On the first day of Dreamforce 2015, two service experts from HP spoke about how they manage customer centricity. The session abstract:
Proliferation of digital channels, new consumer experiences, and migration towards service-based offerings are the key trends shaping customer-centricity. Cloud applications are playing a key role in helping organizations respond to these trends. Join us to learn from a global information technology corporation how they improved customer-centricity leveraging Service Cloud and the App Cloud.
They started talking about how large HP is and how they liked to develop everything from scratch. Then they changed their model and asked:
“If we were a startup company, how would we do it? That changed a lot of things.”
HP is in the process of splitting. One of the new companies, HPI is already very consumer focused. Their journey has a beginning and steps:
- Lay the foundation
- Implement Salesforce CRM (HP calls it Careforce)
- Go for responsive customer service
- Across multiple channel
- Innovate
- Enable proactive customer engagement
- Improve revenue streams with intelligent devices and offers
- Transformation
- Allow revenue streams from support interactions
- New / innovative subscription based service offerings
Stats:
- 6428 agents
- 51 sites around the world
- speaking 22 languages (and yes, customized on Salesforce
Agents benefit from an improved workflow and simple UI
Customers like having a profile and personalizeion
HP likes the analytics
Before:
- Poor flow.
- Very disjointed
- inconsistent system responsiveness
- longer calls
- Difficult to access customer information
- Signficant data dupliation
After
- Fully integrated view
- Simple and ituitive UI
- Improved system performance
- customer profile with history
- Enhanced data quality
How to do it
Given HP’s size, there were a lot of challenges. It started by identifying opportunity in the whole buying experience:
- Pre-purchase
- Purchase
- Had multiple entry points
- Had limited capabilities around guided buying
- Post-purchase
- Didn’t upsell or cross-sell
Doing this means building on the opportunity. There were some key building blocks. Key was to think about a subscription based model. To do that requires a lot of change when you are a company that isn’t geared towards subscriptions. Think about the following:
- Changes to the services catalog
- Make it flexible
- Make it dynamic and easy to change
- Entitlements change with subscriptions
- Need a single entitlement to a user or account
- Hierarchy has to reflect resellers
- Want a customer 360
- Billing engine will change
- New subscription billing model
- eCommerce has to support it as well
- Business intelligence
- Reporting and analytics are important to learn more about the customer
- Customer and partner UI / UX
- Give them a nice clean UI to manager the subscription
Once the building blocks were in place, HP could start selling a wide range of service. That includes help desk / support services, IT as a service,
HP’s architecture include a wide range of systems both on the cloud and on premise.
- communities
- Online order management (in the cloud Heroku??)
- Case management (Salesforce CRM)
- HP.com – HP on premise
- other billing and internal systems
End Results
You give the customer more power but at the same time understand the customer better and in so doing, find additional opportunities to build a more profitable and deeper relationship.
