EMC produces interactive event experiences with Tableau


EMC helps diverse companies work with big data and make the jump to cloud computing. The company gathers a great deal of data about customer experiences from surveys, forums, and simply from the day-to-day interactions.

While planning for the EMC's upcoming annual conference, EMC World, a company leader challenged the Customer Experience group to help customers understand how they use that data to deliver improved experiences. Oh, and two more things: the demonstration should be interactive. And it should be cool.

So Director of Global Quality for the Total Customer Experience Group, Jenny Beazley, and Consultant Program Manager for CS Analytics, Steve Scales turned to Tableau. With Tableau—and a couple of touchscreens—they were able to create an interactive data experience at the EMC World booth. Customers could intuitively build their own visualizations in seconds, while booth workers could point out how EMC is using the data to further enhance the customer experience with EMC.

She wanted us to show and demonstrate to our customers how we're using data to drive continuous improvement to their experience with us. And she wanted it to be cool. So Tableau was the first thing to pop into my mind.

Tableau: How has Tableau helped with customer service?
Jenny Beazley, Director of Global Quality, Total Customer Experience Group: In May we had a big event, EMC World. It runs every year, and it showcases our new products, and how we work in the organization to our customers. So our Vice President of Total Customer Experience, Carolyn Muise, came to us with a directive this year saying that she wanted it to be interactive in our TCE booth. She wanted us to show and demonstrate to our customers how we're using data to drive continuous improvement to their experience with us. And she wanted it to be cool. So Tableau was the first thing to pop into my mind.

Steve Scales, Consultant Program Manager for CS Analytics: We did several different visualizations for EMC World. So we had big touchscreen televisions where the customers could come up. And then they could interact with their data, the data that we have for our customers, and they could drill in and do different things with the data on those screens. We wanted them to walk up and just do it intuitively. And that's what Tableau was able to do for us.

Tableau: What was the reaction?
Jenny: The customers loved the analytics experience center. It drew them in, just seeing the flashing colors on the screen. We used the Pages feature in Tableau to really capture their attention. And as they were using the dashboards, we were able to step in and interject with their interactions on the screens, work with them to talk about how we were improving their experience based on data that they fed back to us in the form of surveys, forums, and data that we just capture with our day-to-day interactions with our customers.

It made me feel really proud, proud of the work that Steve and I had developed in Tableau, proud of the look and feel of the booth, proud of showing our customers what we did with their data to drive improvement.