Read this article about VMware, one of our finalists, in the category Best Achievement in Operational Excellence to deliver an outstanding Customer Experience Excellence, selected by the independent judging panel, for the 2019 Business Transformation & Operational Excellence Industry Awards program. Click here to read articles on other finalists.

To effectively tap USD 6 Billion total addressable market for professional services for VMware core products, VMware needs a strong Partner ecosystem who have differentiated capability to offer professional services to customers. It was identified that the expertise of the Partner for offering Professional Services was not adequate to ensure positive customer experience. There was also a lack of differentiation amongst Partners to deliver professional services, which resulted in difficultly for Customers to engage with relevant partners. Following areas were identified to address in the current Partner Professional Services Program (PPSP):

• VMware PPSP was structured in a dated Tiering model (Professional/ Enterprise/ Premier) that lacked alignment to solutions offerings from VMware like Data Center Modernization, Network Virtualization and Cloud Management
• The adoption of the program by the Partners was low due to lack of relevant trainings to build Partner competency around specific VMware solution offering. Only 300 Partners were enrolled for PPSP (less than 1% of total Partners).
• Partner Professional Services competency was not adequately recognized amongst customers as partners were ineffective in communicating their unique capabilities to customers
  
  

To improve customer experience with Partner Professional Services, there was a need to sunset the current program and introduce Master Services Competency (MSC) that addressed the following:

• Recognizes Partner capability in a given solution area removing the tier structure and replacing it with industry standard competency structure
• Issues badges indicating competency in VMware solution areas, so that customers can easily identify Partners with MSC badges
• Leverages a model that is structurally consistent with other vendor’s professional services, and easily understandable by the customers
  

The MSC program requires Partners to attend advanced, solution specific certification programs & trainings to build expertise to offer professional services based on VMware products to customers. The program undertook massive Change management activity by communicating and educating over 75K different partners leveraging a variety of channels like VMWorld – annual VMware conference, Worldwide Partner Summit and Partner newsletters. There was an innovative Governance mechanism put in place for validating Partner effectiveness by asking Customers to rate their Partner experience and sharing Customer references on deployments. These references would expire after a fixed duration, which meant Partners were evaluated based on their most recent engagements.

This project was a major success with ROI reaching 300% within 8 months of launch (through $250K annual revenues from partner certifications alone). There was significant capability improvement amongst partners to provide professional services and number of partners eligible to provide such services increased by 28%. This program directly improved customer experience through partners and yielded a Net promoter score (NPS) score of over 90%. Customers also provided 691 partner references recommending partner professional services capabilities that further helped in differentiating Partner to deploy VMware solutions at customer sites.

Team Member Names

Amit Sahu
Margaret Kelleher
Melisa Banegas
Shruthi Padmanabhaiah
Prabhanjan Behera
Jeff Crownover
Mohammad Naeem
Safiya Mohammad
Nishith Sahu