Q&A with Cisco: Lessons learned from a community reimagined

One, be realistic. Be realistic about the timeframe and the staffing, and look at every aspect of it. Sometimes people say, ‘Oh, okay, we just need professional services, and we need to license some software.’ There is so much more than that. Again, you're building a wing while you're flying the plane—so you have to take that into account. Your staff is going to be busy, so just be realistic about the timeframe it’s going to take.

If you depend on other teams, make sure you get a commitment. Make sure you have those resources, or it will cause delays. Speaking of that, give yourself a buffer because there will be delays. I guarantee you there absolutely will be delays. Don't try to cut corners on the budget. Be realistic and tell them what it's going to cost. And then, from a timing perspective, under-promise and over-deliver. Give yourself a bit of a buffer, and if you beat it? Great!

This was really about experience. So [community] views, visits. Are we getting people to these new resources? Are they using the content? When you do this adoption, content is [intended for] post-purchase, so there's not exactly a direct line to buying, but hopefully, there's a line to renewal. But that’s kind of fuzzy, right? The focus was on making the customer successful faster: them getting to the value of their investment. That's really what adding this whole adoption—content within the community—was all about.

The customer success team and the user experience team drove that. They identified the content that was going to come over. The guided resources were on Cisco.com. And honestly, those pages were really hard to find. They knew that. The “Ask the Experts” [sessions] were living on the learning platform, but that was a temporary home that turned into a two-year temporary home. We knew the content that we needed to bring together. It was, ‘How do we do that?’ Working with the customer success team and the go-to-market team made that happen.

Our advocacy program is on a different platform right now, but we have a lot of advocates in the community as well. Our community managers run a lot of competitions on the advocacy platform. They participate in discussions within the community.

There's also some crossover between the advocacy program and our recognition programs within the community. We have some amazing recognition programs. We've got our VIP program, which is our super users. They answer 40% of the questions that are posted in the community. Which is a lot, right? There's an overlap between those in the community and the advocacy program, so it makes sense to bring them together.

There are several ways. We have a survey that pops up. It's not a value analytics survey because we've standardized that across Cisco.com and the community. But we have a survey that pops up and asks them [for their feedback]. It's like value analytics in that once you answer it, you're not going to be asked again for a while. So we get feedback that way. We have a feedback forum. We also get feedback from our super users. We've got about 60 of them. In a community of our size, it's amazing what they do. And they have to earn it every year, so they work hard for us.

A lot of them do it because they love it. They've been doing it for a long time and they love giving back. One thing I often hear from our super users is that they like paying it forward, which is amazing, and it's what community is all about.

Now, we also share the program with our learning community. [Super users] get a pass to the Cisco Live of their choice, which there are three around the world in the U.S., Europe, and Australia. We host a dinner at those, so we do in-person things with them. And they get some special privileges within the community. With that, they help us mark spam because they are looking at that. And they get swag, they get that kind of thing.

I'd say don't be afraid to think outside the box. Okay, I know sometimes that's a little scary. But suppose you take a step back and really look at the entire user experience that you're trying to enable, not just in the community but across your company. In that case, don't be afraid to take that step and work across your entire organization to look at that bigger picture.

Cisco’s transformation journey offers valuable lessons for any organization looking to elevate its community strategy, from streamlining resources and enhancing user experiences to integrating advocacy programs.

Dive deeper into their success story and watch the on-demand Community Works webinar, How Cisco Reimagined Its Product-Focused Community for Customer Success. Explore how Cisco achieved measurable results and laid the foundation for future community innovation.