CX Engagement After Low Adoption
A customer has deployed 900 Catalyst 9200/9300 switches and Cisco SD-WAN across 60 sites, but adoption of the purchased DNA Essentials, ThousandEyes, and Umbrella licenses is low. In the last 90 days there were 38 P1 TAC cases, mostly spanning-tree loops and PoE budget exhaustion, and the customer blames the product. The renewal is in six months, and the account team wants to bring in CX. The customer has no dedicated network architect, two engineers have left, and change requests are still done manually. Executive sponsors care about store uptime, mean time to repair, and avoiding another capital purchase. The CX manager needs to separate product defects from adoption gaps and propose a 90-day plan.
1. What data would you gather to separate product defects from adoption gaps?
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Gather TAC case root causes and repeat rates, configuration compliance, license usage, Catalyst Center assurance scores, PoE budget reports, and spanning-tree topology change history. Interview the remaining engineers about change process and training. The reasoning is that repeated loops often indicate missing templates or manual changes, while the same bug across many sites indicates a defect. If PoE exhaustion appears only where budgets were never modeled, that is an adoption and design gap, not a hardware failure. This evidence prevents an argument about blame and focuses the CX plan.
2. Propose a 90-day CX plan using Cisco CX offers.
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Weeks 1-2: health check and architecture review, including PoE and spanning-tree remediation. Weeks 3-4: Catalyst Center templates and compliance baseline, plus a change process. Weeks 5-8: training and shadow operations for the customer team. Weeks 9-12: ThousandEyes and Umbrella onboarding, runbook creation, and a success review. Use CX High-value services and the Success Track to structure the engagement. The reasoning is to stabilize first, then automate and adopt, so the customer sees case reduction before the renewal conversation.
3. Define success metrics and the renewal narrative for the executive sponsors.
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Track P1 cases per 90 days, MTTR, percentage of devices compliant, license adoption, and change success rate. The renewal narrative should connect these to store uptime and avoided capital spend, not to feature lists. If P1 cases fall and compliance rises, the renewal is about continuing the operating model; if not, CX should re-scope. The reasoning is that executives fund outcomes, and adoption metrics prove the purchased technology is being used.