I joined VMware three years ago and the one thing that really sets the company apart, in addition to great technology, people, and culture, is that we are a “customer-centric” organization. In this post, I am going to demonstrate how our customers’ feedback is helping us innovate with the Workspace ONE platform and Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub.
Let’s first define what constitutes a customer-centric organization:
- Actively listens to customer feedback: Customer-centric companies conduct and look at NPS surveys for company feedback. VMware takes customer feedback to the next level by conducting product satisfaction surveys and our product teams regularly participate in discussions with customers. The product teams understand the customer’s environment and ask detailed questions to understand the use cases and pain points. We take all the product feedback we can get from customers, partners and end users.
- Shares response plans: Based on the customer
- Delivers on the execution timelines: Customer-centric organizations ‘walk the talk.’ They are transparent about what they are going to do and do what they say. Products follow different release cadences. Clearly separating the committed features from those that are still being discussed in concept allows the product teams to openly share roadmaps with existing customers and get their feedback early and often.
- Aims to delight users: In today’s world, user experience is as important as security and privacy features within a product. At VMware, we like to understand the use cases and pain points from the perspective of the actual user, while aiming to delight them. Often, in the Information Technology space, it is common for IT to procure and deploy software – but the majority of users are not within the IT group.
Let’s review how being a customer-centric organization helped us take customers on their journey from AirWatch Agent to Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub.
- A lot of customers asked for a single on-boarding app, instead of AirWatch Agent and Container, with the ability to access native, web and virtual apps. Customers wanted a consistent experience to access all apps regardless of whether the user accessed their apps from mobile, desktop or web. This led to the creation of the Workspace ONE app on all platforms. It addressed all the use cases from our customers regarding management types (MDM, MAM, Adaptive Management) as well as the ability to access any app from any device. Workspace ONE quickly became the industry’s leading platform to manage corporate-owned and bring-your-own devices. The capability to access any app from any device with single sign-on became the delight factor. Though our early adopters were very successful, continued thirst to learn from following the customer journey revealed we could do better.
- There were a few pain points we identified in the first iteration of the Workspace ONE app. First, the IT buyer needed clarification on exactly what is Workspace ONE since our solution bundles were branded as Workspace ONE and one aspect of the bundle was the app named Workspace ONE. Second, the move from AirWatch Agent to Workspace ONE was perceived as a project that required approved funding at some organizations, where budget planning cycles meant the earliest the organization can adopt is in 18 months. To solve these pain points, VMware introduced a branding change, where the in-place upgrade of AirWatch Agent became Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub. Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub still supports all management modes and the ability to access any app from any device. The branding changes and the in-place upgrade to enable Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub were introduced in November 2018. So far, Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub has been well received by our customer base. As a customer-centric organization, our thirst to learn continues.
In addition to addressing security, privacy, management and app access, the Intelligent Hub app also added some new capabilities to delight users, such as People, Home tab, and Notifications. If you have enabled our new Intelligent Hub capabilities and want to give us your feedback, please reach out to the product teams via your account executive (or reach out to me directly). We truly value customer input and take great pride in being a customer-centric organization.
To learn more about Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub and how you can create digital experiences for your employees, see our webinar at bit.ly/2zCtpbw! To learn even more:
- Day 1 guides – visit Intelligent Hub product support on My.WorkspaceONE.com
- Feature overview – see the Workspace ONE product page on VMware.com.
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