Ciena is a global leader in telecommunications networking, offering innovative solutions for adaptive networks. With over 1500+ customers worldwide and 8000 employees, Ciena is a leader in designing high-performance hardware, providing software systems, and enabling professional network services on a global scale.
Ciena’s customer enablement team, including Senior Analyst, Lalit Kumar, faces the daunting task of enabling efficient and excellent product experience for end users, customers, and improving support team workflows.
His webinar with Moveworks’ Staff Customer Success Manager Gloria Kang discussed key insights, such as:
- How Ciena implemented AI solutions to help employees address work-specific challenges efficiently.
- How Ciena developed specialized AI programs to streamline tasks and make work easier, such as approving requests and managing time-off processes.
- The tactics Ciena took to gain feedback from employees to understand their needs and improve their AI programs.
Keep reading to learn how Kumar’s team assessed these challenges, found an AI support solution to improve enterprise wide knowledge management, built automations across their enterprise, and enabled truly global enterprise support excellence.
Driving Productivity at Ciena with AI: Watch the full webinar here
Initial pain points
Ciena faced several major pain points, challenges that stemmed from user difficulty in accessing up-to-date information and from lengthy approval and support processes.
1. Finding updated knowledge: Users challenged to find the resources they need, had to navigate through multiple systems, which caused inefficiencies.
2. Stretched support teams and high resolution times: Long wait times for issue resolution, hours to sometimes days to resolve issues.
3. Lengthy, complex approval processes: Time-consuming approval processes relying heavily on email and portal hopping.
Choosing an ideal AI solution
Ciena envisioned a one-stop shop available at all times to improve employee experience. After evaluating over a dozen bots, they felt Moveworks could be a good fit due to its:
- Extensive automation: Use out-of-the-box (OOTB) automations to enable scalable processes and rapid deployment.
- Easy knowledge management: Help streamline enterprise-wide knowledge management and and information access.
- High ease of use: Having a user-friendly platform could accelerate adoption to efficiently improve processes and support with minimal training.
- Native integrations: Seamless connectivity with existing systems would enhance knowledge management and enable quick automation deployment.
- Collaborative support: Moveworks expert team was able to work closely with their team on use cases and enabling alignment with AI strategy.
Moveworks was able to offer a comprehensive platform that aligned with their product roadmap, vision for the future, and offered plug-and-play features to quickly start automating use cases.
Managing a quick implementation
Soon after signing their contract, Ciena had implemented multiple use cases and integrated with different systems, supported by Moveworks’ implementation team, which involved a few strategic steps:
- Clear objectives and prioritization: Teams prioritized critical issues: approvals, notifications, knowledge management, and process automations.
- Collaborative approach: Regular meetings, transparent communication, and shared goals drove the project forward, keeping everyone aligned and focused.
- Iterative feedback and adjustment: Ciena and Moveworks adopted an iterative approach deploying to an initial group of hundreds of users.
This strategic, cooperative approach enabled a fast and effective implementation of Moveworks AI, addressing Ciena’s operational inefficiencies and setting the stage for sustained improvements in productivity and resource management.
100+ use cases, transformative outcomes
Take one simple example of the difference before and after Moveworks for Ciena employees – extending the employee laptop refresh cycle from three years to five.
Ciena's customer enablement team built an automated solution so their AI Assistant “Navi” could use HP website info and to automate responses to the hundreds of laptop refresh queries per month. This was just one of the 100+ use cases that Ciena’s customer enablement team built with Moveworks.
- Building 100+ use cases: Moveworks extensive list of connectors and native skills helped speed up implementation across 100+ use cases. Ciena built extensively with HRIS and ITSM tools, and across departments including HR, legal, facilities, and more.
- More employee self-service: Users could address queries and tasks through AI Assistant “Navi,” improving employee self-service across various business systems, and the engagement ratio is increasing every quarter.
- Approval times drop significantly: Average resolution times have greatly dropped, helped by personalized employee notifications to automate and streamline IT and HR approval processes – no need to tool travel
- Accelerate notifications and reminders: Use cases included timesheet reminders and training notifications, timely reminders that helped to reduce manual follow-ups by support teams.
- Enterprise-wide impact: Implementation began with a pilot group of departments and is quickly spreading across the organization.
Lessons learned
Throughout the implementation of Moveworks, several valuable insights were shared for other support leaders considering AI solutions:
- Align stakeholders on a vision: Create an AI roadmap with quarterly goals. Incorporate feedback at every stage, analyze performance metrics, and make informed adjustments.
- Choose an OOTB ready solution: Use the native skills that Movework provides; their extensive list of connectors helps speed up implementation.
- Facilitate change management: Prep employees for the transition through training and support with frequent webinars to support new skills.
- Clear communication: Regular updates and open channels of communication aligned different parties to stay on track.
- Choose a true AI implementation partner: Ciena engages with Moveworks’ product team and works with them to expand use cases to other business units.
Impact of AI-powered support
By addressing critical pain points such as enterprise knowledge management, repetitive support tasks, high resolution times, and diverse plugin deployments across the enterprise, Moveworks empowered Ciena with streamlined approval processes and significantly reduced approval times.
Overall, the partnership between Ciena and Moveworks has empowered Ciena to build more resilient, flexible, and adaptive networks support, and continue driving innovative networking solutions to their diverse clientele.
Driving Productivity at Ciena with AI: Watch the full webinar here
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