Like any large organization, we fall in to the unattractive habit of using TLAs (three letter acronyms) to describe important entities and concepts in our world.
One of the most significant concepts at EMC is the notion of TCE -- the Total Customer Experience.
More than just vague corporate happy-talk, it represents a significant strategic commitment to continually improving how customers perceive EMC.
How TCE is designed and functions at EMC is a fascinating story of investing in meaningful feedback loops to continually improve customer outcomes.
For IT specialists, it means that we can demonstrate a closed-loop process where their feedback regarding specific issues results in meaningful improvements in EMC's products and processes.
For IT managers, it means that we can show a composite "big picture" of how their organizations are using EMC products and processes: what's working, what's not, what needs to get better, and how.
And for IT and business leaders who are interested in establishing their own closed-loop listening processes to continually delight their internal or external customers (and who isn't interested in that?), we bring some very useful intellectual property to the table.
The story of how EMC got to TCE is perhaps even more interesting -- because it's a great example of how our culture continually evolves.
Six years ago, Jim Bampos was an independent quality consultant. He'd been contacted by Mark Lewis, who was then running EMC's software division.
Mark had a familiar problem. Any time he met with customers, partners or field personnel, he got an earful on software quality issues.
But when he brought those same issues back to his teams, he got a very different picture of everything being relatively OK, or -- at a minimum -- quickly explained away.
What was really going on? And what to do about it?
Mark thought he wanted Jim to do a quality study -- to get to the bottom of what was really going on, and make some specific recommendations. Mark thought he had enough data to do the job.
Jim disagreed. As the conversations progressed, Mark came to understand that, yes, he had data, but he had the wrong kind of data -- it was internally generated by EMC stakeholders, or it was simply a collection of anecdotes and opinions.
It wasn't an external perspective.
Jim argued that without an all-important "outside in" perspective, any internally generated data would end up being skewed and filtered by internal EMC filters, and wouldn't have the all-important "voice of the customer". Without this, EMC would be simply wasting its time.
Jim also believed that the data gathering, analysis and recommendation function had to be completely separate from other line functions such as product development, marketing, sales and customer services.
Politics and various internal agendas couldn't enter into this important process.
The importance of being independent isn’t a new idea: financial people used auditors; what was needed was a customer-centric "auditing" function around all aspects of quality and the total customer experience.
Mark agreed with Jim -- that's what was missing. Mark also realized that this challenge wasn't limited to just his product division -- it applied to virtually all aspects of EMC that touched a customer directly or indirectly.
Mark then brought the discussion to Frank Hauck, who immediately saw the potential, and decided to approach Joe Tucci with a formal proposal to address the challenge.
Jim tells the story of how he and Frank were scheduled to initially meet with Joe the first thing in the morning. Jim gets the dreaded "I'm stuck at the airport" call from Frank 30 minutes before Jim is supposed to walk in to meet with Joe.
During the meeting, Joe immediately grasped the key difference between measuring product quality and measuring customer experience.
He began to see this as a strategic opportunity; quickly realizing that an expanded and systemic approach could fundamentally transform how EMC related to its customers.
Over time, a bigger and more meaningful plan began to take shape. Frank Hauck was appointed executive sponsor -- and thus was born EMC's TCE initiative.
From Frank's perspective, he quickly realized that he needed to build a "data machine" that didn't exist yet. A way to source external data using the customer's voice. A way to measure quality that mattered to the customer, and not individual operational groups. A mechanism to correlate the inputs, and provide meaningful and actionable guidance internally.
And, above all, a set of metrics that could help senior management understand where EMC had problems, and what had to be done to correct them.
Initial Challenges
In addition to building an entirely new organization with new tools and processes, the team faced an enormous mindset change across the EMC organization.
Not surprisingly, the default was for teams to focus on internal operational metrics, instead of metrics that mattered to customers.
Since individual groups largely got to choose their measurements, it's no surprise that the data often said that everything was AOK and the team was doing a great job :)
Stubborn resistance to the new approach was frequent. Jim jokes that he learned the defense mechanisms early: #1 attack the data, #2 attack the methodology, and -- if all else fails -- #3 attack the group and its individuals. Thankfully, that's not a problem anymore ...
Another big challenge was that addressing an important issue often involved close cooperation and joint re-engineering between groups that weren't working together, and had little incentive to do so.
And, of course, unless there was continual pressure and reinforcement, people would quickly fall back into old habits: defining "success" using internal metrics vs. external ones.
