Customer Advocacy
At VMware, We Are All Advocates for You
The VMware Customer Advocacy team is focused on exceeding your expectations when doing business with VMware. Our mission is for every single VMware employee to be a customer advocate, empowered to create experiences and solutions our customers and partners love, and inspire you to recommend VMware to others. To support this mission, we are proactively listening to you, analyzing your feedback, and taking action based on your input.
News
The 2013 Customer Advocacy annual report summarizes the focus areas and actions VMware took in response to your feedback. View the annual report
Our Focus
Insights
First and foremost, we are about capturing insights from our customers and partners. We seek to understand your perspectives and perceptions of our brand, services and products from a variety of formal and informal listening posts. We then employ several methods to capture your insights, including:
Engagement
From there, we engage with stakeholders across all functional areas of VMware to share those insights and help develop an understanding of the core opportunities we have to provide a world-class customer and partner experience.
Discovery
Once we've built that shared understanding, we dig deeper into the themes and issues to discover the critical areas where the company can deliver the most impact. Our focus is to drive prioritized conversations across the company and build clear understanding of root causes.
Transformation
Then, we manage a portfolio of transformation programs focused on solving our prioritized improvement opportunities in the most critical areas; often directly impacting the company's strategic planning. As a result of customer and partner input, we made the following transformations in 2013:
- Strategy and Product Plans
We publicly clarified our company strategy, and communicated three main focus areas: software defined data center, hybrid cloud, and mobility. - Product Quality
We renewed our focus on the quality of our products, initiating modified ‘real world’ testing methods that better leverage our own IT infrastructure. Our core product development life cycle was extended to allow more time and development for ‘ease of use’ attention. - Business Processes
We reviewed and improved a number of business processes in 2013 and continue to prioritize new ‘ease-of-doing’ improvement initiatives.
Experience
Last but not least, we have a core focus on the overall customer and partner experience. We are aware that what you see, touch and experience beyond our products directly influences how easy it is to do business with VMware. For example, My VMware is a self-service site that allows you to manage your licenses and support, and serves as a primary platform for engaging with VMware. The creation of My VMware was a direct result of feedback received, and its evolution continues to be driven by our customer and partner listening posts.
Culture
Guiding our behavior is a team culture founded on integrity, bolstered by the pursuit of excellence and driven by personal accountability and discipline. Additionally, it is our responsibility by our actions and behaviors to establish a culture of customer advocacy that transcends the entire company – every one of our employees should be a customer advocate.
Surveys
Relationship Surveys – Overall Assessment
We survey our customer base annually, and to ensure impartiality, we work with expert partners to execute the surveys:
- Allegiance, Inc., a world-renowned customer intelligence firm
- RONIN Corporation, a best-in-class market research organization
We often contact individual customers directly in response to specific comments they provide, or to answer a question, address an issue or ask for more information to help us better understand your perspective.
Please keep the feedback coming -- we are listening. It's vitally important for VMware to hear from you, so please participate in our next VMware Insights survey:
If you need technical assistance due to problems accessing or submitting the online survey form, please contact Allegiance directly at support@allegiance.com. VMware, Allegiance and RONIN are committed to keeping your information confidential.
Event-driven Surveys
As part of our commitment to provide our customers with the highest quality service and support, VMware Global Support Services and Customer Advocacy takes customer satisfaction seriously. In fact, customer satisfaction is one of the key metrics we use to evaluate the health of the business. We collect customer feedback through an ongoing Customer Satisfaction tracking program. The program routinely sends surveys to customers who have recently closed Support Requests. The surveys address the customer experience throughout the issue resolution process. Survey results are regularly reviewed by management to facilitate customer-centric business strategies.
The VMware Professional Services Organization also deploys surveys, inviting some customers to participate in surveys following onsite engagements. These brief surveys are used to quantify customer opinions on quality and key drivers of satisfaction. The survey responses are used by the organization to drive continuous improvement efforts.
Topical Surveys
If you have had a specific experience with a technology area or particular part of our business, we may contact you to ask for your help in evaluating the current offering and helping to shape the future of the product or service. Examples include My VMware, security policies, product evaluations and TAM evaluations.
Additional Customer Outreach
Customer Connections
We facilitate weekly interactive touch-point calls with end-user customers and partners to remain current on their point of view and sentiment on ease of doing business via My VMware. These sessions include actively asking and listening about the users' current experiences, then exploring and gathering feedback on future design concepts. This feedback is then carefully analyzed, cataloged and prioritized, serving as input into the design process.
Customer Insight Interviews
VMware is constantly seeking to gain a better understanding of our customers' experiences. To help achieve this, we are looking for customers to participate in discussions facilitated by our team.
These sessions are intended to discuss customer concerns and determine where VMware should implement improvements. Customer input and insight will help focus internal efforts aimed at making it easier for you—our customer—to do business with VMware.
If you are interested in participating in this type of feedback discussion, please send us a request.
