Client

Cisco Systems is the worldwide leader in providing end-to-end networking solutions for the Internet.  Their mission is to shape the future of the Internet by creating unprecedented value and opportunity for their customers, employees, investors, and ecosystem partners.

 

Business Case

Cisco Systems, operating in an increasingly competitive environment, needed to maintain their dominant market share while improving productivity and profitability.  To accomplish this goal, Cisco management identified a variety of key initiatives, one of which was to optimize and improve customer relationships.  Doing so would result in increased customer retention rates, increase revenues and profits per customer, and decreased sales and support costs.  Specific objectives for this customer relationship initiative included the following:

·          Optimize all customer facing and support functions by providing a single view to all information pertaining to a given customer, including: booking and revenue history, sales forecast, service status and history, shipment history, current/critical account status, and correlation of vendor/customer activity

·          Quantify the lifetime value of each customer

·          Identify cross-and up-selling opportunities

·          Optimize Cisco’s product distribution strategy

·          Provide cross functional groups with targeted communication specific to a given customer

·          Optimize sales credit assignments in a highly matrixed and complex sales organizational structure

 

Why Quovera?

Selecting Quovera provided Cisco with a team that has strong internetworking industry background and a successful track record for managing, architecting, designing, and implementing scalable, flexible and maintainable solutions for customer relationship management (CRM).

 

The Quovera Solution

Quovera helped Cisco develop the vision for the CRM initiative, and managed, architected, designed, and implemented the solution.  The Quovera architect conceived a non-invasive, reference database-based approach that enabled Cisco’s existing systems to seamlessly integrate with the CRM initiative, thereby reducing development impact and on-going maintenance costs.  Four years later, the Quovera architecture is being replicated within Cisco as a model for other key initiatives.  In all, the initiative consists of four reference databases, each of which focuses on a specific aspect of the customer relationship.

 

Business Benefits

·           Better customer retention rates

·           Improved profitability per customer

·           Increased  revenues per customer

·           Decreased cost of sales

·           Diminished cost of customer support

 

Technologies and Solutions

·           Oracle 7.x, 8.x, 8i databases

·           Oracle Designer CASE repository

·           Oracle PL/SQL

·           Oracle Developer 4.x, 5.x, 6.x for web and client-server interface

·           Citrix servers

·           firstLOGIC address cleansing / data enrichment product

·           Proprietary business rules engine, event notification engine, issue tracking mechanism, error handler, application security features, and other reusable components