Six Years Later
Thanks to Frank, Jim and the team, TCE has become an integral part of the operating model at EMC.
Every customer-facing function has access to world-class data and analysis. Key insights are relatively easy to arrive at. Process and program enhancements are proposed and implemented. More measurements are taken to see if the desired results are achieved.
Lather, rinse, repeat -- working with the TCE program is now just part of what's expected if you're a business leader at EMC.
But that's not the best part -- the TCE team engages directly with EMC customers and partners when the opportunity arises.
Folks who work with our products day-in and day-out need to know that their feedback and input is valued -- and acted upon in a meaningful way.
IT managers want to know what mechanisms and processes we use to listen to their entire customer experience across all the various EMC touchpoints -- and how we drive continual improvement.
And, occasionally, IT leaders realize that they too are in the business of delighting their customers -- and want to use our approach as a template for their own.
Jim tells the story of how one CIO at a major financial firm asked Jim and his team to do exactly that – set up a TCE-like function for his IT function. Over a period of six months with occasional meetings and phone calls, that's what we helped them do.
Yes, it's that good.
The TCE Operating Model
Jim reduces the TCE approach to three fundamental components.
The first component is quality KPIs -- or key performance indicators. I know, this sounds obvious, but the key insight here is to frame the KPIs in terms of how customers see the issue vs. internal EMC organizations.
A classic example usually results from customer service. The popular internal metric is "queue time", e.g. how long a customer has to wait before someone gets to them.
That's an internal measure. The more useful external measure is "time to resolve customer problem" -- e.g. how much time elapsed between the time a customer reports a problem or issue, and the exact time when the customer says "thanks, I'm good". That sort of metric drives all sorts of useful discussions across multiple functions.
Another classic from our storage business is MTBF and MTTR vs. DU/DL. Many in the storage hardware industry are concerned about mean time between failures and mean time to repair. Ultimately, these are internal measures that focus on just one aspect of customer needs.
By comparison, EMC uses "data unavailable" or "data lost" metrics to track the overall quality performance of storage devices in real-world customer environments. That measure includes the entire stack, and looks at *all factors* -- regardless of source -- that can make data unavailable or worse for *any* reason.
I remember clearly having to explain to a customer that -- yes -- EMC doesn't really track MTBF except at the component level -- we run the business using TCE and DU/DL numbers. It was an awkward conversation -- the customer simply assumed that MTBF was the only number that mattered, and I had to convince him otherwise.
Indeed, getting different line functions within EMC to use a shared set of customer-relevant metrics has been one of the great achievements of the TCE program. You can't manage what you can't measure, and having a common set of measurements across multiple functions is simply table stakes if you're going to make meaningful progress.
The second operating component is the "voice of the customer". In a nutshell, it's finding out what really matters to the people who are using your products and services.
Look at it this way -- it's not hard to come up with a long list of potential things that could be fixed or improved. How do you know which areas will give you the biggest payoffs in terms of customer satisfaction and loyalty? What areas of EMC's business are most impactful to the customers' success?
An example: "your documentation is hard to find and use" might seem to be an innocuous complaint, but when it's in the context of a mission-critical issue and time is very short, it can be an important concern indeed. You don’t get that sort of insight unless you correlate quality KPIs with voice of the customer.
The EMC TCE program uses a wide array of listening and survey mechanisms to figure out what's bothering people, and what really matters to the people who use our products and services.
There is no "single approach": an incredibly broad array of surveys, data feeds and interviews all help create that bigger picture we need. And we’re adding new tools and data sources all the time.
Indeed, larger customers are sometimes surprised to find out just how much data we can gather and analyze from across their organizations -- often painting a detailed picture that they themselves were unaware of.
Jim tells the story of a customer who was convinced that we weren't listening to them. Jim ended up presenting about 20 pages of correlated "listening data" from formal and informal channels, as well as EMC's internal assessment of specific issues going on inside that particular IT organization. (!!!)
The third operating program is the TCE program itself -- the consistent interaction with EMC business stakeholders: here's the data, here's the correlation, here's what it means, here's what you might do about, here's the results you've achieved by doing so.
The TCE program presents itself as an independent service across dozens and dozens of internal EMC organizations. There is no agenda -- other than the customer agenda. It's an extreme example of "customer advocacy" with real meat -- and teeth.
