-party product support in a separate contract, is inefficient and less cost-effective.

Cisco Solution Support

To address this need, we have analyzed what is best for our customers and partners, and consolidated all of our support services offers into one single contract that includes both Smart Net Total Care for hardware support, Cisco CX Software Support, and third-party support for our Alliance Partner Products.

We call this offer Solution Support. Engineer experts who focus on hardware and software from Cisco and other providers are your primary point of contact. They are accountable for multiproduct, multivendor issue resolution across your deployment.

IDC, a leading provider of global IT research and advice, conducted a Business Value Analysis with global customers that are using Cisco Solution Support. The report found that these Cisco customers will achieve the following savings over five years:

• 17% lower 5-year cost of operations in hardware environments
• 213% 5-year service ROI
• 9% lower IT hardware costs
• 32% more efficient management of environments
• 21% fewer issues requiring response

These are just a few highlights on the features and benefits fromSolution Support:

• Primary point of contact:Cisco solution expert delivering centralized support across multivendor, multiproduct deployments.
• Architecture expertise:On Cisco hardware and software and their integration with Solution Support Alliance Partner products within and across our technology architectures.
• Priority response:Prioritized case handling and 30-minute service response objective.
• Coordinates support teams:Orchestrates Cisco and Solution Support Alliance product support teams during issue resolution, bringing a solution-level perspective.
• Manages case to resolution:Accountable for actively managing cases for multivendor or Cisco issues, from first call to resolution.

Further, I would like to highlight the actual value and benefits for our partners. Not only will Solution Support allow you to focus on your own more value-added services catalogue, building a lifecycle practice and driving adoption and customer loyalty, but it will have a direct impact on your topline and profitability. If you also achieve the Cisco Customer Experience Specialization while packaging your hardware, software, Cisco attached support services, and your value-added services, you will realize higher rebates from Cisco and increase your profits substantially.

Visit Cisco Customer Experience and SuccessHub

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