InformationWeek: Certain companies are well-known for high-quality customer service, and Cisco is one of them. What are the challenges other companies face that Cisco has been able to attack?

Peter Solvik: Two things. One, I would attribute it to the fact that, unlike a lot of high-technology companies, we're not asking our customers to use or do anything that we don't do ourselves. We're living a lot of it ourselves, either with or in advance of our customers--ideally in advance. A lot of people ask: How do you get up to 87% of your business coming in over the Internet? I explain that it's a business problem, not an IT problem. But a lot of companies think once they implement the technology, that will solve their problem.
The second thing is a very strong cultural customer focus, a constant focus on what the customer wants. In the area of support and commerce, we have advisory boards--electronic-commerce advisory boards and support advisory boards--in Europe, the United States, and Asia. They meet two to four times a year. We bring in our most critical customers and explain what we're doing and what our plans are for usually the next six months. Then we get their very frank feedback and keep an ongoing dialogue with them as we release new capabilities. It's a major outbound focus on listening to what your leading-edge customers want and then forming your plans around delivering to those expectations.

M.S. Krishnan: One may expect that the customers of Cisco are going to be IT savvy. How do we tackle this for a nonhigh-tech company trying to deliver services or products over the Internet?

Solvik: There's no question that a lot of our customers are very technology savvy. Back in 1995, when we started pushing orders and generating new business over the Internet, one of the first things we did is survey how many people in purchasing departments have Internet access. So there are nontechnical people who are also involved in this. And as we push more and more to consumer products, I think that's the case also.

InformationWeek: Is there a bridge between the business-to-consumer approach and the business-to-business approach here?

O'Leary: I'm not a big fan of B-to-B vs. B-to-C. It's a couple of buckets Wall Street likes to use to characterize investment models and has very little to do with how you do business. Every situation warrants its own labels. More and more we're finding the models are B-to-B-to-C, or C-to-C to-B. The rhetoric gets in the way of just doing the right thing: If we structure the organization around B-to-B vs. B-to-C, we lose a lot of the B-to-B-to-C or the C-to-C-to-B. So it's just the alphabet soup that gets in the way of what you're trying to create as far as a business system. And where it creates value, and for whom, are the real questions, not the labels.

Ramaswamy: Everybody talks about a company getting a 360-degree view of the customer. There's an implicit assumption that we can capture the lifetime value of this customer. It raises the question of who actually owns the relationship with the customer. More and more, the customer exerts the most influence and wants to own the relationship. As the power shifts to the consumer, the customer would probably be the one who exerts the most influence and wants transparent access to the entire process and to dictate when and how transactions get fulfilled.

O'Leary: I don't know anyone who owns anything anymore. We might rent the relationship for a little while--at the permission of the customer--but no one owns it. To try to take a business model and say, "I'm going to own the space outright or own a relationship outright," is a very ambitious approach. We're building models that are more holistic and flexible, that allow a lot of constituents to exert their advantages at different points and times for different consumers.

Guleri: The 360-degree customer is a fallacy, because 360 degrees implies that it's measurable and fixed--and it's absolutely not. One thing we've noticed that's a challenge from a systems perspective is that customers tend to migrate--to use an analogy--from one nodal network to another. As they do, they carry information with them on the experience they had with products or prices on the earlier network. And they expect to get the same or better as they move toward buying a new house or a book or CD or whatever they might be doing with the new company. To borrow from quantum physics, it's kind of like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle--when you try to measure it, it changes momentum, position, etc.
So, the best we can hope to do is to have this network where all companies innovate and produce and distribute and sell, and if you assume for a second that the production is fixed, then really the customer and the community can drive the selling and the selection process. Something I haven't seen but I hope will be coming on the innovation side is customers speaking to you, communities speaking to you, and telling you what products and services they want. Most companies are orienting the sales and distribution models to gain from the customer--not the product development side. That's a key gotta-have, because customers are willing to exchange information on how they want to see the products and services being distributed.

InformationWeek: Does anyone else feel the 360-degree customer is a fallacy?

Pehong Chen: Many businesses may want to define it in a way that's historically obvious from the analog world, but it's hard to scale that or hard to achieve that. Now, the Web and the wireless revolution could redefine how people look at their business. For example, the automotive industry is going through a very big change, certainly quite a lot of consolidation. But most of them now think they're not just in the business of building cars--they're more and more in the business of helping people go places better. A lot of that's possible now with [things like] the OnStar system in the car, and being able to tap into portal content so that they can alert you to events for the weekend, a country fair somewhere, so they get you to drive the car a little bit more than perhaps you've been driving it. Things like that extend these companies into additional businesses they may not have found themselves in in the past.
I don't know if you want to call it 360 degrees or not, but it's extending that life cycle of the experience all the way from the supply chain to the demand chain, and then bringing it back together. It's also changing a lot of people who used to be in the core processing business to wanting to be in the experience business.

Guleri: We've talked about supply chains, and that quickly changed to supply-chain optimization as the market moved. What we're seeing in our market is customer-relationship optimization, because the customer chooses what kind of relationship they want to have with you, and you optimize how that experience can be provided or guided.
There's a very important piece from a systems perspective that has to underlie all of this, which is intelligence. It has to do with knowledge about the customer that aggregates across internal systems and external systems.
We're finding in some of our customers that not only are intelligent systems--this includes data mining and ALT systems--pulling from data sources internal to the company, they're also being augmented by external data sources, so that you can start benchmarking customers and their behavior across multiple value chains. From a systems perspective, that's a gotta-have.