Throughout the year, our customers and partners provide feedback to us about their experience doing business with Cisco. We take that feedback very seriously, and are constantly making improvements to address the most common themes we hear and improve the overall experience. In the We're Listening Blog series, we close the loop to tell you about these improvements and the changes that our customers and partners can expect to see.

One common theme in the feedback is the Services ordering process, so I've asked Lars Thorsen, Director, Partner Services, to describe some of the improvements that the Simplify and Optimize Annuity Revenue (SOAR) team has been making in this space over the past year -and what they have planned for this year.

 By Guest Author Lars Thorsen

We are constantly looking to simplify our quoting and ordering processes, starting with the improvements you've told us you most want to see. We've been listening to your feedback via surveys and live forums throughout the year, and we heard you say that the Services ordering process can be "complex and cumbersome" and the Services contract tool, CSCC, is a bit "difficult to use." More specifically, you told us that it takes too many resources and cycles to interact with CSCC. We wanted to make immediate improvements that would decrease the time it takes to receive a quote for Services.

The primary issue driving longer times to quote is the number of policies on the back end of the Services ordering process. Starting last year, we deployed big data analytics to identify policies that were driving the most errors in quotes, and to modify or remove them.

It's an ongoing effort within our team, but since last April, we've seen a16% reduction in time to achieve a valid quote for services. The number of quotes booked without errors has increased 11%, even while the total volume of quotes being booked has increased 32% year over year. The improvements amount to275,000 additional productivity hours for our Partners.

We know we have more work to do, and are actively analyzing and modifying our policies to further reduce the time to quote and generally simplify the ordering process. This year, we anticipate a more than 60% reduction in the number of times a policy triggers a delay in CSCC, greatly accelerating the quoting and sales process, while providing our Partner community with ever greater productivity. We hope you are as excited about these changes as we are, and look forward to your feedback for continued improvement. Feel free to comment below to tell us what you think.