“We are doing a continuous upgrade of our customer services program,” said EMC Senior VP for Customer Services Tony Kolish. “That is what Agile Services is about, meeting new demands for support services, including delivering services over multiple new channels and in more languages and anticipating demands that “we expect to see in the next few years.”

Chat has been a huge success, he said in an interview from the Cube at EMC World 2012 (see full video below). “More people contact us through chat than any other channel today. And we are solving problems 65% faster through chat than any other means of interaction.”

One reason for the success, he said, is that EMC has a specific rule that service agents can only do one chat session at a time, rather than the three or four that is common with many companies. That means that each customer gets individual attention and fast action.

Social media in the form of community forums was the next step, and it also “is getting a tremendous positive reception.” These forums provide an opportunity for customers to exchange thoughts, tips, solutions for problems, and just discuss their experience and situation in general with peers as well as EMC support personnel. They also provide a virtual meeting place where C-level EMC management as well as experts in specific areas can communicate with groups of customers. This gives customers a chance to learn about product road maps and company strategies and initiatives that in the past they only had at a few events a year at most.

The next challenge that EMC is meeting is to deliver those services in the native language of the customer, regardless of what that is. This applies to printed information as well as service delivered live over all channels – phone, chat, and social media.

This requires new skills. Linguistic skills, obviously, but also the ability to conduct good chat sessions or to arrange and conduct a meeting over social media. And the focus of service is gradually changing. The need for product-specific technical information is gradually shrinking, and information on how a product is used in a particular vertical is becoming more prominent. That means that EMC has to retrain its service personnel in these skills and new information.

The other major challenge for EMC is to harness big data technology to make its service more proactive. This includes data from the “Phone Home” system in which EMC hardware products in customer data centers report their status automatically to EMC, from service interactions via phone and chat, and from social media. is very powerful for predicting and preventing problems. This is proving to be very powerful.

“We are creating an early warning system using an algorithmic approach to predicting the likelihood of a particular problem at a particular customer site,” he said. “We hope to start sharing this information with customers before the end of the year.” This potentially could take the concept of customer service to a new level.