In my most recent post, Managing Your Service Culture: A Case Study, I discussed employee input as one of the elements that helps us achieve success. As part of our journey to enhance listening, we have started a new type of discussion with our employees. We have just completed more than 25 Employee Focus Groups around the world as a supplement to our other listening vehicles. With the best and brightest service professionals in the business on staff, these discussions generated some very valuable insight and ideas.

Beyond this, we learned something on reflection that is quite simple and not very surprising. It turns out that no matter what language you speak, regardless of where you live in the world, whether you are a customer in your personal lives, whether you are servicing a customer, or whether you are working with an internal employee . . . we all value very similar things in a service interaction.

At EMC, we are going to keep this conversation going with our employees, “What in our company culture is consistent with enabling employees to deliver a superior service experience and what do we need to evolve or change to take it to the next level.”

In other words, every company has a culture, but the most successful companies recognize its importance and manage it accordingly. This is easier said than done and it takes an ongoing commitment from the top down in order to be successful. Done right, it will endure the test of time. EMC provides an excellent case study on successfully managing a service culture that has done just that.

Flashback to May 31, 2001 when another Fast Company article hit the press entitled, “Customer Service: EMC Corp.” Paul Judge dedicated pages of copy to explaining EMC’s commitment to customer service.  I also recommend reading this article to gain an understanding of how customer service has been built into the DNA of this company.  As Judge said, “it is impossible to understand EMC’s 10-year rise without appreciating its commitment to customer service.” It was that commitment that propelled EMC to being a leader in customer service. The article highlights a Forrester Research report in which Carl Howe, a director of research at Forrester, noted, “EMC came out looking like God. It had the best customer-service reviews we have ever seen, in any industry.”

In the 2001 article, Judge pointed out that, “No competitive advantage lasts forever, of course, and EMC’s rivals are betting that its commitment to service may be less meaningful as competition in the storage field heats up.” Here we are 11 years later, and we believe customer service is more important than ever – and that the same will be true 11 years from now. More importantly, EMC’s commitment is greater than ever as well. This story about EMC’s response to a State of Michigan oil spill disaster is a modern day examples of this commitment. In fact, a recent third-party survey of more than 300 customers showed that 88% identify support as a key reason they recommend EMC technologies.

How have we been able to maintain this service culture? I will tell you it is not coincidence, and we haven’t been without challenges. High growth, global reach, and acquisition activity are all examples of potential threats to a service culture. Here are a few things that have helped fuel our success.

• Invest in employees - Service professionals want to help their customers! Provide the ongoing training, processes, and tools that employees need to be successful. For example, EMC support staff is required to complete ongoing training and certifications – for EMC technologies and beyond. This has led to industry-leading retention rates. And customers benefit because they consistently work with expert support professionals.
• Voice of the Customer must drive strategy and initiatives – and the improvements you make must be things that are of value to the customer. My previous posts, Face-to-Face with Customers – Still valuable after all these years and Rethinking Customer Support – “Consumption Economics” and the New Normal touch on this as well.
• Ensure global alignment - We have a Customer Support Playbook that ensures everyone on the team has a common understanding of priorities and how they are expected to contribute to the success of the business. Individual goals and initiatives can be developed to align with the stated objectives of the organization.
• Listen to employees - We do this through an ongoing stream of global focus group workshops. Executives and facilitators meet with frontline employees in all regions of the world to discuss service excellence and enhancement ideas.

In summary, I will add that one element of our success stems from the fact that EMC has never looked at culture as something that merely existed. From day one, EMC consciously built the company on a “customer first culture.” Service excellence extends beyond our front line services teams. It is pervasive in virtually every aspect of the company and from the top down.

The question was simple enough, “Based on your career path, what advice do you have for others pursuing career advancement in a services organization?” This isn’t the first time I’ve been asked this question. I’ve been asked this question in mentoring situations and have also had the opportunity to speak to groups on this topic. Based on a reflection of my experiences, here are five things that have played a key role in my growth.

1.  Gather as much breadth of experience as you can.
Over my 25-year career, I have worked in virtually every aspect of Support Services and Quality and Supply Chain Management, holding multiple roles in logistics, service readiness, service alliances, and field and call center management—at local, regional, and global levels—and in multiple industries. This breadth of experience has played a big role in my ability to understand the overall business and add value. Don’t just think of progression as upward. You can progress laterally as well. Sometimes in your career you may even want to do something that looks like a downward progression to gather experience—because it gets harder as you progress upwards.

