What it Takes to be a Customer-Centric Company

It’s the time of year for reflection and planning, and what a year 2013 has been! After over 20 years of providing EMC engineering and interoperability leadership, I took on a new role leading our Total Customer Experience team. In the spirit of the season, I’d like to share with you what we have accomplished in 2013.

I came from an environment where innovation was driven in large part by customer requirements and expectations as they pertained to specific products. Since then, I’ve learned that if you want to really improve customer and partner satisfaction it is critical to measure the end-to-end experience along every touch point of their journey with your company. I’ve learned what it means to be a world class customer-centric company, and that focusing on customers first truly differentiates you from the competition. Let me share with you the EMC Total Customer Experience (TCE) program.

What is the Total Customer Experience Program?

EMC’s commitment to a customer-first approach begins at the top and filters through every level across the company. This tradition has been in place for more than 30 years and remains part of EMC’s DNA.  With our TCE program we not only listen to customers and partners – we act, we measure and we improve based on their feedback.

We can actually predict which improvements will have the greatest impact, anticipating and addressing issues before they arise.

Our Total Customer Experience (TCE) program’s mission is to “Enhance the total customer/partner experience, leveraging a data-driven approach for continuous improvement throughout the customer/partner journey.”  

I’d like to briefly walk you through the key elements that make up our program:

1. Customer Journey Map – To measure TCE, we employ a comprehensive suite of activities. These provide an all-encompassing view of our customers’ perceptions and experience throughout their journey of buying, deploying, using and servicing EMC products, solutions and services. We collect feedback and analyze it, then systematically use it to help drive strategy for continuous improvement.

1. Comprehensive Voice of Experience (VOX) Measurement  –  We use multiple Voice of Experience (VOX) “listening-posts” to measure:

• Voice of Customer (VOC): We collect input from customers worldwide to assess loyalty using the Net Promoter Score (NPS), measure satisfaction with specific activities and gauge how well we are performing against the industry.
• Voice of Partner (VOP): We listen to partners and help them to effectively provide EMC solutions (products and services) to their customers.
• Voice of Field (VOF): We gather formal input from our field leaders on how they believe EMC is doing for customers and partners in each phase of their journey.

The knowledge we gain helps us accurately understand the customer life cycle – from a CIO making a multi-million-dollar purchasing decision to a user searching our knowledge base.

1. Quality Measurement –   The TCE team predicts and proposes improvements by measuring product quality, reliability and availability across EMC product platforms and services delivery.
2. Analytics, Reporting, and Business Intelligence as a Service –We thoroughly analyze the data and generate reports that help prioritize needs for improvement and define business objectives. Dedicated TCE advisors deliver actionable recommendations and drive joint action plans that add business value in critical areas. Additionally, EMC’s Unified Analytics Platform enables more predictive decision making when defining process and product/service upgrades (more on this in a future post!).

1. Customer & Partner Advocacy – This group conducts customer/partner site assessments, facilitates continuous process improvements and provides documented responses to customer and partner quality questions.  We assess customer and partner infrastructure and requirements to align EMC products and services that deliver business value.
2. Lean Six Sigma and Audit – The team employs proven methodologies and tools to provide efficiencies and TCE improvements.

In 2013 I’ve experienced first-hand what it takes to truly be a customer-centric company (the Technology Services Industry Association recognized this too, awarding EMC two new STAR Awards). Through EMC’s Total Customer Experience program we continue to build on our long-term success and strategy in optimizing our programs and strategic relationships, enabling us to improve customer loyalty. The ongoing feedback we receive and analyze enables us to continually implement targeted action plans that align with their input. The action plans built on real-world feedback produce impactful and measureable results that directly benefit our customers and partners.

In my next blog post, I’ll discuss where TCE is headed in 2014 and beyond – including how we will leverage predictive analytics to drive innovation and transformation with a laser focus on improving the total customer experience.