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, inspiring you to recommend VMware to others. To support this mission, we are proactively listening to you, analyzing your feedback, and guiding company actions based on your input.
Our Focus
Insights
We are avid listeners – we aim to capture opinion-based insights from our customers and partners. We seek to understand your perspectives and perceptions of our brand, services and solutions through a variety of formal and informal listening posts, including:
This is only the beginning. Our Analysis team uses this incredibly rich data to identify the priorities for VMware to invest improvement resources.
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. It is our goal to build customer and partner advocates across the entire company, in every location around the world.
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 actions across the company and build clear understanding of root causes.
Transformation
Then, we manage a portfolio of transformation programs focused on addressing improvement opportunities in the areas most critical to our customers and partners; often directly impacting the company's strategic plans. As a result of customer and partner feedback, we are focusing on the following transformation efforts in 2014:
- Product Satisfaction
We continue our focus on product quality and are striving to deliver consistently high satisfaction across our expanding portfolio of solutions. Our recently launched Horizon 6 product included functionality enhancements and usability improvements based on your feedback. We are also accelerating our efforts to evolve the ‘web client’ based on your feedback. Just two examples against a number of product initiatives directly driven by your feedback. - Strategy and Product Plans
We have empowered our customer facing teams with better and more concise product direction information, and are communicating our company strategy more broadly across our customer base. We recently posted our Software Defined Enterprise strategy and several product overview videos to VMware.com and YouTube to share our product direction directly with you. - Customer Engagement
Our teams around the planet have a renewed focus on improving their everyday interactions with customers, to ensure you get the most out of your VMware investments.
Experience
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. We partner with experience teams throughout the company to drive cohesive, end-to-end experiences for a broad range of applications. 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
We survey our customers and partners regularly, and to ensure impartiality, we work with expert partners to execute our feedback programs:
- Allegiance, Inc., a world-renowned customer intelligence firm
- RONIN Corporation, a best-in-class market research organization
- TNS, a world leader in market research and business analysis
- Hahn Consulting, a premier marketing consulting firm specializing in services
Often, we also 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.
Relationship Surveys – Overall Assessment
Our Global Customer and Partner Relationship surveys are critically important to helping us develop a clear understanding of your perspectives across the entire span of interactions with VMware, from research and consideration, solution selection, purchase, use, support, etc.
We’re delighted that our customers and partners are so passionate about VMware, and that you are so willing to share your positive and constructive feedback.
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 Customer 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 and our partners 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 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 services engagements. These brief surveys are used to quantify customer opinions on quality and the key drivers of satisfaction. The survey responses are used by our Professional Services Organization to drive continuous improvement efforts.
In addition, the VMware Staffing Organization deploys surveys externally to VMware candidates and internally to those involved in the staffing process. These surveys gather valuable information on the recruiting process to improve our candidates’ experiences. This better enables VMware to attract top talent, which is good for VMware and our customer / partner community.
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 that current offering and your help to shape the future of that 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. 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. If you’d like to schedule a call with us, please contact us at
ca_ux@vmware.com.
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 feedback 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.
