Ever since I've been blogging, I've been itching to do a deeper dive on EMC's renowned customer support function.
For starters, I don't think that the whole topic of customer support gets enough airtime in our broader IT discussions -- certainly not to the degree that our customers care about it!
But it's more than that.
For me, it's very personal -- my interactions with EMC's customer support organization has been an integral part of my EMC career, and has significantly shaped how I see the world these days.
Is there a lot to talk about? Certainly.
Will I do it justice? I'll try ...
Different Perceptions Abound
Let's face it, talking about customer support isn't the sexiest topic in the IT world. But, in some respects, it's ultimately one of the most important.
But EMC's customers can be a different breed.
They're usually moving fast, and can be aggressive in introducing advanced and complex new technologies into their environment.
Just to keep it interesting, most everything they do with our stuff can be fairly described as "mission critical".
They've come to depend on EMC to help them be successful as they in turn are depended on by their organizations for success.
And that mission is a whole different world than simple break-fix of individual products.
There's a strategic element that's worth noting as well. As vendors such as EMC provide higher and higher levels of integrated customer support, our customers are then free to spend their time and resources on higher-value projects and initiatives vs. firefighting capabilities.
I don't think many vendors fully understand this strategic link between providing increasingly sophisticated customer support, and IT organizations being able to move up the stack and deliver more value.
I'm very glad that EMC does, though.
A Personal Story
When I came to EMC in 1994, an integral part of my new hire indoctrination was customer support. I was expected to understand EMC's support philosophy and why it was very different than the norm at the time.
We were all marched through EMC's customer support centers, shown the real-time monitoring and coordination (very advanced for the time), and presented an in-detail review of how the various support processes worked.
Not only was I deeply impressed with how it all worked (I hadn't really paid much attention to the whole topic of customer support in IT up to that point), I was also deeply impressed that my new employer (EMC) considered world-class customer support almost a sacred duty.
There was no discussion of profitability and margins associated with customer support. There was, however, a very detailed discussion of statistical processes :)
As I got involved in more and more customer briefings, this continued. We'd all shuttle down to the customer support facility, meet the people responsible for providing world-class support, and sat down for very frank and transparent discussions about how it all worked from the customer's perspective.
My respect continued to grow.
When I got deeply involved in product management, EMC customer support again became a key part of my world. As we'd sit around the table, they'd bring a very detailed and insightful view to product engineering around exactly where the problems were, and what needed to be done to create a superior customer experience.
This went far beyond the usual bug lists -- it went down to hard bedrock: design principles, user experiences and process flows and the like. The more customer support got involved, the better our products became.
My respect grew even further.
As the years progressed, I came to depend on a consistent pattern. If our customers were in any kind of serious trouble -- even if it didn't directly involve our products -- we'd move heaven and earth to help them, cost didn't matter, speed did. Now, to be fair, all technology sometimes has a bad day, so there's plenty of opportunity to go above and beyond when it *does* involve your own products.
And there are a few fascinating stories about when a competitor's environment went belly up -- remember, no EMC products involved whatsoever -- and we swooped in to help manage the timely resolution of the crisis. It was about fixing the customer, first and foremost. The rest could be sorted out later.
Customer support is one of those disciplines where there's always room for improvement, but -- that being said -- I'm exceptionally proud to hold up EMC's customer support philosophy and capabilities as something for others to aspire to.
The Story Starts With Good People -- Lots Of Them
When you've got a serious or complicated problem, you want to talk to someone who can help you, and fast.
Online resources have their place, but when the brown stuff hits the fan, you want the "A" team on the phone, and pronto.
We've got 6,000 people who work full-time providing direct customer support. And another 8,000
professional services people who provide consulting and project support.
The average EMC customer support engineer has 8 years of experience, and carries multiple industry certifications. These people are the the kind of talent that anyone would pay a premium for.
Our support capabilities are co-located with where our customers do business -- around the world.
These are most definitely *not* outsourced call centers -- they're full-fledged engineering facilities, integrally linked and meshed with each other.
It wasn't easy to build EMC's global customer support capability, but it delivers some amazing benefits.
On the front end, most support is delivered by local EMC employees in local language. Customer support can be difficult enough, but trying to do it through a language barrier is excruciating for all parties.
As day becomes night, we've grown adept at moving support cases to different parts of the world -- all to get a more timely resolution.
And -- for me -- the most fascinating part of the story is how all these locations and people are integrated into what I can only describe as a neural network -- each support expert adding to the collective intelligence and capabilities of the organization as a whole.
Not everyone is tied to a product or technology specialist. A growing cadre of our customer support professionals are tied to specific (and usually larger) accounts. Many EMC customers have one or more dedicated customer support account managers to integrate our support processes with those of our customers. We often augment that with dedicated support engineers so -- if needed -- you can end up speaking with the same people every time you call.
And the story isn't complete without a call-out to the leadership team.
I can personally attest to the fact that these people are as relentless and passionate about continually improving the customer experience as any rabid product engineer.
Not only do they take care of customers and partner, they're perpetually re-engineering processes and capabilities with a vengeance.
They don't work in isolation, either. EMC's CS leadership is an integral part of our executive team.
When they're talking, everyone is listening.
