Cisco Customer Success Practice
Alpha Data Service Framework
At the core of the Alpha Data Services Strategy is your success, everything we do is to help you to achieve your business objectives and organization’s critical success factors (CSF). To deliver on this strategy, Alpha Data has developed six core service practices that map to the solution lifecycle and cover Consultancy, Professional Services, Adoption, Operate, Maintenance and Optimization Services.
Alpha Data has a dedicated team of Subject Matter Experts to assist and guide you to address your business challenges by providing and demonstrating insight into industry-leading solutions, architectures and best of breed services. In essence, the Subject Matter Expert becomes your trusted adviser, providing insight into solutions and services focused on existing and future architectures, emerging technologies and roadmaps that can help you to be better aware of your options to achieve your organizational business objectives.
Alpha Data has a large team of highly certified system engineers with more than 60% of this workforce holding the highest engineering qualification in their field of expertise, providing you with absolute confidence that we do it once, we do it right.
Solution Design: Our highly technical team is skilled in a broad range of technologies from vendors who are the leaders in their field. We have a proven track record of providing robust and simplified solutions designs that achieve the customers’ business objectives, reducing complexity, including articulation of High Level and Low-Level design documentation.
Project Management: The foundation stone to successful project delivery. Our experienced Project Managers focus on the project’s critical success factors, delivery timelines, resource management, and coordination with the goal being to deliver the project using a turnkey approach.
Deploy: Our Team of highly certified engineers has vast experience in delivering complex and highly integrated solutions time and time again. This level of expertise de-risk your project as our Engineers, Project Managers, and Service Delivery Manager have the knowledge, skills, experience, capabilities, and vendor relationships to deploy your solution using tried and proven delivery processes.
Migration: The breath of Alpha Data’s technical capabilities includes services that help you with your migration activities such as data migrations, and services associated with digitally transforming your organization to on premise / hybrid cloud, public cloud, and multi-cloud.
Testing: Testing is proof of successful solution implementation. Rigorous test plans are shared with you in the form of User Acceptance Testing (UAT) documents that are designed to stress the solution, taking a detailed and precise approach where the expected outcome of each test is recorded against the expected outcome, with deficiencies being resolved.
Though solutions can be technically implemented and tested, there is no guarantee that they will be fully utilized, reducing your return on investment (ROI). This is where Alpha Data’s Adoption services come into play, the objective of which is to enhance your return on investment (ROI) of new technology investment by helping you to use and fully adopt the technology, for each and every persona.
To achieve this objective, an Alpha Data Customer Success Manager (CSM) provides an additional layer of project management that focuses on solution use and adoption; in essence, a layer of project management that sits above the technical solution roll out that focuses on the people, process and your Teams ability to operate and use the solution.
As every customer has different challenges regarding solution adoption, Alpha Data’s Adoption Services are a bespoke service that is tailored to overcome and manage your organization’s predicted and emergent challenges. To achieve this, the Alpha Data Customer Success Manager (CSM) works with you at the Onboarding, Implementation, Use, and Adoption touchpoint of your solution adoption journey:
a. Onboard
At the onboarding phase of the Customer Organization Growth (COG) Lifecycle Journey, the aim is the development of a Customer Success Plan (CSP) that documents your business objectives for purchasing the solution, developing an agreed-upon solution critical success factors, and supporting KPI’s that measure the outcomes of the project and its business success. During this process, we also identify the personas and activities required to achieve solution adoption including but not limited to; internal marketing to increase awareness; training; end-user usage documents including stickers and pamphlets.
b. Implement
While the project is being technically rolled out, the activities detailed in the Customer Success Plan such as internal awareness session, training, knowledge transfers, and accelerators are delivered so that your Team is good to go when the solution goes live.
c. Use
At this point in your journey, the Customer Success Manager tracks and reports upon solution utilization using either telemetry or solution health reporting. During this phase, the Customer Success Manager works with you to identify emerging barriers that are negatively impacting utilization, with recommendations being developed and executed jointly to overcome these.
d. Use
At this critical stage of the lifecycle, the Customer Success Manager continues to monitor and report on the solution with the objective being to ensure that 80% or more of the available licenses are being utilized, proving successful solution adoption and return on your investment.
