The Customer Experience Practice partners with our customers developing customer experience strategies and design for more engaging customer experiences through innovative uses of technology. Our experience designs are based on identified productivity savings & opportunities for incremental revenue with ways to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Strategy Innovation - defining new business models: look at how organizations can expand their brand and address unmet customer needs through the application of technology.
Digital Experience Design - encompassing social commerce, co-creation, wireless interactions, digital signage and other methods of exchange – finding ways to increase engagement on an ongoing basis to support organizational objectives. Also includes how the organization needs to change to support the new services and process.
Service Design - development of multi-layer digital services that enable employees to reach customers through online and real world touch points. With a focus on tools, expertise and communities that help users make better decisions, to shop, to order, etc. or improve the way they work.
Design Thinking Methodologies - as the basis for the team’s process. Audience research techniques of observational studies to gather insight and rapid prototyping – using simulations, illustrations or semi-functional models to assess viability, test business concepts, gather user feedback.
The "IT Transformation" of an organisation from its legacy environment to the next generation of technology is one of the most complex and expensive changes an organisation can undergo. It includes, but is not limited to the following areas:
Enterprise Architecture Strategy: How to improve and optimise business processes
Enterprise Architecture Strategy: manage information across the enterprise
Data Center Strategy, Green IT Strategy, Cloud Computing Strategy: safely migrate from the legacy to the contemporary environment
Enterprise Architecture Strategy deliver on a transition strategy that provides incremental functionality while mitigating risk and staying within budget
Enterprise Architecture Strategy, Cloud Computing Strategy: define an improvement strategy for your people, processes, and organisation as well as the technology
To have an efficient and productive workforce requires the development of a set of capabilities enabled by collaboration technologies. This practice looks across the organization at how collaboration can to improve business performance processes such as Innovation, Executive Communications, Engineering and Sales.
Active Collaboration Room (ADD LINK): specially designed rooms that are connected via collaboration technologies to enable dispersed project teams to work as effectively as if they are in the same space.
Economics of Collaboration at Cisco (ADD LINK): contains case studies by function of the benefits Cisco has realized by leveraging collaboration technology which totaled 1.4 Billion in FY10.
A set of frameworks, methods, techniques and enabling technologies to efficiently manage interactions among manufactures, their partners, suppliers, vendors, other members of their eco system and their customers to maximize value for each participant.
Smart Trade: A set of tools, techniques and thought leadership to promote optimized trade interactions among countries, companies (both public and private) and the end customer/user.
Lean Enterprise Management (LEM): A framework that combines traditional business process analysis with technology enablers to achieve business performance, heretofore unachievable
Intelligent Device Management (IDM): Using Sensor Technologies (RFID, Smart Dust, etc.) to reduce cost, cycle time from legacy operations.
New operational risks are introduced every day and organizations must proactively plan to more effectively defend against natural disasters, terrorist threats, and pandemic flu outbreaks alike. The Business Resiliency practice essentially encompasses any challenge that an organization is likely to experience that negatively impacts the ability to accomplish objectives. This includes the market facing subject areas of business continuity, disaster recovery, information security, physical security , public safety and ultimately even compliance. The practice is designed to reinforce the value of adopting and integrating key risk management principles into primary business and operational processes.
Thought Leadership
Next Generation Events White Paper: Cisco Marketing Product Launches Read
Unifying Customer Experience in a Multi-channel World: Unlocking the Full Potential of Multiple Channels To Engage, Acquire, and Retain Customers Read
The Future of Retail Customer Loyalty: RFID Enables Breakthrough Shopping Experiences Read
Point of View: Casting a Ray of Sunshine on Cloud Computing Read
Point of View: The Shift to Cloud Computing: Forget the Technology, It’s About Economics Read
Expert Profile
Rachael McBrearty
Senior Director
Innovations Practice
IBSG
McBrearty first began to use computers for book design and illustration. But despite her success in book publishing (McBrearty won several awards for her work), the new interactive world of the Internet beckoned. She left publishing to start her own company focused on web design with customers such as J. Walter Thompson, Martha Stewart, and IBM.
McBrearty went to IconNicholson, starting as director of information architecture, and ending as vice president, creative strategy. Here, McBrearty truly dug into the ability of ICT to transform how businesses operate, people collaborate, and companies interact with customers. Working at the highest levels of the Prada haute couture design house and with the world-renowned architect Rem Koolhaus, McBrearty and her team created the software for Prada's flagship store in New York. As the first implementation of item-level RFID, the store is a complete, interactive shopping experience. The New York store was such a success that Prada asked McBrearty to work on other stores in Tokyo and Los Angeles.
RFID became a passion for McBrearty. She designed a RFID Center of Excellence that demonstrated how to use RFID and associated technologies to cut costs, boost productivity, and increase sales. Executives from companies as diverse as Saks Fifth Avenue and Apple Computer visited McBrearty and her demonstration room for briefings. She served as the chief creative officer of the RFID Business Association.
McBrearty gained a high profile with C-level executives across many industries by launching an concept called "social retailing," which provided a vision of how retailers can reach the audience in the heart of the social-computing craze by connecting in-store shopping with the online world in a way that was new and entertaining. McBrearty designed an "interactive mirror" for fashion designer Nanette Lepore, enabling customers to get instant feedback from their friends anywhere in the world. Shoppers stand before an interactive mirror and their image is broadcast on the Internet. Feedback from friends is displayed directly on the mirror. The shopper can try on virtual versions of suggested items in different styles and colors.
The success of the project was enormous and the interactive mirror was named one of Time Magazine's "Top 100 Inventions" that year.
While in the midst of the mirror launch, McBrearty drew the interest of the Cisco® Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG) and was invited to join the team. When asked why she was willing to abandon the bright lights of the interactive design agency scene in New York City, McBrearty says, "Working for a small company, I didn't have the resources to scale my ideas. You need to do this to effect an impact at the C-level. IBSG has the resources, it has the understanding of customer-centricity and the importance of collaboration on business transformation, and it has the C-level contacts to make it a reality. The people here are just brilliant thinkers. I don't know of any other opportunity to make the kind of business transformation impact I wanted to make."
During her tenure at Cisco IBSG, McBrearty has realized her agenda of transforming businesses through collaboration and customer experience, working with companies to determine how to leverage collaboration technologies to enhance productivity and connect with customers, and writing about where collaboration can have the greatest impact within organizations. McBrearty specializes in the next-generation customer experience of using technology to connect customers to employees and enabling real-time interactions throughout the customer journey, as well as building cross-functional collaborative teams focused on customer experience design.
Under her direction, McBrearty's team has achieved some milestone accomplishments, including the creation of Cisco's collaboration strategy, co-leading a collaboration consortium of Cisco's customers to build best practices, applying collaboration to transform R&D organizations to enable "open innovation," and exploring new ways of leveraging technology to enable virtual white boarding and brainstorming.
Despite her busy schedule, McBrearty makes ample time for her family and three small children. And while she is dedicated to her goal of effecting business transformation through technology and equally devoted to her family, somehow, McBrearty still finds time to paint. You can transform an artist into a brilliant business transformation consultant, but you can never destroy the creative drive.
Rachael McBrearty