Evolving the Cisco Partner Program to Meet Customer Needs

Tendo helped simplify and elevate the program’s digital experience, enabling partners to keep pace with changing customer expectations.

CHALLENGES

Complex digital experience with myriad purpose-built tools and platforms
Inconsistent UX across the Cisco Partner Program ecosystem
Relevant information buried or hard to find

RESULTS

Clear, compelling, personalized journeys for partners across key roles
Consistent UX, optimized to support partners’ top tasks
Improved findability of relevant information to deepen partner relationships

TENDO SERVICES PROVIDED

Digital strategy enhancement and guidance
Information architecture (IA), content models, and wireframes
Authoring templates and web content creation

About the Cisco Partner Program

The Cisco Partner Program helps partners make the most of their Cisco relationship.

Over the past 20-plus years, Cisco has cultivated a large and vibrant partner ecosystem that contributes more than 80% of the networking and security giant’s revenue. The Cisco Partner Program recognizes and rewards partners in this network, based on how they deliver value to customers. It lets partners unlock key benefits and incentives based on the Cisco solutions and services they provide and specialize in for their customers.

Cisco

San Jose, CA

Networking and security

84,900 employees

The Challenge

In today’s hybrid world, customer needs are evolving—and Cisco partners must follow suit.

For decades, the transactional, turnkey solutions approach worked well. However, customers now seek a lifecycle approach tailored to where they are in their business transformation.

To help partners better connect with customers, Cisco needed to move from a product- to user-centric approach, consolidating its many, disparate initiatives into a single, unified program. This new, simplified program needed to reflect a consistent and cohesive UX that would facilitate partner transactions, supporting how they do business with Cisco.

The Solution

Tendo helped elevate the Cisco Partner Program’s digital experience to better engage and enable its partners to keep pace with changing customer expectations:

Produced foundational digital strategy for how to progressively improve the UX in a multi-year, phased approach
Created clear, cohesive user flows supporting partners’ top tasks
Developed IA, content models, and wireframes for a seamless, intuitive experience
Mapped legacy partner content to new organizational structure, identifying gaps and redundancies
Built authoring templates, crafted messaging, and wrote user-centric web copy
Helped create, extend, and roll out a new brand design system

The Results

75%

of partners believe Cisco effectively supports their business transformation

68%

believe Cisco Partner Program has improved based on partner feedback

78%

agree their Cisco partnership provides a better experience vs. competitors

Based on multiple Voice of the Partner surveys, the Partner Program exhibited the greatest quarter-over-quarter improvements compared to other platforms.

With Tendo’s hands-on support, Cisco created clear, compelling, personalized journeys, optimized to support partners’ top tasks within a consistent and cohesive user experience. And it improved the findability of need-to-know information to make it easier for partners to capitalize on the program, maximizing opportunities for growth and profitability.