DevNet + NWN: Transforming Customer Experiences in a Changing World

Innovative partners across Cisco’s ecosystem are creating new ways to leverage DevNet, when building new ways to serve their customers’ needs in today’s new normal. One of our fastest growing national partners is NWN Corporation, who have integrated our collaboration, contact center, security and networking capabilities into their award-winning Solution-as-a-Service portfolio.

NWN’s Cloud Communications and Infrastructures solutions help transform the customer experience by integrating everything an organization needs to operate from anywhere – from the device to the network – with the adoption services and SLAs to ensure quality and high service availability.

We caught up with NWN during Cisco’s Partner Summit 2020, where they were awarded a “Innovation Partner of the Year” and “Technology Partner of the Year: Collaboration” to learn more about how they’re serving customers’ needs with their integrated offerings, which integrate and extend a number of Cisco platforms, including security, collab, EN, subscription services, EA, Software and CX.

NWN recently enhanced their NWN Experience Management Platform (EMP) for their 1,300+ customers to have real-time visibility and control, and self-service capabilities for their Cloud Communications and Infrastructure offerings through a powerful digital omni-channel interface that transforms the user experience with:

• Aggregated visibility into their environment
• Control over their solutions through Administration and Self-care capabilities
• Increased insights through reporting and analytics
• Interactive communications with NWN within a secure platform

With 20+ years of delivering innovation, we’re excited to partner with NWN as they addresses the new needs of customers looking to support customers’ new needs, for the new normal including more self-help, self-service, and real-time SLA monitoring in the cloud. All of this is needed to enable a truly dynamic workplace, while also improving operational efficiency and manage business risk with a predictable cost model. NWN does all that and more.

Where DevNet and Cisco APIs step in

NWN leveraged Cisco’s restful APIs and DevNet documentation to understand how their developers can further differentiate EMP.

From an engineering and offering management perspective, the team identified high-value capabilities across Cisco architectures (i.e. networking, communications, security) that customers needed to automate and integrate into a unified management platform including overall utilization, logs, as well as manual tasks that could be re-architected into automated workflow.

The APIs helped accelerated development of the EMP platform through the program and documentation, as well as the overall open software architecture inherent in Cisco’s platforms.

NWN’s EMP utilizes Cisco API integrations in a multitude of ways to enhance the customer’s experience. A few of the key areas include:

• Solution Performance Monitoring (observability). NWN leverages Cisco APIs to correlate data enabling proactive visibility and correlation across events in related infrastructure.
• Usage Billing and Cost Allocation for simplified bill back. NWN leverages Cisco APIs to collect data from multiple sources and bring the information together for accurate billing and simplified Cost Center budget management and bill back.
• Reporting. NWN leverages Cisco APIs to collect data from multiple data sources to offer a full suite of Analytics reports for Unified Communications.

The DevNet program is a critical resource for the NWN team across all of these examples. NWN’s engineering team leverages the rich documentation and engages with the DevNet team through the Webex Teams space. One of the recent examples was brought forward as the COVID pandemic required many companies to move to a remote workforce virtually overnight.

How Cisco APIs solved COVID-related remote work challenges

NWN’s Experience Management Platform provides reporting and analytics through a single cloud-interface and uses Cisco APIs integrations to easily visualize complex data that is used for custom reporting and analytics.

As COVID drove an abrupt transition to remote work, customers were met with the challenge of needing to direct the calls ‘Off Net.’ For Unified Communications customers that use Hunt Groups for call routing to agents, this change would result in a gap in visibility.

A long term NWN Unified Communications customer asked for NWN’s help. This customer, a State Agency, is responsible for reporting out to other agencies on the performance of their operation through a set of service level call statistics reports. A gap in visibility into ‘Off Net’ calls would mean that they would not be able to provide service remotely during COVID, putting their staff at risk. They engaged NWN to help to solve this challenge.

With the help of Cisco DevNet, NWN was able to extend reporting capabilities to include ‘Off Net’ Call statistics through EMP, truly providing end-to-end visibility.

DevNet resources supporting NWN’s innovation

NWN leveraged DevNet to identify the APIs that would allow the NWN team to extend reporting to the ‘Off Net’ calls. NWN leveraged the DevNet website and documentation as a resource, which they found sufficient enough to find all they needed without any additional help.

NWN’s appreciates the resources available with the DevNet program including the DevNet Webex Teams space. When NWN’s engineers have questions, they’re able to easily engage the DevNet team through the Webex Team’s Space and immediately get their questions answered.

The access to DevNet allowed NWN to offer a swift solution to how to access the “Off Net” leg of the call through Cisco API and opened up the ability to reporting on information in a streamlined, automated and scalable way.

With DevNet’s help, NWN can swiftly help customers meet their business objectives – which is critical, especially in a time of such uncertainty. The Experience Management Platform’s value and the flexibility of the reporting and analytics will certainly be on their customer’s mind at renewal. NWN is thankful for the DevNet team’s support in accomplishing that successful business outcome.

For more information on NWN and the Experience Management Platform (EMP), visit here.

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