Jim Bampos presented in a session today at PBLS11 titled, Driving the Total Customer Experience with Data.  He described the extraordinary journey he’s led his company on to manage customer experience and how it literally transformed EMC to be centered on the customer.

Prior to embarking on that journey, EMC saw itself as a data storage company that did some important things very well.  What they discovered is that what they did well was not necessarily the best things for the customer.  They set up listening posts to pay attention to the customer and turn the quality group into the voice of the customer.

Today, EMC is an IT infrastructure company that provides customers with access to their data. Their quest to own their quality and the customer experience is driven by analytics and is based on lean six-sigma methodologies.  As part of their process, they monitor every part in every box in every installation around the world.  What might be a big data issue is actually a big opportunity because with the right metrics and the analytics to reach the metrics, they’re able to turn that mountain of data into actionable insights.

My two favorite tidbits from this session are these:

• His challenge to the audience to go back to the office and question any metrics that do not relate to a customer impact.
• Think of a customer value metric in terms of how valuable is it for customers to be with US (not how valuable it is to retain the customer).

This is a great story about a company transformation can take place by harnessing big data for big opportunities. If you are interested in another story about big data, take a look at this whitepaper about how Catalina Marketing uses customer analytics on the billions of datapoints they analyze daily using SAS customer intelligence.