Cisco was able to convert the expertise of our support engineers into exceptional content for our customers by integrating social knowledge and content publishing into our workflows.
— Becky Scott
Program Manager, Cisco.com Digital Support Experience, Cisco
Executive summary
Cisco Systems is the worldwide leader in IT solutions, helping companies seize the opportunities of tomorrow through innovative connections. At Cisco, customers have always come first. One of the most important ways that Cisco supports customer success is by sharing the expertise of their more than 4,000 Technical Assistance Center (TAC) Engineers on Cisco.com. But before Cisco partnered with Khoros, they struggled with how to motivate and empower their TAC Engineers to share their critical knowledge with a global population. In order to improve the process of sharing expertise with customers, Cisco onboarded Khoros Community.
Although Cisco’s TAC Engineers possessed immense knowledge, Cisco struggled with how to make that knowledge accessible to their customers. Cisco needed the tools that would enable their engineers to create content at scale and they needed a way to get the ball rolling on content sharing. With Khoros, Cisco found a way to seamlessly transform the expertise of their TAC Engineers into content their customers and partners could use to improve their business operations. Together, Cisco and Khoros developed the idea to motivate TAC Engineers by hosting a competition with the chance to win a two-week work rotation at any global TAC location. The competition, called the Knowledge Champions League (KCL), consists of engineers collaborating to create articles within Tech Zone, Cisco’s internal workflow-enabled community. Articles are then published to the Cisco.com support site where customers and partners can access them to problem-solve. The KCL team who creates the highest volume of impactful content wins the grand prize. Although only one team wins, all KCL participants realize the benefits of working collaboratively in global teams across technologies: building their network of contacts, building cultural awareness, and strengthening their collaboration skills while developing articles.
Cisco’s goal was to encourage collaboration among their TAC Engineers while creating valuable content for Cisco.com. Through their partnership with Khoros, Cisco found success: increasing their articles published annually by 47%. As Cisco continues to motivate its TAC Engineers to share their wealth of knowledge with customers, Khoros is there to help manage and publish content on their community at scale.
How they made it work
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Onboarded
Khoros Community and worked with Khoros to develop a KCL competition that encourages TAC Engineers to create content.
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Awarded
The winning team a two-week rotation to work remotely from a Cisco Customer Support Site.
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Designed
Their competition to have a first phase qualifying period in which each engineer had to qualify as top contributors and a second phase with top contributors competing in teams.
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Fostered
The sustainable behaviors of collaboration, teamwork, and healthy competition resulting in high-quality, impactful content for customers.
“Khoros has fundamentally changed the way Cisco creates and consumes knowledge in Technical Services.”
— Becky Scott
Program Manager, Cisco.com Digital Support Experience, Cisco
Results
The Khoros community helped Cisco gain record-high support content satisfaction scores through the number of views of TAC Engineer-authored articles. As a result, Cisco realized an approximate $54.2M in case deflection savings for the first year of their partnership with Khoros — more than double their savings from the previous year. Cisco also measured the output of KCL participants and compared it with Tech Zone active users that were not part of KCL. On average, KCL participants created 5 times more content than non-KCL participants.
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5x
More content from KCL participants compared to non-participants
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47%
Increase in articles published annually
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1M+
Yearly customer views of external KCL-generated content