2.  Look for the positive in people. Help others be successful.
There are employees in the organization who are doing a great job and just need a little encouragement to be successful. I learned the value of encouragement firsthand when a senior vice president at a previous employer told me that I would someday be running the Services business. I had just been named a director—and was both humbled and shocked by his comment.

That executive had no idea the impact that statement made on me. He told me I had potential beyond what I would have actually thought for myself. From that moment on, I thought differently about myself, and then I acted differently with other people. Search out people who have potential but may not know it. Help them see the potential in themselves. Look for opportunities to develop that potential and put them in positions that challenge them. Force them to create breadth in their experience so that they continue to learn and evolve.

The bottom line is that positive feedback can be very powerful. Take a minute—take 15 seconds—to say to somebody, ‘You did a great job. I really like the way you did this.’ They may be smiling the rest of the day.

3.  Learn from everyone—be an observer.
Observe other people to identify traits that you would—or would not—want to emulate.

4.  Make sure your employees and stakeholders feel heard.
Because the Services business is a people business, with a direct tie between employee engagement and customer satisfaction, it is important to have a workforce that feels very engaged, has an opportunity to be heard, and knows that their input can make a difference.

In the Services organization, you have to be an approachable leader—the type of leader who talks to the workforce (and not just in large forums), takes that feedback, and then finds ways to act on that feedback. The feedback from the organization, particularly those that work directly with customers, is invaluable to the organization as well. Everything from scheduled roundtable discussions, to all-hands meetings to hallway conversations can help make a difference when it comes to ensuring service excellence for your customers.

5.  Diversity: Good for the company and for the business.
Incorporating different perspectives and ideas will help you and the organization to continually create, grow and improve – and your customers will benefit from ever-improving service. Diversity will help in creating a great environment and chemistry that is successful in driving the right results for employees, customers and the business. This is one of the things that I love about the EMC customer support leadership team –a blend of men and women—some from Services and some from other backgrounds, some new to the company, and others tenured.

Speaking of diverse ideas . . . I would love to hear some of yours!

EMC has become quite adept at collecting data from these vehicles as part of its focus on the customer. We have more data than ever about our customers, their requirements and how they feel about the services we provide. (Check out Frank Coleman’s blog for much more on this topic.) In this landscape, it would be easy to miss one very important component of our customer interaction – face-to-face dialogue.

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with 12 customers in a small and personal setting at an EMC Global Services Advisory Forum. EMC representatives and customers discussed a wide range of service related topics and challenges. We are certainly incorporating the feedback we received into our plans for 2012 and beyond. Following are a few key “take-aways” from our meeting.

• Proactive notification on any known technical issues in a customer environment is a high priority.
• Customers appreciate regular updates on EMC strategy and portfolio roadmap at informal meetings/discussions.
• Time spent listening to our customers to better understand their business problems and how they relate to their infrastructure roadmap is time well spent.
• Customers enjoyed this opportunity to hear how their peers in the industry were solving common business challenges. The interaction fueled an active and creative discussion.

There was a time, and not all that long ago, that the primary form of customer feedback was provided face-to-face. I wouldn’t want to go back, as the expanded opportunities to connect with customers have been invaluable. With that said, these recent meetings served as an important reminder; even with busy schedules and seemingly easier ways to connect every day, the time and energy to connect face-to-face with customers is worth it for EMC support and our customers!

Thank you to the customers who shared their time and thoughts with us. We welcome other customers interested in collaborating in this type of forum to contact us.

One of the conference highlights for me was the awards luncheon where EMC Global Services was honored with three STAR awards:

• Overall Excellence in Field Services Delivery
• Overall Operational Excellence in Technology Professional Services
• Overall Operational Excellence in Education Services

EMC also earned its third TSIA Hall of Fame Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of surpassing 15 individual STAR Awards (our total is now 16). EMC is one of only three companies to achieve this level of recognition.

Why are these awards important? The application process for the STAR Awards is stringent and quite competitive. The process requires us to take a look at specific aspects of our support business in detail. While we do this every day with our own criteria and metrics, we welcome this opportunity to map our capabilities against TSIA’s criteria and to be benchmarked against our peers. Investing this time to analyze our processes and capabilities in detail is another step we can take to help us ensure that we are continually innovating and improving service for our customers.

I also believe there is value in asking our team around the world to pause and celebrate their hard work.  Because I lead EMC Global Customer Support, the award for “Overall Excellence in Field Services Delivery” was the one I prized the most. I’ve found the EMC support staff to be somewhat humble while measuring themselves against extremely high expectations. So to this very dedicated team, I would like to say thank you and well done!

