In 2016, the Customer Success Talk webinar series brought together a wide array of influencers and decision makers from Cisco partners, both large and small. Our subject matter experts focused on the business case for customer success management (CSM) and the people, process, automation and analytics that must come together to form a post-sale lifecycle management practice that createscustomers for life.

Customer Success Talk Rewind: Get caught up on what you've missed. Watch highlights of all 2016 sessions.

While the webinar series was created to share strategy and tools, it has also served as a venue to engage in a dialogue with our partners to better understand how they are progressing on their own CSM journey. Across 15 webinars, and interactions with 4,000-plus attendees, we gained valuable insights into the challenges partners are facing in maintaining customer health in today's subscription economy. Nearly all are establishing their own customer success practices to improve the customer experience, drive loyalty, and find new opportunities for growth.

So how are your peers coping with customer success management? Here are some key insights from the webinar series:

• Partners know what customers want: faster ROI and outcomes. But most partners-as many as 68%-are not actively tracking if their solutions are delivering the outcomes the customer signed up for.
• Most partners consider themselves on the lower half of the CSM maturity matrix. As many as 81% are still not making strategic decisions based on real-time, customer health data.
• Most partners have a dedicated renewals team (82%) but fall short elsewhere in the customer journey, such as in adoption and expand selling.
• The number one challenge for partners in building a CSM practice is accessing the data they need.

While many partners still have a long way to go with CSM, the good news is that Cisco is actively sharing the methodology and tools to fill the gaps and help partners build a best-in-class customer success practice focused on creating customers for life. The Customer Success Talk webinar series is a great place to start if you want to get your CSM practice up and running. To get caught up on what you've missed, click here to watch the highlights of all 2016 sessions. And stay tuned for more webinars that are in the works.

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