Ask The Expert: Continuous Improvement Through Customer Feedback

Sometimes it's difficult to get customer feedback when you sit in a big engienering organization. That's why I like to send my user experience designers to meet with customers at various events. Just yesterday, the interaction designer for ViPR SRM (JoAnne Hubbard) participated in the EMC Forum in NYC. She had a booth, and participants could simply walk up and give her feedback on some new ideas for dashboards.

We also signed up some new members of our Design Advisory Council for ViPR SRM!

The Design Advisory Council is a group of ViPR SRM customer who sign an NDA and then participate in one or more meetings a month during which we show them designs for the next release of the product. They have an opportunity to shape the product. If you are interested in becoming a member of the Design Advisory Council for either ViPR SRM or Service Assurance suite, let me know my sending mail to EMCUSabilityTesting@EMC.com

Customers - how do YOU want to give us feedback?  Do you want to:

• Give all feedback through problem reports/bug reports/SRs?
• Meetings with your sales reps where they bring along some of the engienering team?
• User groups
• Participate in usability tests and Design advisory councils
• Twitter? Facebook? Instragram? Reddit?

I'd like to use whatever is easiest for you.  We're open to changing how we do things.

We have been a customer of EMC for a very very very long time,  we used to buy mainframe memory from EMC ..that should tell you how long we have been a customer

I really enjoy when our TC brings a SME to our bi-weekly meetings, it's informal, it's very productive. We talk about things that matter to our environment, to our customers.

Honestly when i first heard about user forums i had completely different expectations. I expected them to be somewhat technical, where SME/Engineers would talk "nuts and bolts" about new EMC gear but what i find is that these users groups are mini "EMC World", lots of Marketing, dog and pony show ..no substance. You wanted honest feedback, here is for ya.

I will give you an example what i consider worth my time. I think it was two years ago when EMC just acquired XtremIO, our local EMC office brought XtremIO hardware to the local office, asked a couple of XtremIO engineers to come down and give us a good technical presentation/demo. The whole thing lasted a day, there were a couple of customers from around town ( i live in Atlanta). I really enjoyed this format because it was very focused on one specific product, i got to hear other customers from around town talk about their challenges and how this technology could help them. That interaction with other customers gave me some ideas of what we could do with that technology.

Regarding feedback on SR satisfaction, there is more work to be done. What's the point of sending me a satisfaction survey for a routing disk replacement.  I don't want to know i had a disk failure, EMC calls our 24/7 operations center, notifies them they will be onsite, comes in and does their work.  You need to send me surveys after i experience Sev 1 issues, that's when it's your support organization time to shine. How fast do i get a call-back, how fast do you bring in additional resources to the table.

Also i would like to initiate a survey, give me an option to fill out Walker survey because i want to share my experience with you (good or bad). I don't want to call my account team, i don't want to call my SAM. I want to click on a button and fill out the survey, first of all it's very easy for me to do, i don't need to get my SAM/Account team involved, second of all you (i hope) you collect this information and run analytics against it so you can improve your customer service.

Brian,

In my opinion capturing feedback from customers via email is not the most productive way of using that information. I understand it helps you coach your team, helps members that need help in specific areas but that's where it stops. You are not doing anything else with that data, that valuable feedback that could help other departments streamline how they work with customers, how they communicate internally.  It is very rare that i see an email from someone who closes my ticket where on the bottom of his/her email it says "Please contact my manager XYX and provide feedback of how i did". This is a very strange way to provide feedback (at least for me), i feel like i am a child complaining to my parents about another kid on the playground.  I would like to see something formal, when a case is closed provide me a link so i can provide feedback via a questionnaire, similar to what you do when you close a chat session but more comprehensive.

Great points dynamox

The ECN is open to all employees so you will see the marketing and sales folks in here as well as the engineering and support folks.  Hopefully they are defined well enough that you can find what you need.  Ask the Expert sessions are particularly good for finding the right information. 

Self service surveys do sound like a good idea. However we would have no idea what questions to ask.  Currently most of our surveys are specific to a topic (Support, Products Satisfaction, Deployment, etc) and even those have logic built in to ask only relevant questions.  What types of situations made you wish for that self service option?  What types of questions would be useful in that instance?

Currently we rely on employees and the ECN for your ad-hoc feedback.  We actually just released a great article about how we leverage this kind of feedback if you'd like to read more.

We do run analytics on all the feedback we collect not just from surveys.  We recently launched a portal (EMC Experience Analytics Showcase) to show what types of data we look at and how we have been using them.  Let us know what other cuts of the data you would like to see so we can keep adding new content.

Hope this helps!

A simple rating opportunity for any SR would be fine with me, just like rating KB articles:

five grades plus a few lines of free text.

What keeps puzzling me (Isilon customer) is, what level of expertise can be expected from L1 supporters? There is too much evidence for supporters not even understanding the technical issue (for non-standard things) while not escalating either. This cannot have escaped EMC's attention, even without detailed feedback. Not wanting to start a rant here, but I can provide anecdotes if desired.

Cheers

-- Peter

Hi

I work for a EMC Partner. We started with Isilon 6 years ago when Isilon was Isilon and not EMC Isilon.

We had many support cases together with our customers.

My rating for the support would be something around 5-6 with 10 as best rating.

The big pinpoints are

*a very inexperienced level one support.

Level 1 has no clue what an Isilon system is. They only work with their step-by-step manuals, staring with something like "is the system connected to power..." or something like this

*too many new untested features without solving old bugs

e.g. NFSv4 back one year. I was a pain to get some information how to do it.

It would be better to have e.g. 4 Feature releases a year. All other releases should be only bug fixing.

Each new feature has at least 2 new bugs, and this is very annoying in a production system.

The implementation of SMB2.1 in the actual release cycle with all the lwio crashes is nasty in a production enviroment.

*nobody reads the initial ticket or longer answers

If if create a new case, describe the problem and tell that the gather info is already uploaded, I always get a answer like "What's your question and please provide a gather info" this is annoying for us and our customers.

Back to your questions, how to get better feedback

It would be great if I could rate each answer of the support directly. If a case gets too many bad rating the case should automatically escalated.

Chris

Thanks Peter,

A short 1-2 question survey is definitely something we can look into.

Regarding Isilon support we are very diligent about identifying opportunities and making improvements so I would be more than happy to look into your concerns.  Please send me an email with your SR numbers and a short description of your issue at paul.young@emc.com

Thanks for your feedback!

Peter,

I would like to pursue the anecdotes you  offered regarding our  support teams that are not meeting your expectations.  The Support teams are all about improvement, we have a great network of experienced coaches that address just these types of concerns.  Please send me an email with any SR numbers or information that you feel needs to be addressed.  rick.quinn@emc.com   Isilon Division TCE Manager

Thank you

--Rick

This ATE event has concluded. At this time we would like thank everyone who participated in the discussion, but especial thanks to our SMEs who took time from their busy schedule to engage our community.

We currenlty have two more ATE discussion going on. Here are the links for you to access them.

Ask the Expert: Redefining Video Surveillance Storage from Edge to Core

Ask the Expert: EMC M&R GUI and Smarts SolutionPack Installation and Configuration

Thanks.