According to an article in Forbes, 25 percent of technology projects fail, 20 to 25 percent don’t show any return on investment and as many as 50 percent require massive reworking by the time they’re “completed.” That’s astounding.
While the reasons for failure are many—lack of leadership, unclear or inconsistent communication, lack of defined outcomes and failure to adopt, to name just a few—projects almost never fail due to the technology.
That’s why I don’t believe that technology projects should fail. If the technology is good—and it almost always is—and we deliver on what we say we’re going to do, then the project should be successful. After all, I want us to succeed. More importantly, I want our customers to succeed.
The Cisco Lifecycle Advisor Program: Your success is our success
Mutual success underlies the Cisco Lifecycle Advisor Program. Through its lifecycle practice, a Cisco Lifecycle Advisor can help you continuously plan, implement and manage your digital transformation to achieve your desired business outcomes and maximize your technology investments.
Key to customer success is solution adoption. After all, we shouldn’t drop technology onto customers and expect them to automatically love it and learn it. And licensing and asset management processes shouldn’t be so onerous—or, in some cases, costly.
A Cisco Lifecycle Advisor earns customers’ long-term trust by using a consistent process that helps customers make the most of their IT investments. They help customers adopt software and services and simplify renewals. And they’re there to help them respond to new and changing business conditions.
In other words, a Cisco Lifecycle Advisor takes the work out of IT so customers can focus on their businesses.
Becoming an invitation-only Cisco Lifecycle Advisor
As a longtime partner, Logicalis was invited into Cisco’s Lifecycle Advisor Program. Cisco made a significant investment in Logicalis to refine our customer experience processes and build a solid customer lifecycle advisor practice. It was a long and arduous process over many months.
Working side-by-side with Cisco, we completed a thorough review of our business to ensure we could ably support customers’ business outcomes. We re-tooled processes, built in governance and oversight, and added tools to streamline the often onerous processes of licensing and asset management. We created an organizational framework, put the right people in place and built up our Customer Success Management team.
As a final step, we took our resulting customer lifecycle advisor practice to several customer accounts to prove we could deliver true customer engagement. The pilot program demonstrating our proven processes—supported by an organizational framework and a lifecycle advisory methodology—was a success.
We’re now partnering with other key OEM partners—Microsoft, Veeam, NetApp and others—to deepen our customer relationships and ensure our customers receive the full value from their technology investments.
Logicalis: Your trusted Customer Lifecyle Advisor
To deliver the right business solutions and a stellar customer experience, Logicalis’ expert Customer Success Managers (CSMs) work closely with customers to develop success plans outlining their business goals and strategic direction. Then they continually assess, document and analyze our customers’ progress toward those goals, employ best practices to meet them and ensure their solutions are optimized for maximum value.
By becoming experts on our customers’ solutions and environments, CSMs help drive solution adoption and show customers the value that can be generated from their technology investments.
At the end of the day, your success is our success. And just as Cisco invested in our success, we believe it’s important to invest in your success, too.
Learn more about how we can help you achieve your business outcomes and deliver value to your organization…contact us today.
Jeremy Blanton is Vice President of Services for Logicalis US, responsible for delivering Managed Services, Professional Services, Customer Success and Service Desk.