What business problem(s) did your organization / project face, and why did you choose a digital adoption strategy to help you solve it?
As a global leader in networking and security, Cisco is committed to power an inclusive future for all, by helping every customer simplify the complex and accelerate their journey toward a resilient security posture. With the rapid growth of our Secure Access portfolio, our challenge was maintaining a high-touch onboarding experience at a massive global scale. We recognized an opportunity to further accelerate the time-to-value for customers transitioning from provisioning to active deployment. We chose a digital adoption strategy to provide an elite, self-service guided experience that mirrors the expertise of our Customer Success Specialists. This strategy would ensure that every customer, regardless of size or spend, has immediate, 24/7 access to deployment best practices directly within the product.
How did you use WalkMe, in conjunction with other strategies and technologies, to address your challenges?
We leveraged WalkMe to create a digital onboarding guide within the Cisco Secure Access dashboard. This wasn’t just a technical implementation; it was the culmination of the expertise of our Onboarding Customer Success teams, insights from Product Analytics, and guidance from UX/UI. We codified the collective knowledge into automated, in-product journeys. By integrating WalkMe with Cisco Secure Access, we provided a seamless layer of guidance for critical security milestones, such as DNS traffic redirection and Secure Client deployment. This allowed us to augment our human-led onboarding with a scalable digital layer, ensuring a consistent experience for every user.
How does your digital adoption strategy, especially with regard to WalkMe, impact or benefit your end-users (customers and/or employees), your team, and leadership?
The impact was a dramatic acceleration in security maturity across our customer base. Our data-driven pilot (A/B test) showed that our WalkMe-powered in-product onboarding guide led to substantial increases in deployment across all key metrics: Secure Web Gateway traffic (+17.4 points), DNS deployment (+31.9 points), and Secure Internet Access rule configuration (+33.6 points). We also saw a 32.4 percentage point boost in Secure Client setup and a 25.8 point increase in ThousandEyes integration. For our internal teams, this strategy acted as a force multiplier, allowing our specialists to focus on high-level strategic consulting while the DAP ensured foundational deployment excellence. Leadership now has a scientifically validated $(p=0.000)$, scalable model to drive product utilization and ensure our customers are protected by the full breadth of our security innovations.
How has your digital adoption strategy, especially with regard to WalkMe, helped your organization better achieve its mission, goals, or values?
Cisco’s mission is to “To Power an Inclusive Future for All”. This digital adoption initiative directly supports our goal of by removing friction from the security journey for all of our customers, regardless of their resources – be it time or money. By increasing the adoption of advanced features like roaming DNS protection and ThousandEyes integration, we are fulfilling our promise to provide robust, comprehensive protection. This project demonstrates Cisco’s commitment to innovation-not just in the security solution itself, but in the way we empower our customers to use it.
What about your implementation or success makes you most proud? Why?
I am most proud of the cross-functional collaboration this project ignited. We brought together Customer Success, Product Management, Product Analytics, and UX/UI teams to build a unified vision of a digital onboarding journey. Seeing that vision validated by statistically significant data, proving that we could nearly double the adoption of key features through intelligent in-product guidance, was incredibly rewarding.
Please share any additional information about your role in the project, your results, and/or your vision for the future that supports your submission.
My vision is to evolve this from “Guided Onboarding” to “Continuous Value Realization and Product-Led Growth”. We are currently expanding this framework to our Secure Private Access (SPA) and DNS Defense portfolios. By integrating these in-product guides along with our broader digital lifecycle engagement model, we are creating a unified, proactive ecosystem that anticipates customer needs before they even arise. We aren’t just helping customers “start”; we are ensuring they continuously evolve and enhance their security posture with Cisco.