Ask the Expert: Creating the 3rd Platform Customer Experience with EMC TCE

This discussion is now open for questions. We look forward to a lively and informative event.

Best regards,

Roberto

Hi Mark,

First of all, THANK YOU , for responding to the surveys. The feedback that you and the other respondents provide to EMC through the surveys is critical to our on-going improvement of customer services. I don’t speak just for myself….I also speak for the management of the Customer Services organization up through the executive staff. I can share with you that the VP responsible for EMC tech support organization checks the CSAT scores and reads EVERY survey returned for his organization each morning.

Approximately 21% of customers respond to the survey. This is a high percentage as compared to the industry average and is an indication of how participative EMC customers are in partnering with our service organization.

Every survey that is returned is sent to the service manager responsible for that activity. When a poor survey is returned, the manager is responsible to call the customer to follow-up on the activity to see if there are outstanding issues and to take corrective action. This is a mandatory process within EMC and each manager is goaled on his/her completion of follow-ups.

The survey feedback that is collected is entered into our big data warehouse and analyzed against key metrics and indicators. Of particular note is EMC’s use of advanced text analytics to mine feedback from verbatim comments. We get our most valuable information from the comments that customers enter into open text fields of the survey.

Noticeable trends are identified in real-time and shared with responsible managers for immediate corrective action, if needed. On a quarterly basis, the data is compiled and presented to the Customer Services executive staff with recommendations for improvement.

It would be too exhaustive to list all the initiatives resulting from the survey results here, but I’ll list a few key improvements:

1) Text analytics indicated that customers in North America were dissatisfied with language issues associated with certain support centers. EMC engaged language and accent training, cultural training, and even opened a new support center in Utah to address the customer feedback.

2) Satisfaction with time to resolve of certain types of service issues was poor. As a result, EMC’s support systems were bolstered to help service engineers manage resolution times.

3) Satisfaction with the frequency of communications on on-going issues was a weakness so systems and processes were implemented to increase the frequency of communications

4) As a result of customer feedback, communications at the end of a service event were improved so each customer would have a better understanding of the resolution

A great deal of investment has been made in EMC’s service delivery as a result of customer feedback. We are constantly looking to improve our services and we appreciate the feedback that is shared by our customers.

Thanks again!

Brad Barker

Every time I get a survey from hardware working being done by a CE I try and answer it.  I'm sure you send out a lot of them.  What percentage of participants actually respond?  What have you gleaned from the data collected?

It looks as if "3rd platform" is new catchy word this summer.  I have seen definitions being rather wide and standards rather loose - where does EMC stand there?  Do you only observer and try to server or do you take active participation where you try to define standards? How disruptive is 3rd platform for your own R&D?  What I find is that technology is changing so fast that big companies have some issues following it from their "as service" corner. 

Can a Customer have a mobile experience (app) while filling the customer survey when the SR is Closed?

Thanks.

Hi,

The 3rd Platform is defined as the next phase of the IT revolution and includes mobile computing, social networking, cloud services, and big data. It was actually International Data Corporation (IDC) who coined the phrase. IDC predicts that from 2013 through 2020, these technologies will drive around 90% of all the growth in the IT market. It is expected to grow to include billions of users and millions of apps.

The Third Platform is a significant part of EMC strategy. For the past several years, EMC has been developing Third Platform technologies based around cloud, big data, and trust. We’ve been working to ensure that we align our products and services to support the industry’s transition to the Third Platform. For example, our recent investment in Pivotal illustrates how EMC is evolving our products and R&D.

I’ve been at EMC for 16 years and I’ve found that EMC both defines, and adapts to, changing technologies quite well. We’ve had our eye on “the Third Platform” for many years and will continue to drive innovation in this area.

Thanks for participating in “Ask the Experts”!

Brad Barker

Is it on the roadmap the hability to work on a SR with EMC engineering via social network such as Twitter ?

I don't think twitter can give you security model as current service request models do so I do not see that happening. However, having twitter like chat feedback within global SR management might be something to consider.

Thanks Brad,

I do see a prospect here, being a part of the developing cycle of EMC support app, I suggest if the Survey Option be an added feature in future will work wonders.

Hi Julian,

     Hrvoje is right.  We can't request details from you or send secure information over a medium we don't own.  That said we do have the @EMCSupport handle where we can point you to helpful documentation and knowledge base articles.  Also our support Live Chat has a fantastic response time as well.

You can go here for more information on that option:

Using Live Chat

I agree with Hrvoje and Paul. As a social media tool, Twitter doesn’t offer the security and privacy that customers demand for issues associated with their data center. On the other hand, it could be very useful for sharing information about issues for open consumption as a knowledgebase.

I attended a seminar last year that included ideas of how Twitter may be used in the future. It was proposed that Twitter could offer a private exchange service to make it useable as a channel for customer service. That idea has yet to come to fruition, however.

It is surprising to see that only 21% of the customers respond to surveys. Honestly, I have filled in all the surveys I have received from EMC, and I know that my co-workers do the same as well.

In any case, I would like to appreciate the technical support that we get from South Asia (majority of the SRs and issues that I have dealt with so far), as well as Australia - it is always a pleasure to work with technical folks, but with always a "human" element while dealing with Sev 0 /1 issues, which I find is more important that even resolving the issue itself.

Having said all the above, I have a few issues (pet-peeves, rather)

- Can Support Chat can be incorporated in the EMC Support tool for Mobile?

- It would be great if we (customers) can add Site IDs on our own, and re-arrange products and enter Licenses for products in our Sites under EMC Support. When I open a SR, it only takes 2 minutes to enter the actual issue whereas it takes 5 minutes for the background of the issue, viz., Product ID, Site ID, associated products by sites, or by product licenses and then sites. It becomes a hassle and at a certain point, I just cancel the SR creation and call in or send an email to our SAM / TAM on the same.

Can some remediation be done for the above?

Thanks,

AK

With respect to support chat being added to the EMC Support app: we looked closely at this when designing the V3 release of the app.  We have had mixed feedback from customers on the subject, and felt that there were some pro's and con's to this.  On the Pro side, clearly chat is a popular way to engage remote support on the web, and would translate well to a smartphone for some transactions.  Similar to text messaging and twitter (both hugely popular applications on mobile devices), short interactions on a smartphone would be an effective way to communicate in the context of an SR.  On the Con side of the argument, the rich text interactions possible from a computer keyboard ("traditional" chat) might be challenging to achieve given the small size of the keyboard on a smartphone.  There was also the idea that sustaining a secure connection from a mobile device for the length of a chat session (often over 30 minutes) might be difficult to maintain in some environments, particularly in data centers.

So for the V3 release, we elected not to include chat, at least not yet.

That said, we believe that when it comes to using Live Chat on a mobile app to engage EMC's support team, the pro's outweigh the con's, and it's something that should be in the roadmap.  And it is, but we have not yet identified the specific release vehicle for the functionality yet. 

I'd be very interested in hearing your opinions, either pro or con.

I agree that enabling the mobile app as a tool to participate in surveys is a good idea.  Our agile support methodology considers mobile an increasingly valid channel for all aspects of the support experience, and offering the ability to provide survey responses through this channel would likely increase participation and align with people's expectations.  I'll take this back to the design team and see what the technical challenge might be to implement this capability.   As Brad points out, in the meantime it's possible to provide survey feedback via the mobile device's web browser by clicking the link in the survey email.  Not the fully integrated experience that we'd aim for, but it's not a bad intermediate step.

Thanks for the suggestion!