The Customer Success & Risk Management role is responsible for driving the successful adoption and utilization of Cisco technologies to ensure customer value realization and growth, proactively handling and mitigating renewal risks in alignment with the renewals team by demonstrating risk insights and adoption action plans to increase retention rates, and supporting customer expansion through finding opportunities for deeper product utilization and aligning technology to evolving business needs. This position develops and maintains strong technical influence with customer team members through product demonstrations and consultative sessions to address business challenges and objectives, leads alignment workshops to review adoption progress and drive customer outcomes for successful onboarding, adoption, and renewals, and acts as a technology evangelist by providing feedback from customers to Cisco's product teams to advise product development and improvements. The role also includes crafting and implementing technical adoption plans (TAPs) that align with customer goals to maximize technology investments, staying informed of delivered services and available software, directing customer requests to appropriate teams for resolution of adoption barriers, and collaborating with sales, customer success, delivery, renewals, and business entities to identify use cases that drive value and business outcomes. Additionally, the role requires staying up-to-date with the latest Cisco technologies, including AI, ML, automation, and cloud technologies, as well as maintaining awareness of the competitive landscape and industry trends to provide guide mentorship to customers.

What You'll Do:

• Handles a portfolio with complex or strategic accounts, often with multiple team members (multi-product, multi-region, multi-stakeholder)
• May supervise sophisticated, multi-workstream adoption initiatives, utilizing AI-tools to predict adoption challenges and driving value realization cadence and implementing risk‑mitigation strategies throughout the lifecycle
• Impacts across teams (e.g., standardization, playbook build)
• Leverages deep technical knowledge across multiple products and solutions, acting as a technology evangelist to customers
• Leads health checks and adoption accelerators; codifies standards for scale
• Acts as a pilot user or early adopter of new AI / automation features to validate usefulness; proposes and drives small internal innovation experiments (e.g. automating health checks, anomaly detection)
• Champions the use of AI tools to synthesize feedback and adoption data for ongoing improvement
• Owns technical adoption strategy within their specialization and complete core adoption motions without reliance on CSSs
• Collaborates with peers and cross-functional teams to share field insights and support enablement efforts
• Uses CS’ feedback tools to log adoption barriers, recognizes trends around recurring customer challenges, and surfaces to CXM/others as appropriate
• Leads end‑to‑end orchestration of CS adoption initiatives across programs and partners, crafting sophisticated transformation roadmaps and driving adoption patterns that span multiple technologies and engage cross-functional teams
• Guides adoption efforts with minimal oversight and mentors others on TAP quality and telemetry usage
• Drives renewals interlock cadence and delivers de‑risk and adoption strategies at scale; proactively surfaces and qualifies expansion, renewal, and new‑business opportunities applying adoption insights, and routes to Sales/Renewals
• Systematically scales and streamlines through reuse, modular playbooks, automation of routine tasks
• Engages regularly, and through onsite meetings, with customers’ senior leaders as a dialog partner and to shape strategic adoption plan
• Lead alignment workshops; steers outcome roadmaps and executive updates; raises adoption risks with clear owners
• Partners with customers to co-create proactive and predictive, personalized adoption journeys
• Influences cross-functional internal teams (Product, Engineering, Sales) based on customer priorities
• Guides pooled CSS and partner resources; sets cadence and governance for adoption plans and value reviews
• Guides internal process improvements and pilots new ways of working
• Leads cross-functional working groups involving CS, product, operations
• Acts as a liaison across accounts, regions, or functional initiatives, ensuring a “one-team” customer experience
• Maintains awareness of overlapping service engagements and other CSM teams, coordinating only where directly tied to software adoption plans
• Provides field insights that influence pricing and packaging strategies
• Identifies growth opportunities from adoption signals and partners with Sales on qualification and forecasting inputs (not direct funnel ownership)
• Collaborates with Finance, Sales, and Operations to align software renewal targets and growth levers

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelors + 8 years of related experience, or
• Masters + 6 years of related experience, or
• PhD + 3 years of related experience, or

Equivalent relevant work experience

• Professional level (e.g., CCNP) or equivalent relevant certification encouraged. Industry trend certifications

Why Cisco? 

At Cisco, we’re revolutionizing how data and infrastructure connect and protect organizations in the AI era – and beyond. We’ve been innovating fearlessly for 40 years to create solutions that power how humans and technology work together across the physical and digital worlds. These solutions provide customers with unparalleled security, visibility, and insights across the entire digital footprint.

Fueled by the depth and breadth of our technology, we experiment and create meaningful solutions. Add to that our worldwide network of doers and experts, and you’ll see that the opportunities to grow and build are limitless. We work as a team, collaborating with empathy to make really big things happen on a global scale. Because our solutions are everywhere, our impact is everywhere. 

We are Cisco, and our power starts with you. 

Message to applicants applying to work in the U.S. and/or Canada:

Individual pay is determined by the candidate's hiring location, market conditions, job-related skillset, experience, qualifications, education, certifications, and/or training. The full salary range for certain locations is listed below. For locations not listed below, the recruiter can share more details about compensation for the role in your location during the hiring process.

U.S. employees are offered benefits, subject to Cisco’s plan eligibility rules, which include medical, dental and vision insurance, a 401(k) plan with a Cisco matching contribution, paid parental leave, short and long-term disability coverage, and basic life insurance. Please see the Cisco careers site to discover more benefits and perks.  Employees may be eligible to receive grants of Cisco restricted stock units, which vest following continued employment with Cisco for defined periods of time.

U.S. employees are eligible for paid time away as described below, subject to Cisco’s policies:

• 10 paid holidays per full calendar year, plus 1 floating holiday for non-exempt employees

• 1 paid day off for employee’s birthday, paid year-end holiday shutdown, and 4 paid days off for personal wellness determined by Cisco

• Non-exempt employees** receive 16 days of paid vacation time per full calendar year, accrued at rate of 4.92 hours per pay period for full-time employees

• Exempt employees participate in Cisco’s flexible vacation time off program, which has no defined limit on how much vacation time eligible employees may use (subject to availability and some business limitations)

• 80 hours of sick time off provided on hire date and each January 1st thereafter, and up to 80 hours of unused sick time carried forward from one calendar year to the next

• Additional paid time away may be requested to deal with critical or emergency issues for family members

• Optional 10 paid days per full calendar year to volunteer

For non-sales roles, employees are also eligible to earn annual bonuses subject to Cisco’s policies.

Employees on sales plans earn performance-based incentive pay on top of their base salary, which is split between quota and non-quota components, subject to the applicable Cisco plan. For quota-based incentive pay, Cisco typically pays as follows:

• .75% of incentive target for each 1% of revenue attainment up to 50% of quota;

• 1.5% of incentive target for each 1% of attainment between 50% and 75%;

• 1% of incentive target for each 1% of attainment between 75% and 100%; and

• Once performance exceeds 100% attainment, incentive rates are at or above 1% for each 1% of attainment with no cap on incentive compensation.

For non-quota-based sales performance elements such as strategic sales objectives, Cisco may pay 0% up to 125% of target. Cisco sales plans do not have a minimum threshold of performance for sales incentive compensation to be paid.

The applicable full salary ranges for this position, by specific state, are listed below:

New York City Metro Area:

Non-Metro New York state & Washington state:

* For quota-based sales roles on Cisco’s sales plan, the ranges provided in this posting include base pay and sales target incentive compensation combined.

** Employees in Illinois, whether exempt or non-exempt, will participate in a unique time off program to meet local requirements.