Even as technology offerings improve at light speed, customers' needs to improve their bottom-line remain largely the same. They want results, and a healthy return on the investments they've made. As we've built out our customer success organization, and taken our partners along with us on our journey, we've found that nothing drives customer value realization like effective adoption. And that's how Cisco's Annual Adoption Workshops (also known as our "Adopt Shops") got started.

At its core Adopt Shop is all about keeping customer satisfaction and frictionless renewals at an all-time high, and it's fast becoming one of our most popular partner events at Cisco. We just wrapped up our third annual gathering in San Jose last month, and it's clear that momentum is building as more and more partners establish adoption practices and hire adoption specialists within their organizations.

The base of partners building adoption practices is getting bigger and bigger, and new partner adoption specialists focused on software and security are also emerging.

In San Jose, it was also clear that the next evolution of customer success is upon us. With a concentrated group of more than 50 partners in attendance, it was great to see so many familiar friends in the audience-people we've worked with for years. But we also saw a lot of new faces, including new adoption specialists focused on software and security. The base of partners embracing adoption is getting bigger and bigger, and at the same time Cisco is continuously adding new offers to our adoption portfolio.

What really excites me is the underlying analytics and telemetry that we provide our partners to execute on value realization. We're now able to deliver information specific to offers in our software, security and services portfolio and provide partners with the insight needed to take action when a customer hits an adoption barrier-such as an incomplete deployment or low feature usage.

The workshops have featured inspirational guest speakers (i.e. CEO of GainSight) who provide use cases and practical advice for moving customers forward on their adoption journeys. During the events we also share updates to our VALUE framework and the latest news surrounding Lifecycle Advisor, Lifecycle Advantage and other Cisco programs designed to provide everything a partner needs to build a more robust adoption practice.

It's easy to see why adoption is so critical to a customer's success. But what does it mean for partners? It's been said that if a customer doesn't see value within 90 days, there's only a 10% chance they'll remain loyal. Adopt Shop is all about positioning partners to ensure value and gain customer loyalty within those 90 days-and ultimately, to create customers for life.

To find out if Adopt Shop is a fit for you and your business,watch this video for a deeper dive into what was discussed at our San Jose workshop.