Rise of the Personal Tech Consultant
HP’s Bold Move Toward Value-Added Support
HP Case Study—March 2007

Personal tech consultants: most of us have them, or perhaps you are one yourself.  Do you have a friend or relative that can answer questions such as: How do I set up my home network?  How do I merge tables in word? How can I display digital photos on my TV?  These go beyond typical tech support questions.

At HP we are trending towards personalized support in our consumer services as well as our overall approach to how we take care of our customers. We’re talking about moving beyond break/fix support and helping consumers get the most out of their products or helping to prevent problems before they happen.

Consumer services and tech support are moving in a new direction towards personal tech consulting. This article explores the need for this type of service, how HP implemented these services, and some of the results we’ve seen to date.

Technology in the Home
Technology in the home is getting more sophisticated and complex.  I have experienced these changes personally. Our family has two desktops and two laptops networked to a main printer, as well as connected to a local printer—and they can all access our family photo file on our home server. My 13 year old son started creating PowerPoint presentations a few years ago for fun using advanced animation features that I didn’t even know existed.

Not only is consumer technology becoming more complex, but consumer dependency on technology continues to rise.

Looking a few years ahead, Media Center PCs will become the hub of the home, not just the family room. Let’s say you need to adjust the heat, lights or turn on the TV in your vacation home or living room. You can do that now through your Media Center PC with a simple touch panel on the wall or your coffee table—without getting up from the couch.

According to Forrester Research, nearly one in six households now has a home network; this represents more than half of all those with broadband and more than one PC. Younger users are the most likely to have a home network - one in four are classified as Gen Y. ¹

The number of U.S. homes with a connected network will reach 30 million by 2010.²

Other trends that point to greater complexity in consumer technology include:

• Broadband is more pervasive.
• The complexity of home networks is on the rise; wireless and mobility is becoming common place in the American home and on the road.
• Media is on the move – back-ups and personal storage will become mandatory in order to preserve precious memories or download music and movies on demand.

The Impact on Support
Consumer technology is getting more sophisticated, but how will consumers learn how to use everything together? More importantly how will we—as support professionals—help these customers? Supporting them will be much more challenging, and solutions will need to go far beyond the traditional break/fix model and provide a new level of value-added customer support.

The question is not how can we provide technical support, but how do we become a trusted, personalized technical consultant for the customer?  For instance, what do we do when a customer calls the HP contact center on how to set up a wireless home network, or how to use Adobe Photoshop to remove red eye? These are not product support questions, but rather questions on product usage.

We don’t want to send the customer away in these cases and leave them with an unsatisfactory customer experience. Consequently, we have established a new class of consumer services, which we generically call consultative services. By becoming the customer’s trusted, personal technical consultant, HP has been able to improve the customer experience, resulting in improved customer satisfaction and consumer services revenue.

Identifying the Need
Two main vectors converged to tell us that the trend toward personalized consultative services was growing:

• Technology for the home is becoming more varied and complicated with home networking, music downloading, gaming, and all of the associated add-ons needed to make everything work together. Psychologists say that most people only use 10% of their brain capacity. I think that applies to using technology—we use only 10% of what the hardware and software is capable of doing.
• Furthermore, our customers told us—based on the questions they asked our technicians—that they needed more than assistance on fixing a printer jam. We found that just providing product diagnosis, troubleshooting, and repair doesn’t meet customers’ needs or expectations.

If you look at these vectors, it tells us that a more holistic support model that includes break-fix, preventative care and consultative services—essentially SSPA’s definition of the Value-Added Support business model—is needed to deliver a superior customer experience.

A New Class of Services
HP recently launched two new services called SmartFriend by HP and PC Tune Up to respond to the increasing complexity of technology in the home. These services deliver a personalized tech experience that addresses a customer’s specific issue or problem that goes beyond the product’s standard warranty support. These services are in place to help customers with simple “how to” questions such as how to use those advance animation features on PowerPoint, how to maximize the performance of a PC, or how to configure a home network.

Further, HP now includes the new HP Instant Care capability. HP Instant Care delivers a personalized support experience on every support call. With the customer’s permission, HP technicians get remote access to a consumer's computer so they can fix the glitch, instead of having to talk the customer through the process. HP Instant Care has been used on the enterprise side for years and now consumers can benefit from the capability.

HP’s Secrets of Success
HP invests $4 billion annually for product innovation, new technologies, and solutions. Since we developed our products, we know how they work together and how to maximize performance and usage. If there is a complicated technical problem, we have engineers to find the solution. We can create the content, train the support personnel, and deliver the best customer experience by controlling those customer contact points.

HP also provides options for the customer, respecting their needs, busy lifestyles, and privacy. Not everyone wants to have a service person come into their home or take the time to be home to answer the door. At HP, the majority of services are delivered by phone, real-time chat, or email. In-home capabilities are also available with many of our services. Where in-home may not be available, we offer other convenient options, such as pick-up and return on our extended service plans, and advanced exchange for some of our imaging products. Furthermore, HP Instant Care allows our agents to fix complicated problems directly, like a virtual house call. 

Putting Consultative Services into Place
The most important component of putting consultative consumer services in place is the agents.  HP puts its agents through a rigorous six-week training program that includes classroom, product, and process training. To ensure that agents can be effective on the phone, the agents are evaluated by mock calls and call monitoring. Using these training techniques allows the agent trainer to review the call and make improvements as needed.

Besides the technical product and process training, we provide soft skills training to deliver the trusted consultant. Today, agents need to have a combination of technical expertise and soft skills. The consultative agent needs to not only solve the customer’s technical problem, but also be able to understand the customer’s unique situation and offer a suitable solution.

The curriculum itself needs to adapt to this changing environment to include soft skills training, building rapport, needs assessment, and problem solving. We provide recommended scripting, cues, and triggers to listen for.  For HP specialized services such as SmartFriend by HP and PC Tune Up, the agents must maintain an even higher skill set as the questions from customers tend to be more complex.

The Benefits of Value-Added Support
Internal metrics show that satisfaction with HP service and support has improved by more than 18 percent in the past 12 months. These services and new programs—like HP Instant Care—are helping drive improved satisfaction. For example, the PC Tune Up program is seeing 100 percent customer satisfaction.

The HP Consumer Services business at HP has experienced greater than 25 percent growth and continues to deliver a material percentage to our Worldwide Personal Systems Group overall profits.

Calls to HP tech support have been decreasing significantly, which can be partially attributed to the increase in preventative services like PC Tune Up and HP Instant Care. Both can diagnose and prevent problems before they happen.

As stated previously, helping customers get the full use out of their products helps in improving the overall customer experience with HP, leading to higher customer loyalty and retention rates.

In Conclusion
Consumer services are moving in a new direction and this trend is also trickling into tech support overall. HP is in a better position to deal with the increasing complexity of technology in the home and providing services which allow customers to get more out of their products. Because of the two vectors of higher product complexity and customer need, tech support as a whole must migrate toward a value-added “consultant” approach to satisfy the customer and generate future revenue growth.

¹Source: Forrester Research: The State of Consumers And Technology: Benchmark 2006 by Ted Schadler, July 2006
²Source: Parks Associates

About the Author ………………………………………………………………….
Janice Liu has been with HP for more than 13 years and currently manages the Consumer Services Marketing group in the Americas. She grew consumer service revenue by more than 20 percent from 2005 to 2006 and is in charge of growing it an additional 15 percent this year. Prior to her current position, she was the business lead responsible for creating online merger business plan for pre-merger HP and Compaq online support assets. She graduated with a Master’s in Business Administration from University of California, Irvine.

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