Listening to Customers

The definition of listening is “to make an effort… to hear something… to pay attention… to heed advice.” It’s a critical element in defining the success of any relationship and it’s the starting point for all of EMC’s customer interactions. In fact, it’s one of the key drivers behind our award-winning Total Customer Experience and Customer Commitment.

Total Customer Experience at EMC is reflective of the end-to-end lifecycle that customers and partners experience. It starts when customers engage us to better understand how our products, services, and expertise can help them solve business challenges. It continues as they are enabled by the use of our solutions. As their businesses evolve, the proposed solutions need to scale and change in order meet the challenge.

We do not sit back and passively wait for innovation to fall upon us. Rather, we immerse ourselves in the process, responding to and addressing feedback from our customers, partners, and our own workforce. Our continuous improvement loop, coupled with industry-leading advancements that solve real customer problems, is what sets EMC and the Federation we are a part of apart from the competition.

• We Listen. Survey data from our top 3,000+ customers give us insight into how we are performing across the customer journey. This is complemented with a deep understanding of the loyalty of our partners, offering clarity in the way we enable business. Next, consistent measurements across product and service outcomes provide key feedback with respect to quality.

• We Analyze. Statistical analysis is used to arrive at key drivers and focus areas; advanced text analytics are leveraged to identify trends in unstructured data, such as customer comments, and to measure the strength of customer sentiment. Something that makes me particularly proud is the use of Big Data analytics to create a detailed picture of service delivery characteristics that result in good customer satisfaction (CSAT) and methods for continuous improvement.

• We Act. The opening of our Utah Center of Excellence and the widespread deployment of Live Chat in multiple languages are two tangible examples of how we have taken direct action based on feedback. PTC also recently highlighted EMC’s customer-oriented workforce management initiative in a case study posted on their site, entitled, “EMC: Transforming Customer Service with Agility”.

The Total Customer Experience is not about a specific function, team or group; it is about rallying our collective talent and energy around a common set of shared investments, data and programs, to bring a continuous improvement mindset to all our interactions.

What we are hearing from our customers and partners is encouraging – availability & reliability rates improving across product lines and CSAT is at best-in-class levels.

There’s always more we can do. We are unlocking doors to deliver a truly world-class experience by continuing to innovate in the way that we listen, analyze and act upon customer and partner feedback.

For more insights on IT trends from senior leaders at EMC, see our Reflections Blog.