Cisco Unveils Service Contract Management Solution and Consulting Process for Channel Partners

Cisco® today introduced two global offerings to help channel partners simplify the process of selling and delivering services, enhance their services portfolios, and improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. Cisco Service Contract Center is a Web-based solution intended to simplify the way a channel partner manages and sells services, while Cisco E-Consulting for Partners is an analytical, automated system that provides customized recommendations and activities to address gaps in a channel partner’s services practice.

“Selling and delivering services can mean a variety of things, from providing or reselling technical support to providing a customer with network design assistance. We understand the complexity around building out a profitable services practice,” said Karl Meulema, vice president, marketing and channels for Cisco services. “We have been listening to our channel partners, and they tell us that process simplification and help with business assessments and recommendations are two specific areas where Cisco could really help. We are always striving to help our channel partners differentiate themselves in the market and deliver a profitable and sustainable service to our mutual customers.”

Cisco Service Contract Center
“The level of detail provided by the new Cisco Service Contract Center is going to save us a month’s work,” said Lynne Daly, CSSP renewals/program administrator of Dimension Data. “Now we can focus our attention on selling and servicing our customers instead of waiting for reports, searching for information, reconciling prices, re-entering quotes and solving problems.”

Cisco Service Contract Center is a simple and easy-to-use solution for channel partners who want to identify and track renewal opportunities, quote and order service offerings, and manage service contracts on an ongoing basis. Designed to improve efficiency and enable business growth through the simplification of end-to-end service delivery, the Cisco Service Contract Center solution becomes available for 1-Tier Channel Partners starting on March 27, 2007. For more details, please visit: www.cisco.com/go/cscc.

Cisco E-Consulting for Partners
“As a long-standing Cisco channel partner, we are excited by Cisco’s commitment to channel partner success with Cisco E-Consulting for Partners,” said Paul Lopez, general manager of marketing and services for NEC Unified Solutions. “We look forward to learning about these additional capabilities and hearing how our business benchmarks with other industry leading practices, while taking advantage of the Cisco recommendations and activities. These new services complement our existing offerings and will increase our customer service levels.”

Cisco E-Consulting for Partners is an automated process that measures and assesses a channel partner’s sales and delivery capabilities against its industry peers and leading practices and then provides customized recommendations and suggested activities to address any gaps. Features include the “Partner Dashboard,” which provides a quick summary of a partner’s profile and key performance metrics in a consistent, easy-to-read format. “Findings and Recommendations” prioritize key findings based on a partner’s assessment and provides customized recommendations for each of the identified areas of opportunity. The “Improvement Tracking” section provides a summary of a partner’s key improvement areas so that it can track its progress over time. Cisco E-Consulting for Partners becomes available to channel partners in May 2007.