Visit TSIA’s Award Page to see other winners and a photo of EMC employees accepting the awards on behalf of EMC Global Services.

I recently read a pre-release, abridged version of the book Consumption Economics: The New Rules of Tech. The book is authored by J.B. Wood, Todd Hewlin, and Thomas Lah. It builds upon some of the thinking in J.B. Wood’s earlier book Complexity Avalanche. In Complexity Avalanche, Wood challenged the industry to think about the impact of product complexity on customers and the opportunity that it creates for the services part of the business. In essence, developing value-added services that enable customers to more fully consume product features and extract real value for their business can create that “stickiness” for which we’re all striving.

In Consumption Economics, Wood and his co-authors take this one step further. They explore how the growing use of cloud and transactional business models create a new normal in high-tech. While I have only read an excerpt from the book, I am anxious to get my copy at TSIA’s upcoming Technology Services World (TSW) conference.  The book supports the theory that we are in the midst of a huge paradigm shift in many ways and credits the global economy, cloud computing and the iPhone as the primary drivers. No surprise then that EMC’s Cloud and Big Data strategies are resonating with customers that are already operating in or moving toward this new normal.

EMC’s journey is not over. In fact, the very model in which we are now operating makes change a constant. We continually talk to our customers every chance we get, through many different vehicles and forums. We continue to invest heavily in our global field organization and data analytics capabilities so that we can remain close to our customers and better understand their experience.

Big data analytics are central to running the business. We mine tremendous amounts of data – from millions of service requests and other data points – and analyze it carefully so that it can be funneled back into our service and support model as well as into our product development. I’m proud to say we have been on the front end of this as evidenced by the TSIA STAR Awards we have received for our innovation in this area.

If you are interested in taking a closer look at the book and big data topics, I’ve included some helpful links to get you started. For me, Consumption Economics validates the strategic work we have been doing to evolve our service model to help our customers achieve maximum value from our product and service offerings.

Helpful links:

Consumption Economics Abstract – https://www.tsia.com/consumption-economics-abridged

Blog Post by Alan Walsh: Using Big Data Analytics to Manage Business Risk

Blog posts by Frank Coleman: Using Big Data for Performance Metrics – Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game and B.A.D. Data Is Not Always Bad…If You Have a Data Scientist

Greenplum Big Data site as possible reference: http://www.greenplum.com/media-center/big-data

I am fortunate enough to work for an organization that is the source of progressive yet reliable information – not only about customer support, but other relevant topics. I have found an incredible thirst for knowledge and excellence at EMC and this has fostered an environment of both learning and teaching. My colleagues throughout the company have been invaluable to me and I would like to think the reverse is the case. There is a good deal of sharing about our specific areas of expertise and access to resources inside and outside of the company.

This got me thinking. What role do vendors play in educating the industry and in some cases, instigating new directions? I’m sure the answer varies widely among vendors, but as I look around, I see EMC playing a very vital role in educating customers. Some of the places this happens are at conferences, both industry- and EMC-sponsored. EMC is often invited to speak at industry conferences, such as TSIA’s upcoming Technology Services World (TSW) conference, where speakers share best practices and experiential knowledge.

There are also a number of company-sponsored events that provide opportunities for EMC to share information and give customers an opportunity to network with industry peers. In addition to large-scale events such as EMC World, customers have access to more targeted meetings. For example, EMC Forum events are being held this year in more than 20 cities around the world. These are free events providing information on relevant topics such as cloud computing and big data, along with the opportunity to network.

Online, there are also tremendous opportunities for such interaction through EMC Support Forums where you will find customers and EMC technical staff sharing ideas and knowledge. This sharing also occurs through a continuous stream of white papers and articles published on both emc.com and the support portal.

It would be great to share ideas here. What information resources do you find valuable?

For me, the article is an important reminder that we must remember the basics in our quest for service excellence. “Are we making the resolution process as effortless as possible for our customers?” Certainly this goal is nothing new to EMC, but I do believe posing the question in this way ensures this important facet is not forgotten. Here are some of the strategy elements that help ensure success.

