Taylor's Take on Sun Storage

Mapping the DNA of our customers...

The Human Genome Project (HGP) has been credited as one of the great scientific feats in history when it announced it mapped the human genome in April 2003.

We don't have any molecular biologists on staff - but we think we mapped 70.1% of what makes up our Customer's Experience with Sun Storage Products (Give us a couple years to map the rest, it took 50 years to map the genome after DNA was first discovered after all...) 

This is important because if you are in the business of trying to make customers happy, then you need to know what makes them happy (or not happy for that matter.)    

The person in charge of our "Customer Experience Genome Project" is our Research Manager, Hernando Gonzalez, a Ph.D. in International Development and research statistician at heart.  You can read some of his published work in Quirk's Marketing Research Review.  In fact, if I were to guess what Hernando is thinking right now - it would probably look something like this:
How to Map Customer Experience

At the risk of spilling our secret sauce recipe for customer research over the Internet, this is what we did...

First, we sent a survey to more than 40,000 Sun StorageTek customers in 24 countries (and translated that survey into 14 different languages).  Then, we asked each customer to pick just one Sun StorageTek Product to review and answer questions about (product features, services, sales surrounding it, delivery, etc.) Finally, rigorous analytics like Factor Analysis were applied to the responses. 

Here is what we found (and I think you will quickly see that this can be applied to multiple industries)
 

• 19% of our customer's satisfaction or experience is determined by the type of relationship Sun has with a customer account.  How well sales anticipates needs, whether customers view Sun as a strategic business partner, etc.
• 10.9% of the experience fell into the product deployment and operations category - how well the product integrates, how easy deployment was, how easy upgrades are.
• 10.5% of our customer's experience is impacted by product RAS (Reliability, Availability, Scalability).
  
• 9.9% of the product experience is determined by how our sales folks communicate with a customer before and after a sale, as well as how well we do in keeping customers apprised of new technologies.
• 5.8% is impacted by product fulfillment - product delivery and install.
• 5.3% is impacted by ongoing technical support or customer support services. 
  
• 5.1% (and this came as a surprise) is impacted by the invoicing process - order accuracy, clarity, timeliness, etc.  (I guess when you are dealing with budgets and cash flow, the invoicing process becomes increasingly important.)
• 3.6% is impacted by how we communicate and deliver our future products - our roadmaps.

And finally, our analysis tells us that there is 29.9% of "something else" that dictates whether a customer has a good or bad experience with us.  ~30% unknown is higher than I like it, but mapping about 70% of the DNA of customer experience isn't a bad start...        

Measuring (and Improving) Customer Experience   

The next logical question is, "If this is what impacts a customer's experience with Sun Storage, then how is Sun Storage doing?"   To get this answer, we simply have our customer's rate us on a 0-10 point scale - 10 being great and 0 being not so great.  We can then see how Sun is rating with customers on each of the major categories above (by product line AND geographic region).  

But here is where my sharing of the secret sauce stops - since this blog is public, and our customer scores are confidential.  (But, if you are a Sun employee you can log into SWAN to see how our customers rated us - if you are not with Sun, you will just see a "server not found" page).

Now for the hard part... 

If the above work seems like a lot - it was.  But we are only half way there.  A large step in the right direction is knowing what impacts customer experience, satisfaction and loyalty on a macro scale (nothing replaces a good 1:1 with a customer btw).  The next step is to develop and implement plans to maintain the categories we are doing well in; and improve the categories we are not doing well in.

So, as we move into our new fiscal year, you don't have to guess at which areas we'll be focusing on...  

Posted at 05:04PM Jul 09, 2007 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence  |  Comments[0]