We all know it when we see it – a great service experience. Some of the greatest companies in their respective industries come to mind – Starbucks, Zappos, Apple and The Ritz Carlton. One of the common denominators that all of these companies possess is a unique culture that puts customers first and empowers their employees to do so in performing their responsibilities. EMC is also a company that values our customers and our company culture is consistent with that value. We also enjoy a very strong reputation in our industry for the services we provide to our customers. And . . . we strive to be the company that is synonymous with the best experience in our industry – hands down.
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.”
