Customer Service Hero, Amy Tower, has been dedicated to the challenging effort of bringing evermore exciting user upgrades to our Online Support Site. As part of EMC’s ongoing mission to continuously improve our customers’ online self-service experience, the evolution of the Online Support Site has included major releases of comprehensive bundles of upgrades and user enhancements throughout the year. This month marks the launch of a new suite of improvements to Online Support, and I sat down with Amy to gather her insider story behind the upgrades and what the new release means to our customers and partners.
Q: EMC’s Online Support Site has evolved over time. Can you give our Support Community Blog readers a taste of what to expect from the release on June 1st?
A: Of course! This release was the first in a series of releases focused on bringing about relevant, actionable improvements that enable proactive support, and provide a single view to our customers’ entire install base. Now our customers will have one quick view of all of their products, including configuration information, contracts and Service Requests, all in one place under My Support>My Products. From there, you can see everything you have at your site. You can even receive proactive alerts with customized advice based on your specific product mix.
Q: What kind of proactive alerts?
A: We know the better informed you are about the status of your service levels, the better we can provide comprehensive support for your products. So the first set of proactive alerts available include:
- technical and security advisories
- warranty and maintenance contract expiration notifications
- and current vs. target code levels
In future releases, additional alerts will be added, as well as other features such as reporting capability and advanced personalization and customization.
Q: That is a major enhancement. What else is new in this release?
A: The more easily you can access all of your product performance information, the better we can be at providing you with targeted recommendations and advice – then the more proactive we can be together to improve stability and reduce vulnerability issues with your products.
So we’ve also provided better access to support information and support-related tools. This includes providing a simplified view of your Service Life information, which was also part of the upgrade. Now, you can export this material to a PDF or XLS to make is easier for you to keep your install base up to date and supported.
Q: Which of the enhancements in this most recent rollout of the Online Support Site would you say was the most challenging to bring about? And why?
A: Revamping the global navigation involved a great deal of effort on the part of many folks and was very much a cross-team collaborative effort, including Customer Service, IT, and Marketing. In the end, we’ve achieved a persistent navigation that’s consistent with our other online properties, including www.emc.com – so that no matter where our customers are visiting us online, their having the same consistent navigation experience.
Easier abilities to Search and hover-drop-down features also enable quicker access to support content, and both were part of the overall improvements to navigation as well. It was a challenging effort, but we feel it also brings one of the major benefits of the release to our customers, namely the ability to take control of your online experience through a more streamlined and intuitive interface.
Q: What inspired these upgrades to come about? Did you get customer feedback on where improvements were most needed?
A: We did get a lot of feedback from our customers on these improvements, and their input has directly shaped our feature roadmap. Just like we do here at EMC, our customers are always looking for ways to be more proactive versus reactive when it comes to supporting their products. While we already have a comprehensive suite of tools available to quickly and easily assist our customers in reacting to an issue, these new features offer more personalized, actionable, proactive information – providing opportunities to prevent some of those issues from occurring in the first place. This is a huge win for our customers, and for EMC!
Q: If customers and partners would like to learn more about the latest Online Support news and tips, where should they go to get more information?
A: The best place to get information about this upgrade, as well as all other future enhancements, is in the Your Support Experience forum on the EMC Support Community. This area includes an overview of the new features, announcements about upcoming releases, and includes the ability to ask questions or provide your own feedback on current or planned features. You can also ask questions on our Twitter account @EMCsupport, or post your questions here in the Support Community Blog and we’ll get back to you with answers!
Holly Anderson
Principal Program Manager, Social Media & Community Strategy
CS Innovation
Follow us on Twitter @EMCsupport