A common barrier to technology adoption is complexity. Alpha Data Operate Services provide you with solutions that overcome the challenges posed by operating complex solutions by delivering value-rich services such as:
On-Site Engineers: Alpha Data has a range of services that provide you with dedicated onsite engineering resources. These can be used by the customer as a bridging service till your Team has familiarity with the newly deployed technology or a permanent resource that can be part of your team to address projects, change requests, and support issues.
Managed Services: Alpha Data Managed Services provide the tools, resources, processes, and know-how to handle day-to-day IT operations. This allows you to focus on your core business while reducing operating expenses and costs associated with increased skills capability to manage new technologies.
Alpha Data’s Network Operations Center (NOC) provides an around-the-clock monitoring service that includes; performance monitoring; event management; incident ticket management; guaranteed service levels and integrations into Alpha Data’s maintenance services.
The support of your solution is paramount. Every minute of system outage costs your organization direct and indirect financial losses due to reduced business productivity, regulatory fines and reputational and brand sentiment. To alleviate these risks, Alpha Data has created a holistic and comprehensive catalogue of maintenance and lifecycle services designed to address you maintenance challenges, delivering best in class services and providing you with peace of mind.
These services are tried and tested and are delivered by a team of dedicated diagnostics specialist who’s primary objective is to return you production environment back to operation as fast as possible. Alpha Data’s broad range of maintenance offerings and complimentary lifecycle services include 24×7 incident coverage, onsite engineering, incident management, change management, problem management and escalation management.
As solutions mature, problems and opportunity arise organically. Alpha Data’s Optimization Services are a range of advanced bespoke services that target solutions risks and opportunities with the objective being to continue maximizing your return on your initial solution investment and subsequent service and maintenance contracts.
Assessment Services: Alpha Data has a wide range of assessment services that span security, architectures, industry standards, and best practice. Examples of these include penetration testing; configuration review and conformity to best practice, and IT Forensics Consulting Services to name a few.
Assurance Services: As your success is at the heart of everything we do, so is our drive to assist you with maximizing your solution ROI. Alpha Data’s Assurance services assess the current solution health, usage, features, to provide an evaluation of common concerns and gaps; while identifying features that have the opportunity to unlock the hidden potential to drive new value to your business.
This services framework is built around the customer’s lifecycle targeting the customer’s organization growth, by selling, deploying, and helping customers to adopt and expand upon technology that results in tangible and positive customer business outcomes.
Cisco Customer Success Practice
The Alpha Data Services Framework is designed to cover all aspects of your Journey with Alpha Data and has been articulated and developed into the Customer Organizational Growth (COG) lifecycle Journey which maps the major touch points between yourselves and Alpha Data. By taking this approach, the Alpha Data Customer Success strategy provides enhanced synergies between Alpha Data and yourselves
The COG framework interlocks the Business Engagement, the traditional sale motion with the Customer Engagement throughout the lifecycle of the solution, the delivery motion:
- The Business Engagement cog is where Alpha Data helps you to develop the need and provide solution evaluation and technology demonstrations to ensure that you buy once, and you buy right.
- The Customer Engagement cog is driven by your Business Engagement cog with the objective being to successfully deploy new technology ensuring that you have the skills and knowhow to use and support the solution, overcoming your barriers to technology adoption and ensure you achieve your ROI; not just at the time of delivery, but throughout the solution lifecycle.
Cisco CX Practice Lead
Ashish Hatwar
Cisco Customer Success Manager
Ahmed Adnan
Rana N.H Barhoumi
Sajeev Purushothaman
Cisco Renewal Managers
Arun Balaji
John Panuelos