Customer Service: EMC Corp.

Four hours later, when Leo Colborne, VP of global technical support, was alerted, the engineers who had designed the machine joined the effort. They re-created the bank's setup in a $1 billion facility that EMC has set aside to do such simulations: same computers, same kinds of networks -- a mirror image of the data center, including a double of the EMC machine that was screwing up. Only then did they zero in on the problem: a glitch in the operating system. They hammered out a patch and zapped it to Wisconsin.

Problem solved -- which, for EMC, meant that it was the beginning of the story, not the end. Colborne knew that he had some fence-mending to do. So that same day, he jumped on a plane to Wisconsin, and a few hours later, he walked into the bank's boardroom, where 20 people sat around a table. Colborne, now 46, has been in this kind of hot seat so many times in the past 15 years that it's become second nature to him. Invariably, his opening line is an apology, on behalf of EMC and from himself personally. As he took the empty chair across from the bank's CEO, he reviewed in his mind one more time the questions that he tries to answer to help restore faith in EMC: What happened? Why did it happen? How do we make sure it doesn't happen again?

"You can't really lose if you go to a customer after something's happened and tell them exactly that," Colborne explains. "It's very simple. But it's not easy. Customers have to go through a healing process before they can move on. The goal is to get the customer to say, 'I'm really not happy about what happened, but I can't thank you enough for the support you provided to get me through it.' That's turning the situation around. If we get to that point, we become sales enablers."

Colborne reached that point with the bank CEO when they began to talk about how other EMC customers had avoided the nasty experience of losing access to their data by using an EMC software package that builds a mirror copy, which is always available. Turning to his team, the CEO told them to set up a meeting that afternoon with EMC sales engineers to figure out how they could add that redundancy to their systems. EMC revenue: $7 million. Says Colborne: "Everyone in the room was looking at me like, 'What's he doing? We're here to defuse the situation, and he's turning it into a sales call!' "

Smart Service: (Don't) Do It Yourself

Consider the challenge: Your customers include some of the biggest outfits in the world: banks, phone companies, automakers, oil giants, Internet-service providers, and other e-commerce heavyweights. They stand to lose millions of dollars if your equipment falters even for a few minutes. Every week, they're changing the already-complex environment of computers and software programs that rely on your equipment for the care and feeding of their crucial information. And those customers are scattered across North and South America, Europe, Asia -- all around the world.

In this situation, delivering great service would seem to hinge on developing world-class problem solvers on the front lines. At EMC, just the opposite is true. The biggest mistake you can make as a customer engineer -- a career-threatening one, in fact -- is to try to solve a problem by yourself. EMC doesn't want heroes in the field; it wants team players who will draw on the company's collective expertise to solve a problem quickly and elegantly.

"The hardest thing about customer service is to get people in the field to have a real sense of urgency," says Ruettgers. "The average guy would die with a problem before calling for help. And some people just don't like to face irate customers, so things can get kind of buried." What happens next, Ruettgers knows all too well: "Senior management doesn't have a sense of what's going on until you get some blowup where a customer calls and says, 'Hey! Do you know I've been down for three days?' "

So one of Ruettgers's first moves at EMC was to centralize the dispatch and management of all service activities. "If you don't do that, and you're providing service in 20 countries," he says, "then there's no chance in the world that you'll be able to understand what's really happening with customers or to intercede fast enough when something isn't going right."

To achieve that kind of speed, EMC's customer-service engineers follow a rigid procedure for escalating a customer's problem. Leo Colborne gets paged about any EMC product anywhere in the world that's been out of commission for four hours. If the problem goes on for six hours, Colborne alerts his boss, Joseph F. Walton, EMC's senior VP of global customer services. If the problem is still unresolved after eight hours, the quaint interval of a traditional business day, Colborne notifies Ruettgers, who recently became the company's executive chairman, and Joseph Tucci, who took over as its CEO.