What's awesome about EMC Support?

I wanted to talk about the EMC Support organization. Not just my end of the Support Forums, but the whole Support organization in EMC. Before I go on, I must disclose that  I come from this organization in that I once was Support Engineer in EMC. Customer Support has been my career over the last 15 years in a number of multinationals.
Support is considered a dirty word, isn't it? It's true, who enjoys calling up for Support on their products, regardless of what they are. From a mobile phone to washing machines no one likes doing it. But someone has to :)

EMC Support is award winning. We have achieved numerous SSPA awards.  Now I could talk about our great tools our focus on Total Customer experience or Live Chat, etc. But we all know that tools are just that, tools! It's the people who do Support that lead to these awards. And yet Sales and Marketing only seem to laud Support Services when they win awards. The fact is EMC's Support Services excellence is completely down to the Service Personnel behind it. These people have the most intimate relationships with our customers because they are there to help customers in pain, solving problems. Support is there, 7 X 24, 365 days a year. Support People are there long after Sales and Marketing have moved on to other potential customers. And I know I 'm biased but the Support People in EMC are dedicated, excellent and second to none. They get very little kudos in EMC for what they do. These people are the brand differentiators for EMC in my view. These people hold up the brand of our Service Support. So I wanted to show them a little appreciation.  (Very Subtle I know ;) )

These day's don't you think  that Twitter is oversubscribed for Marketing? I certainly do. I would like to see more from Support people and organizations. But Still, things like this EMC engineer's work @sthulin (and yes he is a friend of mine) give me encouragement about Support engagement socially. Check out his latest blog post in relation to EMC's Celerra and MAC OS X 10.7.

Digital Life, the Digital Universe and Digital everything!

I returned to work this week. As it's a short week I stuck to working from home. But wow since I 've been off EMC has been busy! More on that in a a paragraph or so.

It's my belief that a proper break from work is 8 weeks. That way those colleagues sending you email with a job to do will give up on you and find someone else to do it. 2 weeks... they wait. It makes me laugh too. I had a couple or urgent requests for me to fulfill. Convenient they could wait for my return to do them and then hound me to get it done. If it could wait two weeks for me it was not urgent! I dislike intensely  the misuse of the word "urgent" like that.

I also dislike email intensely and  cheer it's coming demise. I urge you all to read MG Sieglers post on TechCrunch entitled  I'm Quitting Email. I participated in a break from email with @thelaurenfiles last night. It was easier exercise for me though as I was too caught up in getting my two kids to bed :) But I'm going to keep up the campaign and ween myself off email as much as I possibly can.

Last week IDC released "the 2011 IDC Digital universe study" sponsored by EMC. The study is staggering with the amount of data being talked about. 1.8 zettabytes will be created by the world in 2011. How much is 1.8 zettabytes? It would take every person in Ireland tweeting 3 times per minute for 2,082,203 years! That's a lot of data to manage!

 EMC also released a very cool video about EMC's Social Media engagement for EMC employees. I think it's really cool that EMC encourages and supports all of it's employees to engage in Social channels. 

One thing the video did not address in detail is our Support Communities.
Now I am biased because it's related to the work I do.
But to me EMC's Support is an immense part of the EMC brand. It's not just our amazing products that give us the edge on our competitors, IMHO, its also the Support we provide.

EMC is a leader in Supporting it's customers. On the EMC Community Network our Support Communities are a vibrant area. We have Customer to Customer interactions, helping each other out with Support issues. Our Partners and employees engage in here too, answering technical questions and solving problems online and collaboratively.

EMC also have a Support Pool of not only Technical Support Forums, but a Knowledgebase and White Papers. Not only that but we have a very successful CHAT tool that allows customers to Chat with Technical engineers about their issues. The Services organization (which I work for) continue to strive to improve Customers experience of eServices and Support. Support is extremely social in EMC. And we are continuously improving our Support Portal to the benefit of customers, Partners and employees. It's a passionate community. One I am very impassioned about myself. And let us not forget the Developer Community on ECN. A very vibrant community too where you can obtain sample codes and technical resources to develop your own solutions on EMC products. From a Support perspective ECN is a cool place. Drop by. And yes if  you are following my blog we are still proceed to getting the Forums opened up to web search. It's going well.

Well enough said for now. That's my Friday musings done. Have a good weekend.