• Provide service through vehicles most desired and convenient for our customers. This is a huge priority for us. Technology, social media, and other advancements have broadened available channels, and individual customer preferences vary. A solid customer support strategy must include multiple vehicles beyond traditional phone such as community forums, online chat, and a customer-accessible knowledgebase. Each must be tuned to achieve fast issue resolution.
• Invest in online service. Simply making a vehicle available doesn’t make it effective and efficient for the customer. These channels require ongoing investment and process refinement to ensure success.  For example, EMC has a very active online support community. Global customers engage one another to discuss challenges, ask questions and resolve issues. EMC plays an active role that extends beyond just investing in the technology. We have implemented a staffing rotation program that ensures knowledgeable staff is available to assist with responding to requests and updating the knowledgebase.
• A proactive support strategy helps resolve issues before they impact a customer environment. At the core of this is remote support technology that allows secure around-the-clock remote monitoring, diagnostics, and resolution of potential issues.  EMC provides this through our EMC Secure Remote Support (ESRS) capability. We also provide a portfolio of personalized support options that customers can choose from to implement a broader proactive support strategy. Such a strategy helps customers maintain a current environment, identify issue trends before they become impactful, and perform root cause analysis.
• Empower the front line by providing support engineers with the right knowledge, resources and processes to do their job effectively. Customer services professionals want to serve their customers! Opportunities for ongoing education and certification credentials are critical. For EMC, this has driven high staff retention rates and an average length of service of eight years.
• Use customer input to make key improvements in the organization. For additional ideas on this, take a look at a post by my colleague Frank Coleman, Data Scientists – Big Data Often Starts Small, So Get Your Foundation Right.

Well I will end this post by simply admitting that I still want to delight our customers.

There are many facets to what makes our customer support leadership tangible when it comes to providing the best support for VMware environments. I will quickly touch on those that I view as most relevant. First, simply put, we support more virtualized environments than any other vendor. This is a result of customers recognizing EMC as the best solution. Backing this up, Wikibon published research results last month highlighting that 53% of participants said EMC had the best VMware solution. This is more than all other vendors combined and a true sign that our synergies with VMware resonate with customers. Second is that EMC offers the highest degree of integration with 75-plus integration points between EMC products and VMware. (Read more about this in our press release.)

While it’s important that we have comprehensive integration and a high number of deployments, this must be backed by top-shelf service.  Working with TechValidate to poll over 120 customers, we found that nine out of ten IT organizations prefer EMC Customer Support for their virtualized environment over other storage vendors.  Key is that this data is customer driven – which is a huge priority for us as we manage our support initiatives by key metrics.

Why do they prefer EMC customer support? Among our core competencies and processes, there are two worth calling out as it relates to our support for VMware environments.

• Broad and deep expertise in virtualized environments, emphasized by the fact that EMC solutions span storage, backup, security, network and beyond.  Fast issue resolution requires having the right people with the right expertise and we have and thousands of VMware certified professionals.
• Continued heavy investment in service capabilities. A key example is our ground-breaking work to offer the first B2B CRM solution to assist customers with faster issue resolution.

Since VMware and virtualization play a catalyst in driving cloud deployments, it’s important for potential customers and partners to understand the importance VMware plays in our customers’ day to day lives and operations.

The short answer is customers rely on customer support organizations–not only to help them to keep their businesses running, but to support a competitive advantage through use and investment in technology. For example, at EMC, customers in the financial services industry rely on our technologies and services so they can provide services to their own customers. Transactions and activities such as ATM usage, account information access, trading stock and processing home loans are all critical to their business, so in turn, providing high quality support to customers is a responsibility we take very seriously.

Beyond this, it makes good business sense to invest in service excellence as it helps to maintain a leading position in the market. For example, while EMC is recognized for its superior technologies, service plays an important role in EMC’s success. Customers continue to buy our technologies at an increasing rate because they value the service and support EMC provides. But service excellence isn’t something that can be simply added as an afterthought. Service excellence is more of a mission – a way to run the business. From product development, engineering, sales, account management, and yes customer support, there must be an intent focus on doing what is right for the customer. This focus should be part of the company culture and this doesn’t happen overnight. I can tell you that while you will find this customer-focused culture prevalent at EMC today, this began 20 years ago.

How do we know what is right for customers? From my perspective, you need to ask customers as often as possible – seeking this information right from the source is key! Customer surveys, customer meetings, industry conferences, and support interactions are all opportunities to listen and learn. Then, you must be fanatical about analyzing and synthesizing the information so it becomes the driving force behind service delivery improvements. The reward comes when customers like East Carolina University share their story — because in the end, service excellence is in the eye of the beholder – satisfied customers.

 “”We know that EMC will do whatever it takes to resolve our issue. This is huge for us. In fact, our satisfaction with EMC customer support has impacted our decision to continue buying more EMC technology.”
–Garrett Killian, Operations & Systems Analyst, East Carolina University