Each group has a consistent, customer-centric view of critical KPIs. Each group has a consistent, customer-centric view of what really matters to customers, usually reflected in things like NPS, or Net Promoter Scores. And each group has a ready source of recommendations on how to work with other groups to improve the outcomes.
Patentable IP
One of the things that Jim is justifiably proud of is that EMC owns a key patent in this area around correlating quality KPIs with voice of customer to achieve superior results. It's US Patent #7818203 if you want to go look it up.
Patent status aside, there's a great insight in using both kinds of information to present internal recommendations: here are the numbers, and here's how your customers feel about them. We've also gotten a modicum of recogntion in the industry for what we're doing here.
TCE In Practice
I asked Jim for some concrete examples where this sort of approach had made a significant difference. He had no shortage of great stories.
One important one early on was bridging the gap between customer services and product groups -- a frequent source of conflict in most product companies.
The customer service folks tend to see things thought a customer lens; product teams naturally see things through a product feature/function lens.
By both groups having access to the exact same data sets -- and interpretations using the voice of customer -- serious progress can be made in building better products with better support processes than using other methods. Changes can be measured to see if they're successful, and it doesn't take long before you start to see the customer satisfaction metrics start to move in the right direction.
Another early win was within EMC's Professional Services group.
By applying TCE principles, it quickly became obvious that this group had to improve in three areas to really move the needle: expectation setting up front, communicating project completion at the end, and measuring success in terms of customer outcomes vs. performing individual tasks.
I know, it sounds obvious, but it wasn't at the time -- that's exactly the point.
The result? A 30 point swing in Net Promoter Scores in an 18 month period -- one of many metrics we use. If you're familiar with NPS, that's almost unheard of.
After that particular episode, Jim says, everyone noticed -- bigtime.
TCE At Senior Levels at EMC
TCE has changed the way EMC runs our business -- at very senior levels. For example, at EMC, we have quarterly business reviews (QBRs) that span the entire EMC operation -- products, services, marketing, sales, etc. It's one of the basic tools we use to run the business.
Jim and his TCE data are always a popular item on the agenda. Why? He can break the data out by product, service, geography, specific management team, market segment, etc. You can run, but you can’t hide :)
It's almost like an x-ray across the entire business -- showing strengths and weaknesses from a customer perspective in a way that's not often easily visible using standard reporting methodologies. His data always drives an interesting discussion -- and, frequently, a set of specific action items to be reported back the next time.
In some aspects, TCE fills an extremely important information gap for senior management: what's *really* going on in the minds of our customers -- in a raw, unfiltered and inarguable format.
Current Challenges -- And Opportunities
Now that TCE is a part of EMC's overall operating model, Jim's primary challenge is working with people who are new to the organization or new to the role. They've never had the chance to work with these rich data sets, or have it all characterized in the voice of the customer, or had a cross-functional forum to work across groups to come up with better ways of doing things.
We believe that there are only a rellatively small handful corporations across all industries that have this sort of TCE-like capability -- it requires a new mindset on the part of all participants.
You have to continually invest in training the new people coming on board -- especially acquisitions.
Another major challenge is convincing customers and partners to invest their time to share their perspectives with us – before there’s a crisis, that is. That’s understandable, everyone gets bombarded with survey and interview requests these days – how do we communicate the value of their time investment back to the participants?
The amount of data Jim's TCE team marshals is now becoming staggering -- over a billion data items and many terabytes from all sorts of sources, including (more recently) social feeds from blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc.
This means that -- yes -- TCE is starting to use "big data" techniques and operating principles to guide EMC's business. And if making customers continually happy with EMC's products and services isn't a matter of critical business strategy, I don't know what is.
Jim's team is also finding it more difficult to keep up with customers, partners and prospective customers who want to understand how we listen -- and how we respond. I consider that a high-class problem to have :)
Final Thoughts
Designing and implementing critical new business processes will always be an important form of innovation. Coming up with new business processes that form the basis of continually delighting your customers -- well, t's hard to think of anything more important.
If you're an IT leader, you might want to consider this in two ways.
First, any serious vendor or partner you work with ought to have some sort of process that looks somewhat similar to EMC's TCE. Look closely for components I've described here.
The reason is simple: your experience over the long haul will likely be far better with vendors who invest in these processes vs. those that haven't done so yet.
Second, if you're in the business of delighting *your* customers (and who isn't?), maybe you should give some serious thought towoards making the same sorts of investments as we have.
It isn't simple, quick or easy, but the payoffs can be staggering.
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