Customer satisfaction is an important part of the bigger information technology picture. In fact, it so important that Dell EMC has created the “customer experience engineer” position to focus on what the customer is doing and feeling, what their questions are, and what issues they are trying to resolve.

That involves a three-part process: using data analytics to study customers and how to make them successful, innovating customer expansion modality and acting as a “not-so-secret-shopper” where the engineer studies the complete customer experience in order to understand it.

“We’re finding that you can only prepare for every question that you know, so we find a lot of times customer experiences have been great, but there’s those little things that we don’t think are nits but do come up when you switch your perspective and put it into their shoes,” said Don Norbeck (pictured), senior director of customer experience engineering, architecture and product management, at Dell EMC. “You’re not going to understand what a customer feels unless you’re acting like that customer.”

Norbeck sat down with host Rebecca Knight (@knightrm) and guest host Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor), of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live-streaming studio, during Dell EMC World in Las Vegas, Nevada. (* Disclosure below.)

Norbeck discussed Dell EMC’s strategy to improve the customer experience, the conversation the company is having with customers and what innovations it is using to help businesses solve problems.

Understanding customer needs to innovate solutions

With the advances happening throughout the IT industry and the digital transformation and move to the cloud, it’s important the customer hears and understands the fundamentals of this shift in order for them to keep their company as profitable as possible, Norbeck pointed out. But many customers have in fact not heard about these sweeping changes, so Dell EMC is helping those customers adapt to this transformation and explaining what they need to do to benefit from it.

“We tell the transformation story that you have to stop doing certain things, like playing around with cables, to be able to do certain other greater things for your organization for the line of business,” he said. “It surprises me every EMC World that there is a percentage of customers that have not heard that they can benefit from that experience.”

Sometimes the customer encounters a problem with their setup but doesn’t know how to resolve it. In that situation, sometimes it is best to try to get away from the small technical issues, such as speed or specific hardware, and understand the “hows” and “whys” and try to see the issues from a wider perspective, Norbeck explained.

“The part that matters is what you’re going to use it for,” he said. “So getting past that into why and the outcome is the first approach. And then, after you … get answers based on that, you go into what I call PACCS: performance, availability, cost, compliance, security. Those are the hows that you achieve the why.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of Dell EMC World 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Dell EMC World. Neither Dell nor other sponsors have editorial influence on content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE