Ask The Expert: Continuous Improvement Through Customer Feedback

Hello and welcome to our Ask the Experts Session on Continuous Improvement through Customer Feedback. I'm looking forward to all your discussion and comments.

Regards,

Brian.

Look forward to listen, share and ask session.

Hi everyone, just a little about myself. I've been in EMC for over 6 years now and have had customer facing roles my entire time, working in Remote Managed Services and Global Solutions groups.

I'm currently working as a manager in Customer Service for over 2 years now and find that engaging with customers and in particular building relationships has been a tremendous success for both us and our customers.

Regards,

Brian

What a great way to collaborate. I am excited to hear from you & share some of my views on TCE.

Bit about me: I have been working with various customers in different roles for last 15+ years.

Around 10 years spent as Pre-Sales Lead, enjoyed every bit of the relationship that I built with various stakeholders in customer organization. Being a trusted advisor for the customer brings in sense of responsibility, as it would mean customers believe in you for their success. And bet $$ on you!! then around 3 years worked as Solution Architect, to understand customer environment, create solution blueprint and own up complete solution to achieve customer’s business objective. And now recently working with customers, to understand their business needs for cloud journey. Map it to a Solutions, to deliver successful Customer Cloud Strategy.

As part of our best practices in delivering quality solution to customer, we always believe in providing best user experience. For best user experience all round, there are many initiatives that we drive within EMC. Today I want to talk about the Internal Collaboration that we do, to better our user experience. Let see how it works:

In large organizations it’s obvious for one to be, ignorant of what others within the team, across team, across BU or departments, are doing. If my customer is facing an issue, and I am working towards the solution, I may spend hours or sometime days to find a solution. I May end up escalating it to various levels, which not only is frustrating for the customer, but also is unproductive, to many people in the organization. Imagine someone within your team or cross team (seated right there on the floor) knows exactly how to fix it. Well, it’s like, one hand not knowing what the other knows… isn’t it? Does it sound familiar??

To avoid such situations, we created a QAG (Quality Assurance Group) which is a group of experts from various BU’s like support, Implementation Specialist, Solution Architects, etc., whenever I am stuck with an issue, I blast an email to this group. Looking at the error message or screen shot, someone pop’s up from the cubical next to me (hopefully J). Hey!! I know how to fix this…. J

Well here you go…. No Escalations, No Frustrations, No waste of time…. !!

I see at least 5 – 10 query fired every day on the DL & people responding within minutes. This has significantly improved productivity, reduced turn-around time & provided better user experience.

Please share your experiences & help us understand what else you would like us to do….

Hi Chirag,

That's a great example, and collaboration within our growing organisation is going to become more and more important as we look to get the right people and expertise working on the right cases for our customers.

Brian.

Our team is currently aligning to Professional Services teams and Partners in an attempt to get early engagement with customers while product roll-outs are in POC or Test & Dev phases, prior to going into production.

We have found this to be very helpful for new products such as ViPR and ViPR SRM because sometimes there is a bigger learning curve for customers with these newer products. It helps us to engage early, get to know the customer and their environment and therefore be in a position to offer a better level of service when our help is required.

This has proven to be very beneficial to customers in the early stages of a new technology roll-out and also builds a strong relationship into the future with our customers and partners.

Brian.

Sometimes it's difficult to get customer feedback when you sit in a big engienering organization. That's why I like to send my user experience designers to meet with customers at various events. Just yesterday, the interaction designer for ViPR SRM (JoAnne Hubbard) participated in the EMC Forum in NYC. She had a booth, and participants could simply walk up and give her feedback on some new ideas for dashboards.

We also signed up some new members of our Design Advisory Council for ViPR SRM!

The Design Advisory Council is a group of ViPR SRM customer who sign an NDA and then participate in one or more meetings a month during which we show them designs for the next release of the product. They have an opportunity to shape the product. If you are interested in becoming a member of the Design Advisory Council for either ViPR SRM or Service Assurance suite, let me know my sending mail to EMCUSabilityTesting@EMC.com

Customers - how do YOU want to give us feedback?  Do you want to:

• Give all feedback through problem reports/bug reports/SRs?
• Meetings with your sales reps where they bring along some of the engienering team?
• User groups
• Participate in usability tests and Design advisory councils
• Twitter? Facebook? Instragram? Reddit?

I'd like to use whatever is easiest for you.  We're open to changing how we do things.

I would like to firstly say, I appreciate customer feedback whether it about me, my company or a competitor, whether it be good or bad. In my opinion a company that listens to their customers' needs is a winner in my book.

Over the tenure of my life, I have learned to pick up a sense of customer satisfaction from what I did right and especially those that were wrong from the customer feedback (verbal and/or written). I can remember as far back to my college days, when my manager of a café shop explained that a mystery shopper has marked me highly. The feeling was satisfying and it was from there I decided to continue to find the mecca of satisfaction and used this to service my customer from past to present.

Today I work as an implementation engineer for EMC for the portfolio of Enterprise Storage (VMAX, Cisco) and Data Protection (Data Domain, Avamar) solutions at EMC Professional Service Division.

In my line of work, I have seen transparency as the key to customer satisfaction, how we came to that conclusion, you may ask, well from getting feedback and reactions from customer right there and then and at times an appreciation in the form of emails and letters from the customer. I treasure these comments from the customers and hoping for more to come through over the years.

So besides getting customer service response, I get pumped each day from listening to Janet Jackson’s track Trust a Try, and to get me thinking about Total Customer Experience I have a quick mnemonic that I run through when meeting the customers for the first time, PERFECT

So with all that I have said, I hope to hear some great experiences that you as customer’s had, had from EMC and vice versa. Let us know what we should be listening for and methods that you believe will work or have worked already with your special experiences with EMC, whether it be social medium, face-to-face, surveys,etc.

Or Do you resonant with our TCE with being PERFECT (Professional, Efficient, Reliable, Friendly, Expert, Caring and Trust)?

So now don’t everybody rush to speak up at once and am looking forward to your comments and experiences.

Good question Mary Beth - understanding our customers preferred communications method for feedback is very important.

We have been a customer of EMC for a very very very long time,  we used to buy mainframe memory from EMC ..that should tell you how long we have been a customer

I really enjoy when our TC brings a SME to our bi-weekly meetings, it's informal, it's very productive. We talk about things that matter to our environment, to our customers.

Honestly when i first heard about user forums i had completely different expectations. I expected them to be somewhat technical, where SME/Engineers would talk "nuts and bolts" about new EMC gear but what i find is that these users groups are mini "EMC World", lots of Marketing, dog and pony show ..no substance. You wanted honest feedback, here is for ya.

I will give you an example what i consider worth my time. I think it was two years ago when EMC just acquired XtremIO, our local EMC office brought XtremIO hardware to the local office, asked a couple of XtremIO engineers to come down and give us a good technical presentation/demo. The whole thing lasted a day, there were a couple of customers from around town ( i live in Atlanta). I really enjoyed this format because it was very focused on one specific product, i got to hear other customers from around town talk about their challenges and how this technology could help them. That interaction with other customers gave me some ideas of what we could do with that technology.

Regarding feedback on SR satisfaction, there is more work to be done. What's the point of sending me a satisfaction survey for a routing disk replacement.  I don't want to know i had a disk failure, EMC calls our 24/7 operations center, notifies them they will be onsite, comes in and does their work.  You need to send me surveys after i experience Sev 1 issues, that's when it's your support organization time to shine. How fast do i get a call-back, how fast do you bring in additional resources to the table.

Also i would like to initiate a survey, give me an option to fill out Walker survey because i want to share my experience with you (good or bad). I don't want to call my account team, i don't want to call my SAM. I want to click on a button and fill out the survey, first of all it's very easy for me to do, i don't need to get my SAM/Account team involved, second of all you (i hope) you collect this information and run analytics against it so you can improve your customer service.

Thanks for your participation and your response.

I heard the same where EMC started in the memory business, from a camp fire I had many years ago with people that have lived and breathe at EMC for many decades. It's great to hear and see your contributions and dedication that you and your company had with EMC and value your comments. 

Funny you should say around the TC bringing SME to a periodic meeting, I recently was brought into an account to discuss the potential of Purpose-Built Backup Appliance (PBBA) which includes Data Domain. I realise that customer love having new faces and product talks with them. We also get the customer’s to fill in the survey and get their feedback around what interest them.

I learn from these feedback to better my presentation, so I value these very much. As to the content on the forum, there has been some insightful discussion on the technical aspects of the product and even time where we help customers with their questions around the best practices and configuration of these. However I believe we could do better and will do better from your feedback.

Again thanks for your feedback around SR satisfaction surveys and I share your sentiments and we value these comments as these are collected and filtered to produce a tailored Total Customer Experience to your needs and that of your organisation. I believe we are working towards building a system that would cater the experiences of a Severity 1 and value that your philosophy around management of these.

I also like your idea of analytic processing, we should be eating our own dog food with our own supplied technology. So not a bad idea (wink wink) and will take on board your comment. For now I am happy to be that Monkey that collects your information, so you can initiate a survey with me.

By the way an amid fan of your blog and the funny thing is that your blog has got me out of some sticky situation, love the piece you wrote on Oracle and Data Domain.

Thanks again for your comment and hope to hear your contribution on our forum and look forward for your contents on your blog.

Hi Dynamox,

I just wanted to add some feedback on one specific area of your question, which is the SR Satisfaction portion of your query.

It’s true, the frequency of the surveys is random as you have noticed, although it was set-up this way to get an understanding across all areas of support from disk replacements all the way to severity 1 cases, therefore covering the full spectrum of support we provide to our customers. It was also designed to be random as way to solicit unbiased feedback from our customers although I do understand that being able to send commentary on any case may be a better option for some. What I always have my team do is include my email address for customers if they do want to provide feedback outside of the official survey directly to management. This has provided me with lots of valuable and actionable feedback over the years, which is always great to have.

We always want to hear from our customers and feedback is a great way to help continuously improve our service levels. This may not always be thorough a survey, but email/phone feedback is also valued tremendously in EMC.

I hope this helps clarify one of your points.

Best Regards,

Brian.