When Walter Reitz became EMC Corporation’s first vice president of customer service marketing in 1997, his mandate was clear: build a customer service marketing function from the ground up. Providing world-class customer service was a top priority for EMC but the Customer Service division itself received little attention inside or outside the company. Now that EMC had successfully introduced new hardware and software storage systems for open systems, the company had to convince customers that its services support would be as effective and reliable as EMC’s mainframe storage support had been.

In developing the new customer service marketing function, Reitz and his colleagues emphasized four main initiatives, two each for internal and external audiences:

• Bring Customer Service into the corporate branding effort
• Educate internal audiences on: Customer Service’s function, organization, and competitive differentiators; reasons Customer Service can support sales; and, how to position its added value
• Differentiate EMC Customer Service externally from competitor service organizations
• Educate external audiences on how best to use Customer Service resources and how these resources add value to EMC products and the corporation as a whole