Cisco Launches the Next Generation in Customer Satisfaction; New Model Measures Loyalty Economics Allowing Partners to Make Better Business Decisions

Business Wire, June 20, 2005

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- As part of the company's continued commitment to providing its partners with the tools, training and programs to accelerate revenue growth, Cisco Systems(R) (NASDAQ:CSCO) today announced it has added a loyalty methodology to its partner customer satisfaction tool,

Partner Access onLine (PAL). This proprietary customer loyalty model unites customer satisfaction with a focus on customer retention and business growth by providing customer loyalty segmentation along with associated financial impact statistics.

"It's essential to measure customer satisfaction, but looking at loyalty takes customer satisfaction to a new level," says Tom Shaw, president and CEO of Wide Area Management Services, a Cisco(R) channel partner. "Being able to assess, in real time, the loyalty of my customers, and most importantly which customers I am at risk of losing, will enable me to make better business decisions and will have a substantial impact on the profitability of my business."

With the PAL tool, Cisco channel partners can now access a customized view of loyalty data that categorizes their customers as loyal, accessible, or at risk. Financial data is tied to the customer loyalty metric to demonstrate the financial impact that losing a customer may have based on historical bookings data. Partners are able to conduct "what if" analyses to customize their financial results based on current bookings and profit margins. Year-over-year trending data based on customer loyalty segmentation is available to help pinpoint whether or not actions taken in one year had an effect on growth in subsequent years.

"At Cisco, customer satisfaction is a top priority," said Don McNally, director, Worldwide Channels Business Operations at Cisco Systems. "The new customer loyalty phase of PAL will provide partners very selective customer satisfaction data to enhance relationships with customers identified as 'at risk' of leaving the partner. The discussion is evolving from today's traditional and short-term customer satisfaction score, to a longer-term, strategic approach, focusing on the revenue impact of customer satisfaction."

Cisco Channel Partner Customer Satisfaction

The customer loyalty element of PAL will take full advantage of proprietary data and analysis from Walker Information, an independent third party, whereby "willingness to recommend" and "willingness to repurchase" will become new foundational metrics to complement the current Cisco customer and partner satisfaction metrics. Since making customer satisfaction a strategic component of the Channel Partner Program in 2001, Cisco has realized a 40 percent improvement on a five-point scale in partner-served end-customer satisfaction.

Availability

All Cisco Gold, Silver, and Premier certified and registered partners currently have direct access to Cisco customer satisfaction data. Cisco Gold partners worldwide have access to the new loyalty and bookings comparison data. Cisco Silver and Premier certified and registered partners have access to all loyalty functionality except bookings. Cisco will assess Gold Partner feedback and plans to incorporate bookings data for additional partners upon completion of this review.

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