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Customer Story

VMware

By delivering insight in every step of the development cycle, Inner Circle helps VMware improve product innovation, customer satisfaction and loyalty

VMware Achieved

Provides feedback from a hard-to-reach B2B audience

Drives partner and customer engagement

Delivers millions of dollars in annual research cost savings

Overview

VMware is a pioneer in virtualization and an innovator in cloud and business mobility. With 500,000 customers globally, the company’s award-winning software provides a powerful foundation for the apps, services and experiences transforming the world today.

Goals:

Improve customer satisfaction
Accelerate innovation
Drive revenue growth
De-risk decisions

Business Challenge

As VMware’s products expanded, it recognized the need to proactively identify customer issues early. The mandate from Chief Customer Officer Scott Bajtos was clear: deliver an “unrivaled” end-to-end customer experience.

To meet their CCO’s vision, the company needed a way to engage IT decision makers in enterprise-level companies. This demographic was traditionally hard and expensive to recruit and reach (one study alone could cost up to $100,000). Traditional research took months to generate insights. The company wanted a solution that could keep up with the speed and scale at which VMware operates.

Solution

Inner Circle is a digital insight community of VMware customers and partners that facilitates rapid-cycle research efforts. Teams across VMware engage the community to answer strategic questions and improve product functionality, quality, ease of doing business and more.

The digital insight community played a big role in the development of Skyline, a proactive support system that uses data telemetry. VMware invited select Inner Circle members to be early adopters, incorporating their feedback from product development through implementation and ongoing innovation.

Through Inner Circle, VMware demonstrates to customers that they are true partners—an approach that transcends traditional customer engagement and market research.

"Inner Circle is a win-win for both VMware and our customers and partners. VMware benefits from the feedback, and our community members appreciate the opportunity to shape the direction of a company that significantly impacts their own."

– Valerie Brock, Senior Research Manager, VMware