Looking Back at FY22: Cisco Lifecycle Advantage Digital Partner Experience Team Accomplishments

Fiscal year 2022. It’s hard to believe it’s over. Some may think it flew by, others may feel like it dragged on, but however it seemed; it was certainly a year to celebrate many milestones.

Looking back at the past year, the Lifecycle Advantage digital partner experience team knocked several big projects out of the park, and we hope our partners saw value in the new features and functionalities added to Cisco Lifecycle Advantage and Success Program Insights. While we toast to a fruitful year, let’s celebrate some of our biggest accomplishments.

Cisco Lifecycle Advantage Success Program Insights

In April, Lifecycle Advantage Success Program Insights turned one. At birth, SPI had just five use cases under Campus Network, and one year later, we had 15 use cases under six solution domains. Since then, we have added nine additional use cases, reaching 24 total. Throughout the year, we added even more features, including:

• Displaying customer telemetry and next step insights
• Enhanced filtering, displaying use cases and accounts with partner-provided exclusions, digital customer granted data consent, enabled telemetry, and Software upgrade recommendations
• Recommended actions for partners
• Ability to support multiple customer contacts on the digital journey
• Lifecycle stage and exit criteria completion indicator with date stamps

While those are only a few of the many awesome additions to the platform, we can’t forget enhanced telemetry. With enhanced telemetry, partners gain a deeper understanding of how customers are progressing in their deployment with direction on how to use the data to better support them. You can read more about it in my blog: “Enhancing telemetry for a better customer experience.”

Partner adoption journey launch

New partners who enrolled in Cisco Lifecycle Advantage last fiscal year received emails over several weeks designed to assist them in getting started and help them understand and successfully use the program. Emails sent to partners gave details on setting up campaigns, reviewing their data, enabling Commerce Automation, and getting the most out of Lifecycle Advantage Success Program Insights. Launching the partner journey was a fantastic way to support partners right after enrollment and continues to be the best method in getting introductory materials to them so they may realize value from Lifecycle Advantage sooner.

Lifecycle Advantage accreditation

With 6,900+ partners enrolled in Lifecycle Advantage, we developed a way to help partners improve their use of the program and better enable customer success, renewals, and growth. In FY22, we launched Lifecycle Advantage accreditation; a series of five challenges that include tasks and quizzes to help partners learn about Lifecycle Advantage and its capabilities. Upon completion, partners receive a badge to promote across their own personal marketing materials to indicate they are an expert in Lifecycle Advantage and customer success.

Partners can complete the training, follow the steps below:

Total Economic Impact of Cisco Lifecycle Advantage

Forrester Consulting, a third-party research firm, conducted an analysis to determine the potential return on investment organizations may realize by using Lifecycle Advantage. The study found that over a three-year period, the potential risk-adjusted cash flow analysis grew to $781K, renewal rates increased by 25%, and operational efficiency improved by 88%. The incremental profit from increased sales was $574.4K and from improved efficiency $206.6K. You can read more about the study in my blog “The Total Economic Impact of Cisco Lifecycle Advantage.”

Partner experience

We launched several initiatives last fiscal year to improve and simplify the partner experience. We added a WebEx bot for partners to receive notifications about recommended actions associated with their customer accounts in the platform. We added advanced download capabilities to allow partners to select specific data to download, rather than having to download and review substantial amounts of data they may have reviewed previously. We also added visibility to customers not on a digital journey, adoption barriers, and definitions to understand why customers are not progressing through the lifecycle. Let’s not forget, we continued to send the Lifecycle Advantage Digest to keep partners up to date on everything new on the platform. . . Whew, what a year!

Because of these enhancements, we saw our partners sharing their CSM (Customer Success Manager) contact details and by year-end, those partners were driving their customers’ use cases 774% faster. No wonder in FY22 Gartner recognized Lifecycle Advantage as a key differentiator in the industry.

We ended FY22 with noisemakers, confetti, and maybe a little bubbly. As we move into FY23, the team is more inspired and motivated than ever to continue delivering for our partners in the fiscal year ahead.

We would love to hear from you! What was the most game-changing milestone you encountered in FY22? All the best this next fiscal year, and happy New Year!

Learn about Lifecycle Advantage

Read about Lifecycle Advantage Success Program Insights

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