I’ve spent the last 15 years in the Webex Collaboration Customer Success organization as a student, constantly learning what excellence looks like. I’ve worked with hundreds (thousands?) of Webex customers guiding adoption and identifying patterns of success. I want one hundred percent of our customers to repeat these successes and be able to use our collaboration tools to do more than they ever imagined. Faster. With less friction. With more fun.

Sounds pretty amazing, right? Like I might be about to sell you a sham-wow? Maybe just a little too good to be true?

I used to think adoption success was random. Some customers just seemed to knock it out of the park. Who knows why? They just didn’t have that many tech support cases. Somehow their users would just use the tools. Their utilization would sky rocket way faster than other customers. And then somehow, they were in the news for record revenue quarters, making a huge impact to their communities or for being included as one of the top places to work lists. I used to think they were just lucky, or their end users were just more open to trying new things. Fast forward a decade and I now know it’s about strategy. The smarter you work, the luckier you are.

And I want to help share there strategy with you. First step is putting a solid plan together with attention paid to seven specific areas: Business Objectives, Leadership, Technical Readiness, Use Cases, Communications, Champions, and Measurement. We wrote an ebook to help guide you through all of these steps to make you an Adoption Master. We have a Team Space to collaborate and share your wisdom with Adoption Practitioners from all over the globe.

The area I hear customers say they need more guidance on when deploying our technology is on the actual deployment of the technology. In Control Hub you can set up user management to be 100% controlled (which means it’s also manual and more time consuming) or completely automated (which means it’s instant, but not controlled by a human approving every request). Workflows can be integrated. Security, compliance, data retention, APIs, bots, and much more can be customized to meet whatever your business goals are. But sometimes too many choices without a clear path is overwhelming. And if all you get is a rigid set of required configurations, they most certainly will not take into account your specific goals, your company requirements, or what is right for you right now.

When I work with customers I spend a fair amount of time understanding their business objectives. Not their goals for Webex – the goals for their company. What will their business look like in six months if everything happens perfectly? I ask the same thing when I’m working with the IT folks who are setting up their user administration. If these teams are not looped into the goals and objectives, they are not given enough information to know what configurations will drive to these goals. “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there” – Lewis Carroll

Below is an example of how we used our own Adoption Methodology Pillars to ensure our project was a success:

Business Objectives

My team’s business objectives were to create a guide educate our org admins on all the capabilities Control Hub offers and then to help these teams configure their Webex experience to meet their needs today and easily evolve as those needs change.

Leadership

We had strong leadership sponsorship that gave us the freedom to create the correct solutions, allow the right team members from across various business units to contribute and clear obstacles as needed.

Technical Readiness

We had an amazing technical readiness group who tested the flows, our recommendations, and put themselves in the shoes of our users.

Use Cases

Before we even started creating the documents or trying to come up with a solution, we created user personas by talking to customers, partners, and customer success members. Our team created use cases from these interviews and as a result we addressed our audience with a catered approach.

Communication

The document itself is a form of communication, but we are also blogging, holding classes, sharing this information with partners, customers, and anyone who will listen.

Champions

We have a strong champions network (that we built in part from our persona building) – but we’re making it even stronger by inviting you to participate: https://eurl.io/#BkJ2mGLQH.

Measurement

And finally to measure the success of this project – we want to track how much more quickly we are able to help our admins move through their own Technical Readiness with this guidance.

My hope is we’ve created a resource that guides you to make the best decisions for your organization’s needs. Not one that dictates one path for all. I hope it’s juuuust right to give you the “why & how” to ensure your Control Hub configurations are set to enable long term frictionless administration and a rock solid (delightful) user experience.

We’re continually evolving this guide as Control Hub incorporates more and more ways to seamlessly integrate into your organization’s workflow. Our adoption team would love your feedback on this asset so we set up a survey in the book to make sure it keeps getting better and better. I can’t wait to hear your feedback (and incorporate it!). https://ebooks.cisco.com/story/controlhubessentials

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