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Today, October 5, Dell Technologies will join the industry-wide Customer Experience Day (#CXDay), a global celebration of the companies and professionals that create first-class experiences for their customers. For the past two years, EMC has celebrated this day around the world and engaged thousands of team members and customers. Now with our newly expanded Dell Technologies family, we are excited to reiterate the importance of our customer-centric culture and take this opportunity to thank the customers, partners and employees who make us what we are. The fact that we have the opportunity to celebrate customer experience (CX) is fantastic. However, the challenge is how to take something like CX—which is really about an intangible feeling—and translate it into something relatable, consumable and engaging that can be shared at our 30+ onsite events happening around the world? Looking at best practices from other companies and drawing on our own experience at Dell, we have identified three key components to create those impactful CX engagement moments:
Interactive and Personalized Visualizations / DemosJust five years ago, interactive visualizations in everyday life were relatively rare. In 2011, the New York Times were one of the few publications to have a dedicated data visualization and info design team. These days, it’s commonplace for readers to be able to personalize a story by filtering graphics by something that’s meaningful to them, such as their own country, state, demographic or football team! At Dell Technologies, we use data visualizations in our day-to-day roles to help us make sense of vast amounts of data and identify trends that impact customer satisfaction. But visualizations are also powerful tools to draw people in and spark conversations. We’ve leveraged interactive dashboards as a marketing tool to help make the content more relatable to users through the use of personalized filters, by product, geographic region or presenting data for a specific customer account. A sample of our proactive and predictive visualizations is available on our website and I described our path to develop this content in a previous blog post about how to Start your Data Visualization Journey. For our recent customer tradeshows, we wanted to showcase how customer feedback has directly impacted our products. So, we created an easy-to-use tool (the “Experience Customization Tool”) that allows the user to select their role and language and receive a customized output that shows the products they would be interested in and provides customer quotes in their preferred language. The technical users who attended the 2016 EMC World event found this content to be extremel y informative and through providing tangible examples of how we utilize feedback, we were actually able to solicit additional feedback at the event so we can continue to drive improvements across the business!  A role-based tool allows technical customers to see how their feedback impacts major products. Similarly, for our Dell CX Day events this year, we developed the “CX at Work” tool—which provides employees with a “tour” through the Chief Customer Office Analytics and Intelligence team from the perspective of an account-based role (e.g. Sales), a product/technical role (e.g. Consulting, Support), and a shared services role (e.g. Marketing). This shows employees how they can leverage the customer experience data and capabilities we have available and use it to deliver better business and customer results.
 A new tool created for CX Day shows employees how they can leverage customer experience data and capabilities to be more successful in their roles.
Cutting Edge TechnologyVirtual Reality (VR) is definitely “in” right now—you had the option to watch the Rio Olympic using VR goggles and health entrepreneurs are using it to help elderly and chronically-ill patients receive relief from their suffering—a story on NPR shared how “there are over 100 clinical research papers that are already published that show proven positive clinical outcomes using VR in managing chronic pain, anxiety and depression”.  VR allowed fans to watch the Rio Olympics and is provides needed relief to high-risk healthcare patients So why shouldn’t we at Dell use the same interest in VR to create a connection to our customer experience? Earlier this year, we created a VR video showing “the customer experience of the future”, which nudges today’s technology forwards by a few years. For example, the customers in the video receive alerts on their wearable devices to confirm their systems are running smoothly, allowing them to enjoy an unprecedented work/life balance and participate in conference calls with a hologram account manager, seamlessly completing transactions. When we showcased this VR simulation at EMC World in May 2016, it was the first time most of the attendees had worn a Virtual Reality headset, which held their interest as the talk track covered information on our CX listening posts, proactive methodologies and closed-loop process.  The Dell (formerly EMC) 360-degree virtual reality simulation helps inspire customers to image the future and share feedback on what they will expect from their technology vendor in the coming years While Virtual Reality is cutting-edge today, like visualizations and infographics, it will become commonplace over the next few years. Many universities now offer campus tours by virtual reality. Realtors are jumping on board the bandwagon. It’s even transforming education services, by enabling users to rack and stack virtual devices before they get their hands on the real equipment. So what’s next? Internet of Things? Robots? We know that we have to look for the next technology trend to engage our customers at future events!
At the 2016 EMC World event, customers lined up to try out our CX virtual reality simulation. Connection to a Larger PurposeFinally, people are rallied together by a common purpose. Dell Technologies recently released a video that explains how we create technologies that drive human progress. We know our employees are passionate about making a difference by the time they “give back” to community projects and those less fortunate.  A Dell video shows how our technology enables human progress During our CX Day celebrations this week, we’ve identified customers to engage with our teams and illuminate how their work is contributing to the wider world. For example, last year at our Seattle event, we brought in a representative from a leading photography organization that depends on our technology to bring stories from the front lines of war zones and natural disasters to international news outlets. Photographers may be working in circumstances with only short windows of power or connectivity, so it’s essential our systems are reliable when time is so sensitive and availability is critical. Understanding real-life use-cases helped put the role of technical support personnel into the context of this bigger picture, making the connection between their day-to-day roles and their contribution to global reporting. Our customer participated in a panel discussion talking about what makes or breaks the relationship with a technology vendor and what they’re doing in their organization to deliver a superior experience to their own customers. In addition, we’ve invited a special celebrity guest—a famous professional sports star—to speak at our live virtual event (taking place today at 2 pm EST). One reason we chose this particular athlete is given his incredible commitment to supporting charities—he is known for granting the most wishes in Make-A-Wish Foundation history, fulfilling “wish” experiences to children with life-threatening medical conditions. It’s this sentiment that inspires and delights our teams.
We also make an effort to celebrate the individual and team impact of customer experience improvements. We run an internal CX Awards program, open to all employees, where we recognize customer-focused projects from across the company, reviewed and judged by our senior leadership team. In SummarySo here at Dell Technologies, we are all looking forward to the CX Day 2016 celebrations. We know that by creating interactive and personalized visualizations / demos, using cutting edge technology and showing how CX can connect to a larger purpose, we will once again excite and delight our customers and employees. I hope to learn how you create engagement around your CX efforts—please leave your comments below! Join the Dell CX Day live virtual event—today, October 5 at 2 pm EST!
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