Customer Service: EMC Corp.

Colborne hates making that call. He goes to great lengths -- puts in long hours of planning, drills his field-service organization of 4,000 people to an amped-up state of readiness -- in order to maximize the odds that his group can solve a problem before Walton, Tucci, or Ruettgers enters the picture. But five, maybe six times a quarter, Colborne submits to protocol and grudgingly dials the phone to report that EMC's reputation for unfailing reliability and unparalleled customer service is being tested again.

The escalation process is so ingrained at EMC that it has the eerie quality of being self-propelled. At least that's how it seemed to work at Sears, Roebuck and Co. In the summer of 1999, the giant retailer was renovating its data center in Columbus, Ohio one Saturday when a couple of workmen tried to move a refrigerator-sized EMC box. They edged too close to an open floor tile and the machine suddenly tipped at a sickening angle, then crashed through the opening to the subfloor below, pinning a workman's leg underneath.

The guy's leg was freed a few minutes later, badly broken but still intact. The EMC storage unit was another story. An EMC customer-service engineer was paged before anyone at Sears knew about the accident. He rushed to the scene and managed to stand the box back up. The cabinet was badly damaged, but it wasn't until he gingerly removed some of the high-capacity disk drives, one by one, that he realized he had a potential showstopper on his hands. Sears relied on the EMC system to store data on daily sales and inventories for every Sears store in the United States. Without it, the entire merchandising-and-replenishment system was blind -- spelling thousands and thousands of dollars of lost sales opportunities each day it was down.

By some miracle, the disk drives and the all-important data they contained had survived the crash. But the system that tied them all together was broken beyond repair. Jonathan Rand, 53, Sears's merchandise-information director, heard about the accident within an hour. By then, two remarkable things were happening. First, because of the speed of EMC's response, dozens of people were already working out a plan to preserve the data. Second, and more amazing to Rand, every well-rehearsed action by EMC seemed to flow from an understanding that approached empathy for Sears's plight. "They were not going to put us in the role of solving their problem," says Rand. "They took ownership of it."

EMC escalated the problem through four layers of the organization, all the way up to Leo Colborne, the vice president in charge. He got authorization to steal a new system off the assembly line and use it as a replacement for Sears. "There were never any questions about the impact on revenue," says Colborne. By Monday, when Sears's top executives started looking through the merchandising reports from Saturday, it was as if nothing ever happened.

Would You Like Us to Read Your Mind?

Of course, the best way to address a customer problem is to fix it before it happens. And for every hour that EMC spends mending faulty hardware and software, it spends nine hours anticipating and preventing such meltdowns. "Most of the time, we address problems before the customer even knows that there's an issue," says Walton.

EMC likes to call it "service and support mind reading." Sensors that are built into its storage systems monitor things such as temperature, vibration, and tiny fluctuations in power, as well as unusual patterns in the way data is being stored and retrieved -- over 1,000 diagnostics in all. Every two hours, an EMC system checks its own state of health. If everything is running smoothly, the log file is stored away. If the machine spots something that it doesn't like, it "phones home" to customer service over a line dedicated for that purpose.

Every day, an average of 3,500 calls for help reach EMC's call center in Hopkinton. But it's not people who are calling in to ask for help -- it's machines. Even so, it takes an ability to deal with pressure to be one of the 80 people who provide responses to machine-generated inquiries. In the span of a few minutes, EMC's systems at Ford Motor Engineering, Chase, GE Plastics, Citibank, ITT Hartford, and Ericsson dial in to request attention. About one-third of the calls from EMC's machines trigger the dispatch of a customer engineer to lay hands on the box.

"Mind reading" on that level isn't just a way to increase the speed of EMC's customer-service response. It also dramatically shortens the feedback loop on new products for EMC's engineers. It's what Ruettgers means when he says that EMC stands for "Everyone Meets Customers." (Actually, the name is derived from the last names of the company's three founders.) At most companies, service technicians live on the other side of a wall that separates them from the engineers who create products. EMC has torn down that wall. The call center sits right in the middle of the building where the software and hardware engineers work. If a machine phones home with something acute, the design engineers are summoned. "Usually, when there's a problem with a piece of code, it's personal for the engineer who wrote it," says Rick Espanet, 42, a product-support manager who oversees the call center. "It's amazing what that buys us."