EMC is a multinational corporation that provides customers with cloud computing, data storage, and technology solutions. For more than 30 years, the company has worked with customers in every industry, from startups to the Fortune Global 500. Allowing customers to drive the company has resulted in superior brand loyalty at EMC.
Loyalty360 recently spoke with Kevin Scanlon, EMC’s Senior Director of Total Customer Experience, to learn more about the company’s unique process.
Let’s talk about customer insights, and how it relates to the customer experience. How does Voice of the Customer drive your business?
Scanlon: Customer insight is what drives us. It drives our products, technologies and our people. Customers today want more and demand more. We recognize that the customer voice is critical to our success and have pivoted our company to where customers now define our products and solutions—the era of companies deciding what’s best without customer insight are long gone. However, to achieve this shift is an ongoing effort, and it’s at the core of everything we do. We subscribe and are committed to the mantras of “continuous improvement” and “customers first”. We truly believe that everyone at EMC impacts the customer experience, and that affects how we look at customer insight.
One way we’ve improved our ability to understand what customers are feeling is through the creation of a predictive model that actually predicts customer service dissatisfaction without receiving direct feedback. This allows us to proactively reach out to customers we believe had a less than satisfactory experience. We are in the midst of a global roll-out of this model and the results thus far are impressive—the proactive follow-up is leading to an improved customer perception of EMC, increased satisfaction and revealing new opportunities to improve the end-to-end experience as well as generate sales leads.
You mentioned the way that marketing has changed over the years, and today it seems that products need to constantly evolve according to the customer’s needs. How difficult is it for a brand to change this mindset, and how has your company adapted to this shift?
Scanlon: I believe that brands who don’t actively listen to their customers won’t be around for much longer. We’ve been fortunate enough to have leadership at EMC that recognizes missteps companies have made in the past and capitalized on it in a way that has allowed us to avoid the same pitfalls. In order to survive in a commoditized marketplace, you need to be able to reinvent and transform yourself, all while maintaining a customer-centric approach.
Part of that transformation includes the culture of the people who are servicing the product, and people that work so hard with our customers. This transformation is not easy, but we’ve found success by taking it from the top -down, and using supporting facts to show why this kind of change needs to happen. We’re not perfect, but we’re getting better every day at allowing the customer to drive every decision we make.
What are some of the biggest challenges or opportunities that you face when listening to your customers?
Scanlon: We see every customer as “number 1”. The challenge we face is trying to consistently serve all these “number 1s”. So, we need to balance how we make changes that will have the biggest positive impact to the overall customer base, while still ensuring that individual customers understand our commitment to their personal success. This is where our advanced data capabilities, diverse listening posts and closed-loop processes come into play.
We have created an enterprise-wide “Business Data Lake”, which bring together diverse and large sets of customer data. By creating a platform where cross-functional teams can share and take action on common information, we can identify trends across the entire customer base as well as understand the specifics of an individual account. We have built robust data visualizations that draw from this data lake, which include key customer metrics, such as customer satisfaction, product quality, net promoter score, multi-year revenue, survey text analytics and loyalty risk. We are now in a position where we can compare customers with similar profiles and analyze why there may be differences in their experiences. We can then take action across and within customer accounts.
We want to make sure that customers know we’re listening to their feedback and paying attention to the data. We might not be able to solve all problems by tomorrow, but we’re going to solve them at some point. Our customers have a strong, trusting relationship with us, and they appreciate the fact that we’re listening. We put a heavy emphasis on closing the loop, and if you come to us with feedback about something you don’t like, we hear you, and we’ll work to make that difference for you. It may not come right away, but we want to make sure we close the loop and let our customer base know that we’re committed to acting on their feedback. By being open and honest, we build loyalty that can be built upon for future sales opportunities. It’s a win-win for us and the customer.
How are you using social media differently now as opposed to a year ago, and how do you see that changing over the next year?
Scanlon: Social media is something that’s very useful for pushing things out. It’s very useful for pushing out content, but what we’re challenged with is how we can pull information and sentiment back out of traditional social media. Although we still have room to grow in this area, we do have great examples of how to leverage social media as an effective two-way communications platform.
For example, one of the strongest aspects of our social media presence is the online EMC Community Network. We’ve invested in this peer-to-peer network, which has allowed over 300,000 registered users to connect with both peers from other brands, and with EMC technical experts. Through this forum, we regularly host conversations on targeted topics, such as specific products or services, through the Ask the Expert Program. This program had over 60,000 unique visitors in 2014 and we have found that 47% of users spend more than 10 minutes per visit, which indicates that they value the conversation. The EMC Community Network is a powerful way to engage our technical users—the people who deal with our products and services every day—and we are excited by its direct impact, such as helping customers resolve issues faster, which is good for customers and EMC.
How do you see customer experience being perceived, both externally in the market and internally within your own company? How has this perception changed?
Scanlon: If you look at recent research from Temkin Group, McKinsey, Forbes (and the list goes on), they are all saying the same thing—customer experience is increasingly important to business results and long-term loyalty. This is especially true in industries where customers have the ability to easily switch brands. Companies cannot afford to sit around and wait—there is a real urgency to get your people, processes and technologies organized to ensure that customers’ are satisfied today and tomorrow. A lot of that has to do with the digital era. Customers are looking for real-time responses to their issues. They expect companies to utilize data to know their needs, challenges and wants. They expect the experience to be personalized and consistent. They are looking for a memorable experience that exceeds their expectations. At EMC, our leadership realizes both the impact and opportunity of the digital era and is actively investing in the analytics and holistic listening capabilities, cultural change and organization-wide processes necessary to continue to deliver an industry-leading experience and build strong and enduring relationships.
About the Author: Mark Johnson
Mark is CEO & CMO of Loyalty360. He has significant experience in selling, designing and administering prepaid, loyalty/CRM programs, as well as data-driven marketing communication programs
Callout: By being open and honest, we build loyalty that can be built upon for future sales opportunities. It’s a win-win for us and the customer.
Summary: EMC is building strong consumer relationships by using advanced customer insight tools and a customer-driven business philosophy.
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