By: Christien van de Sande

Jeff Schuey is director of business development at Kodak. He’s responsible for the Kodak and Microsoft relationship. His customers are system integrators, independent software vendors, and valueadded resellers. We talked with Schuey about customer experience in situations where partnerships are involved. Jeff Schuey: “My definition of customer experience is probably a long one, but my short version is that the customer gets the solution that exactly meets their needs.”

Who is the customer? The partner or end customer?
“Ultimately the end customer is the one we’re trying to achieve their needs. But we work through and sell through channels. We need to make sure that our channel partners also get what they need, and that they’re happy with the results they’re getting.”

Serve the customer correctly
“At Kodak they have a couple of mechanisms to help end customers get the information that they need. “Our customer can go to the websites with self serve capabilities. But if they have an issue that they can’t solve, we have teams in place that will help them solve those problems directly.”

“Tough to head off issues”
“We make sure that our partners in our channel distribution teams get the information and training they need. So they know how the products work. We don’t necessarily have a strategy to prevent complaints. It’s pretty though to head off issues. People try and use things that they may not have been designed for, and sometimes they work extremely well, and sometimes they don’t. And when they don’t, we make sure we help the customer to get back to that point of exactly what they need, to solve their business need.”

Set up support criterias
“Kodak is the manufacturer, we make the software and hardware. But we have partners that have a responsibility to be the firstline support. Whether they’re system integrators, whether they’re ISVs, or valueadded resellers, they act as the first line of support. We want to make sure that the customer and the partner is happy. So we will step in when we need to, to help the end customer and the partner to solve the business or technical challenges.”

The biggest challenge
“Kodak’s been in business for 122 years, we’ve been doing imaging with microfilm and microfiche for 87 years. We’ve been doing document capture with scanners, high-end and mediumvolume production scanners for 20+ years. My biggest challenge is letting people know in the Microsoft community how we’re doing that and how it actually helps them with their Sharepoint business practices.”

Social Media
“Kodak has a visible social media strategy, a social media team and a CMO who’s very visible out on the speaking circuit. We’ve written a whole guide that’s on our website that talks about the way Kodak does and the way Kodak thinks about social media. The business to business side has the same basic guidelines, but we’re focused more on production scanners and production printers. From the business to business is social media how customers and partners, and ultimately vendors or manufacturers in our case, can communicate and get information out to solve again, to go after and solve specific business needs. From the social media aspects, there’s still a lot of work to be done. Social media in the business to business space has not been 100% addressed yet.”

This interview was held in April 2010 during SOBcon in Chicago. This year’ SOBcon starts April 29th, 2011. And -of course- we will be there!