Processes and Best Practices
All those people resources can't be effective without a continual investment in process improvements and growing the library of best practices.
Now, there's always plenty of opportunity to improve processes and practices after a customer or partner has identified a problem.
But there's an important strategic shift going on here.
As our analytics capabilities improve, we've gotten increasingly adept at spotting potential customer problems before they happen.
Way back when, our interest started when we realized we could detect when a disk in, say, a Symmetrix, might be starting to go bad.
The ability to spare the failed component long before it failed paid enormous dividends in customer satisfaction.
Take that principle, and expand it to the vastly more complex and integrated landscapes we're responsible for today. And this philisophical approach now goes beyond the predictable real-time alert and configuration monitoring, correlation and analysis.
For example, if we notice that a customer is asking a lot of questions on a certain set of topics (whether live or online), that tells us that they're about to try something, ahem, interesting, and maybe we should reach out to see if we can be of assistance?
I believe that our continuing heavy investment in predictive analysis capababilties is providing very differentiated customer experiences today, and this should only increase over time.
Investing In Creating New Support Models
There's a lot of thought being invested at EMC around how do we come up with entirely new support models to not only better serve our existing customers, but our new ones as well?
And examples abount everywhere ...
Sure, EMC provides online support -- many vendors do -- but we did it very differently.
I am under the impression that most support organizations approach the topic in an effort to reduce support costs.
Sure, that potential is always there, but EMC took a different view: how can we use online capabilities to provide a *better* support experience, and not just a cheaper one?
Can we help you find information quickly?
Chat with someone knowledgeable as you're browsing?
Even have a repository of your products and configurations so we can pinpoint the problem more quickly?
And can we learn from how you're using our online services to spot problem areas and deliver even more value in the future?
It's a very different mindset.
Another example is how we're approaching the needs of IT generalists vs. IT specialists.
When we created the recent VNXe, our customer support organization was an integral part of the product concept and execution. Not in a "how are we going to support it?" kind of way, more of a "how can we transform the customer experience?" perspective.
If you've seen Unisphere on a VNXe, you'll get a sense of what we've done here.
All the various support and education assets are fully integrated into the management experience.
Get a little help, or get a lot -- it's all right there from the console, and (most importantly) presented in the context of what you're trying to do.
Personally, I think we'll be seeing much more of this sort of fully-integrated support
experience model -- not only from EMC -- but the industry at large.
Another important example is the Vblock. Some people may balk initially at the relative ridgity and constraints VCE puts on Vblocks. But the evidence is now *overwhelming* that doing so creates a vastly superior customer support experience.
Just to be accurate, Vblock support is provided by VCE (and not directly by EMC), but there's a healthy helping of EMC support DNA in the function (along with Cisco and VMware) not to mention plenty of EMC customer support alumni :)
Most support experiences start with a lengthy discovery of what are you running, what are the version levels, what are the config files, what have you changed recently, etc. etc. With a Vblock, all of that is cut to an absolute minimum. The people providing support know exactly what you're running -- so they can get to the problem resolution part of the discussion far faster.
Vblocks also have managed configurations. There's not a hodgepodge of versions and patches from various vendors. There's a single, tested and integrated release for Vblocks that incorporates all the supporting technologies. You just can't imagine how much better that is from a support perspective unless you've experienced it.
There's more, but I think I've made my point: EMC is investing in not only providing better support, but entirely new models of supporting our customers. And I think that's an important "innovation topic" to add to the broader set of industry discussions.
There's Plenty Of Evidence At Hand
While it's true we don't delight all of our customers all of the time (always room for improvement!), I firmly believe we delight the vast majority of our customers the vast majority of the time.
And not just on the break-fix part of the business -- but in ensuring their success as an IT organization.
As you scan the various quotes and testimonials, it can seem a little surreal.
Ask most of our customers about EMC support, and they tend to gush a bit.
Those all-important anecdotes are backed up by vast amounts of statistical evidence that we use to meter and continually improve our customer support experiences.
And we share that data with our customers and prospects each and every day, if they want it.
Ending Where I Started?
Part of my early education here at EMC was realizing just how important and strategic world-class customer support can be for our customers.
It's not just about solving today's crisis (although that's important!), it's laying the foundation so IT organizations can do more -- and do it better -- with the resources they have.
I don't think the topic gets enough airtime in the industry. And maybe it's time it should.
And, for the thousands of EMC customer support professionals around the globe, please accept my personal thanks and deep respect for what you do each and every day.
You folks are a huge part of the reason why EMC continues to be a special place for many of us :)
Very interesting and insightful blog.
Posted by: Zyrober | May 08, 2011 at 03:31 PM
I've been an EMC customer for two years, and until this past several months I would have agreed with this post. The support I got during the initial setup, and when trouble occurred, was timely and effective.
Then, in March and since then, it feels as if support has fallen off a really tall cliff. I had a simple case open for over 3 months, and I could not get a response until I contacted my account rep several times. I opened a simple upgrade case three weeks ago and it is just now getting assigned a resource - and that resource still needs to be trained. Something has happened and it is a 180 degree turn from what is posted here, and what I expected.
Posted by: Dave Tolen, Network Admin, Aspen School District | July 12, 2011 at 05:44 PM