The customer success landscape is rapidly transforming into a digital-first model, driven by the need for scalable, cost-effective practices and growing customer preference for self-serve experiences. According to TSIA's State of Customer Success 2025 report, a strategic shift toward digital-led engagements is emerging. And, as detailed in Digital Customer Success by Nick Mehta and Kellie Capote, "the next frontier of customer success is digital", adding that "we believe every company should now be thinking about how (not whether) to deliver a digital-first customer experience."

As we boldly venture into this digital frontier, Cisco recognizes the essential role partners play as trusted guides to customers, and we're committed to continuously innovating to empower them with the strategies and tools to thrive.

Defining Digital Customer Success

Digital customer success is a strategy to drive customer adoption, retention, and growth through personalized omnichannel engagements. It empowers users to self-serve using data-driven automation and centralized resources. This approach centers around delivering helpful experiences throughout the customer lifecycle, not replacing humans -but harmonizing digital and human interactions.

Beyond Traditional Segmentation

Digital preference spans all customer segments, necessitating a shift from traditional high-touch, mid-touch, and tech-touch strategies to a universal, digital-first experience. This model supports self-service across all customer tiers, supported by customer success managers (CSMs) for larger clients and pooled CSMs as needed.

The "3 Ps" Framework

Digital customer success is characterized by three key attributes: Proactive, Personalized, and Predictive.

• Proactive:Facilitates real-time customer self-service through centralized resources such as community forums and guided tutorials
• Personalized: Tailors experiences to individual personas and usage patterns using automated digital journeys and GenAI capabilities
• Predictive:Anticipates needs and orchestrates experiences using advanced data science and AI to identify risks, make decisions, and deliver contextual recommendations

Empowering Partners to Scale through Digital

Cisco uses all three of those attributes in our Lifecycle Advantage program, enabling partners to deliver a powerful digital customer success experience at scale. Partners gain the benefit of Cisco's predictive AI models, personalized content, experience automation technology, and proactive adoption-focused digital journeys that guide customers through the lifecycle -while maintaining their brand identity and primary relationship with the customer.

Announcing New Lifecycle Advantage Program Enhancements

The core value of Lifecycle Advantage is centered on delivering a great digital customer experience jointly with our partners, but that experience must also be coordinated with a partner's CSMs to ensure cohesion between digital and human touchpoints. Our new program enhancements provide that connection.

1. New Digital Partner Playbooks: Introducing our newly redesigned Partner Playbooks -the first of which launches with the new Cisco eXtended Detection and Response (XDR) journey. This comprehensive guide helps partners accelerate their customers' adoption journey. In addition to an overview of the digital content automatically going out to customers at key lifecycle stages, the Playbook offers essential product details and customer outcomes, as well as tips for partners to address potential adoption barriers.
2. New Digital Recommended Actions:Partners can receive prescriptive insights in real time with Lifecycle Advantage's Recommended Action Delivery (RAD) engine. The latest offerings include new insights related to the critical onboarding stage, as well as de-risk insights for customers exhibiting signs of renewal risk.

Onboarding Recommended Actions

Research shows that successful onboarding in the first 30 days is a strong predictor of customer loyalty. Our proactive notification system will deliver Onboarding Progress Reports directly to partners -in their preferred channel -at key milestones to ensure potential deployment challenges are resolved early. The first phase focuses on Cisco XDR, providing partners with:

• Proactive updates on each customer's XDR onboarding progress (based on telemetry) at key intervals over the critical first few weeks
• Automated alerts for customers who haven't completed onboarding within 30 days
• Actionable insights and recommended steps to drive successful customer implementation

De-Risk Recommended Actions

Cisco's powerful risk data science models allow us to identify and predict customers at risk of not renewing earlier than ever in their product adoption-and we aim to empower our partners with the insights and steps to help mitigate this risk.

Through the de-risk recommended actions, partners can:

• Receive automated customer reports to determine which accounts have been identified as being at risk
• Log a remediation plan, customer pulse, and de-risk status for accounts actioned
• Review recommended steps to mitigate renewal risk and safeguard retention

Embrace the Future with Cisco

As the expert authors of Digital Customer Success wisely put it, "Your CS organization has an immense opportunity -the chance to reinvent itself with digital tools, strategies, and tactics, that, in turn, present you with the opportunity to reinvent your entire company."

As we forge ahead into this next frontier of digital-first customer success, Cisco remains dedicated to supporting our partners. By adopting these new capabilities, partners can deliver exceptional value to their customers, build enduring relationships, and achieve scalable success.

To leverage these new Recommended Actions and learn more about what's next, reach out to our Lifecycle Advantage team.

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