Digital Transformation in the Enterprise

Everyone Needs a Chief Experience Officer

I had a bad experience last week with a hotel chain that shall remain unnamed. 

In a nutshell, I called to make a reservation. Everything went smoothly. However, the agent suggested I hold the line for a moment. I did so, assuming I was getting passed to a customer satisfaction survey. 

Instead, I was passed to a representative from their 'loyalty club' who began the hard-sell around why I should join their time share club.

The Importance of Customer Experience

It's hard to believe that it's been six years since Watermark Consulting started their Customer Experience ROI study. But as time passes, the case only gets more compelling.

Ask yourself - "Is customer experience truly critical to our business?" While everyone is going to answer with an emphatic yes, I suspect many of us have lost sight of what this truly means. Now ask yourself if you believe your brand is a leader in customer experience excellence. This one's a tad tougher, and the answer may serve as a bit of a wake up call.

Customer Loyalty - An Endangered Species?

For me, making a significant purchase is an emotional decision. I do my research, I check out different brands, I compare products, and ultimately decide to give my hard-earned money to a particular company.

Once I make that decision, I'm entering into a relationship with the brand. I'm giving them my trust.

Based on several recent experiences, I'm left questioning the extent in which companies understand the modern consumer. I'd argue it's the single most important lesson for future success.

Social Connects Companies... To Themselves

One of the things I love most about being part of the social revolution is the unexpected 'ah-ha' moments that surface almost daily. I had one such moment this week, and wanted to share the observation.

Given the command and control structure that remains prominent in the traditional web, there are inherent checks and balances in place to ensure consistent messaging and positioning. In that model, a centralized web team is usually organizationally agnostic, with their focus being on providing a consistent experience to visitors of a traditional .COM site, as example.

As we know very well, social flips that model upside down, providing a direct path from subject matter expert to audience. In effect, it can remove all of the checks and balances that the more traditional model provided.

An Approach to Enterprise Social Media Education

To celebrate Social Media Day, we thought we'd share a little something with the community...

At EMC, we pride ourselves on our approach to Social Media adoption. When we started this journey years back, we chose to focus on employee proficiency - and that strategy has paid us back many times over.

But, the social world is constantly changing. New tools and techniques show up daily. In addition, we've all become so completely ingrained in the digital world that it's easy to lose sight of the larger picture, the incredible reach we have, and the vast diversity of our audience.

To that end, we set out to create an educational video highlighting the opportunities and possible pitfalls of social engagement. While it's designed with our global EMC family in mind, the key points should resonate with just about everyone... Give it a look.

 

 

Helping our Community... Let me count the ways

Sometimes we forget just how fortunate we are. I'm lucky in that I have a roof to sleep under tonight, a warm meal will be on the table, and I'll be surrounded by wonderful and loving family. Damn I'm lucky.

Many can't say the same. It's so important to not lose cite of that.

I do my best to give back to the community, but can NEVER do enough. Whenever possible, I spend time volunteering at a wonderful place called 'Tony La Russa'a Animal Rescue Foundation' here in the Bay Area. These folks are the best of the best - taking dogs and cats scheduled to be euthanized and keeping them until they find permanent homes.

Yesterday during a discussion with global Marketing employees, EMC CMO Jeremy Burton issued the challenge to his global team - How can we help? How can you individually make a difference - and what can we do if we came together as a team with a more orchestrated effort?

Perspectives on Social Media Policies

Shortly before the holidays, I'd spent some time with Upsana Gupta, contributing editor at BankInfoSecurity.com, chatting about EMC's journey in Social Media. While we talked about the journey in general, we spent considerable time talking about the fundamental notion of crowd-sourcing, and how it's been instrumental to our success.

Based on her discussions with myself and industry peers, Upsana published a piece entitled "How to Write a Social Media Policy". It's a good read and provides a broad range of perspectives on the topic.

As is indicated in the article, there is in no way a 'one size fits all' approach to governing Social Media. What works for one industry or culture may or may not work elsewhere.

Regardless of the approach, however, I firmly believe that inclusion and education are key components for success.

We're actually in process of completely retooling our own social policies and supporting education materials, and I look forward to sharing progress with you in the coming weeks... There's some fun stuff in the pipeline that I think you're all going to like. :)

Social in the Enterprise - Convincing the Curmudgeons

I enjoyed a trip to BlogWorld Expo last week, and was honored to sit on a panel of industry-leaders to discuss the impacts of Social Media in the enterprise. Having participated in several such discussions this year, I continue to be stunned by the number of folks still in the 'convincing' or 'selling' mode.

Perhaps I'm just taking our evolution for granted - But I really struggle to understand how the debate persists. Especially with such compelling data around enterprise adoption so readily available.

Given the number of questions around overcoming this particular hurdle, I thought I'd share a few tips and tricks we used along our way. Not that there was ever resistance to the evolution at EMC, but there's always a crowd that needs help understanding the opportunities at hand...

 

The Evolving Enterprise

I'll be boarding a plane midweek and taking off for some much needed time on a tropical island and off the digital grid. I'll be radio silent while away, avoiding the temptations of Twitter, Facebook, blogging and the like.

While away, I wanted to leave you with a presentation given at JiveWorld 2010 a couple of weeks back. During the discussion, I shared a bit about EMC's journey to becoming a socially proficient company. We've done some great things, learned some invaluable lessons, and still have much work ahead. The slides are below, and Jive has also provided a video of the discussion. I'm hoping there are a lesson or two in there that can help you on your journey.

Talk soon... In the meantime, Aloha!

The Transforming Enterprise

View more presentations from Len Devanna.

The Evolution of Social at EMC

Things have been a bit quiet on this blog of late.. sorry for that. Chalk it up to a plethora of exciting changes - all of which I get to share here with you here. Most notably, Social Media @ EMC has taken another large step in it's evolution.

While simplifying the story a bit, our journey to become a socially savvy brand started in the Fall of 2007. Starting with the launch of EMC|ONE, we set out to develop a high degree of social proficiency among our global employees. Over time, we continued to extend our reach to the outside world, and can now be engaged in many places, including the EMC Community Network, our Facebook presence, and the like.

Truth be told, our amazing progress in this space has been largely organic. Our innovative culture combined with a small but passionate group of social practitioners are among the contributors to our success. While there have been people focused on evolving social, it's often been 'part of the job' as opposed to being 'the job'.

Things have changed, and I believe we've just taken our next big step in this journey.