EMC’s recent strategic moves

1.How have EMC’s recent strategic moves (within the past ten years) supported or hindered its customer-centric approach? Customer Centricity is a strategic choice the company has made on how to run business. This requires listening to our customers’ needs, repairing what’s broken, and delivering simplified experiences to them. This will differentiate us in the marketplace, and deliver long-term, profitable growth. EMC has the following bold moves recently to maintain EMC’s culture of customer centricity:

a)Managing a VAR sales model that distances EMC from its customers since EMC had entered into partnership relations with a number of companies. These include companies like DELL and CISCO. These partnerships enabled EMC to increase their returns and, at the same time, cut costs that come with direct sales. EMC classified these partners as Value Added Resellers. However, this created some problems. For example, the company could not access the customers that were serviced by their partners. This automatically meant that customers could not experience the high touch that EMC offered to its direct customers. This is because their only point of contact with the customers was through the VAR partners.

b)Effects of the Internet, Social Media and Web 2.0 Technology on the way B2B Business Buy. The internet, social media and web 2.0 technologies have led to reduced spending in the sector of technology. With the presence of many websites offering versatile information on different products, customers now have gained a wide range of options for choosing. In this situation, they are poised to make their choice depending on the price quoted by the service provider. This has led to increase in competition for customers coupled with a reduction of prices to suit the customers. Many companies, therefore, had to cut prices so as to acquire more customers. Internet has also led to reduction of one to one contact between customers and their service providers. This, therefore, means that for a customer to be prompted to opt for a product, it must be well marketed both in the internet and the social media.

c)A “Voice of the Customer” (VOC) team was set up to transfer learning from the surveys into tangible recommendation. It support the customer-centric approach as it enhanced the customer-firm relationship and to seek candid feedback.

d)EMC launched “Total Customer Experience (TCE) that kicked off a commitment to exceeding customers’ expectations, to understand what consumers valued most and then find the most efficient & cost-effective ways to deliver it which support its customer-centric approach.

e)EMC also hosted Customer Councils to have customers collaborate to have collaborative innovation online and offline to support the approach. f)EMC’s customers had historically relied on EMC salespeople to guide them through the complex, consultative buying process. However, understanding how the replacement of physical interaction with digital interaction in the consultative selling process and EMC sales team as a truly reliable partner who valued a customer’ satisfaction and success.

g) A sales tactic “puppy dog selling” renewed faith in EMC’s products, prospective customers were offered the chance to install EMC’s system for trail to increase the customers’ confidence.

h) A high touch service encouraged employees to embed themselves in the lives of their customers to deliver high quality, dependable products to support the customer-centric approach.

i)“Phone Home” enabled it’s product to run a self-check every 2 hours which often put an EMC technician onsite before the customers realized the defect.

j)Fast Deployment developed sophisticated infrastructures and processes to ensure that EMC was ready to respond anytime and anywhere when there was a problem which fast responsiveness kept customers coming back.

k)Guilty until proven innocent policy makes working with EMC a stress-free proposition which resulted in 99% customer retention rate.