Background
Customer Service technology, in general, has evolved to meet the demands of the changing demographic that it serves. Customers continue to adopt self-help options that provide speed of response and flexibility of consumption. Service practitioners continue to feed this appetite through tool development and intelligent services. New tools and technology continue to extend the reach of EMC’s knowledge assets beyond the traditional service experience. The main objective remains reduction of the time necessary to resolve problems. EMC Community Networks (ECN), Support by Product and Twitter are key components of this ‘Enlightenment’.
Getting from Here to There
From a services perspective, our drive has traditionally focused on handling individual customer interactions with a ‘high-touch’. An individual’s technical expertise grows as personal knowledge is amassed through customer engagement. We now invest more thought and effort to understand the event trends that our customers are facing.
Trends are important to identify the key areas that we can focus on for knowledge and product development. Within the Knowledge Base, the trends help to identify gaps and education opportunities. Within product design, the trends identify areas of concern that can lead to product developments. The challenge is understanding the trends that are useful to each of these areas. The graphic below shows the interrelationship between the support process, knowledge base and promotion of content through social media.
Within the USD customer services business (covering Celerra, CLARiiON, VNX and VNXe), we have catered recent content to meet the established needs surrounding Configuration, Documentation and Performance issues. The content developed by support engineers in these key knowledge areas are actively promoted in our Social Communities. We have promoted more than 100 articles since March 2013 with an expectation to accelerate publication.
Social Support
Getting knowledge to a diverse customer demographic is challenging. The target and actual user base tends to shift as innovators exploit product features. ECN affords an opportunity to express supporting knowledge in an area that is open to the public. This community adds features to improve discussions around solutions that we share. We now leverage this facility to actively engage customers based on our understanding of service patterns.
Beyond ECN, @emcsupport has been leveraged to get the message of support spread to customers outside of EMC’s domain. The intent is to provide enough technical information to draw customers to the feature rich solution that resides on ECN while enhancing our social presence. This combination of approaches has helped to feed the customer appetite for information while having the added benefit of focusing our services employees on unique challenges that highlight their technical expertise.
Feedback
Our approach is only as good as our customers say it is. I have two questions for people that read this post:
- Are the technical documents in the support forums helpful?
- What additional areas would you like to see in future technical document postings?
This feedback helps to enhance the community that hopes to evolve to meet changing needs.
Jeff Cote
Sr. Manager, USD
Customer Services
