Q1. How do you handle the challenge of supporting a very diverse customer base, one that spans multiple generations and includes everyone from grandmothers to today’s highly technical youngsters, while at the same time supporting increasingly complex products and technologies?
A1. This is a tough problem. We serve everyone from the novice to the very technically savvy. The key is to have flexibility, depth and focus and use a combination of specialists and generalists in the delivery of our services. Within our Consumer Services business, we’re heavily focused on customer empathy, especially for the novice user for whom it is much more important to know that we will stay on the phone with them until their problem is resolved. In comparison, the more technical customers just want the answer provided as quickly as possible. So we really focus on striking the right balance. First, you need to understand who you’re dealing with and then apply the right mix of empathy and technical skills
Q2. What techniques are you using to reduce your support costs and still maintain high customer satisfaction ratings?
A2. We take a 3-part approach to this. First, we do everything we can to avoid problems altogether by being proactive in identifying and then resolving problems. Second, we have a very strong emphasis on First Time Resolution. For this, we have a very systematic, thorough and complete issue path resolution that defines how we go about solving customer problems. And we make sure we stay on the line with the customer until they know the problem is solved. Simple, but extremely powerful. Third, we are making more options available to customers to self-serve and resolve their own problems. A good example is driver downloads which we make readily accessible via our customer support web site.
Q3. What unique things are you doing within the consumer support space that the commercial service and support providers can benefit from knowing about?
A3. We’re heavily focused on remote problem resolution. This includes the ability to both diagnose and resolve problems remotely, whether that involves shipping a part to the customer or delivering a patch through the Internet. Through these techniques, we’re able to handle a very large number of transactions at very low cost. We handle up to 2 million transactions per month with a very low average cost of resolution of $5-6 per phone incident. The other thing we’ve done is gotten very smart about how we execute unit exchanges which is about swapping units without having to dispatch an HP service staff member to the customer site. This is where good product design becomes really essential. We work very closely with our R&D team to provide input on product design and development to ensure the products are designed with serviceability in mind. For example, we work with them to make sure the most commonly failed parts are easily replaceable and can be done by the customer. We also have a heavy focus on root cause analysis. We have statisticians on the team who are constantly studying data about our service incidents to help identify trends that have the potential to turn into large scale problems. Our goal is to be prepared and get ahead of these situations before they can snowball. It’s really critical that we can rapidly assimilate data and take action. When you’re shipping 100,000 units of a product every week, you need to be quick to recognize and resolve issues or you can easily fall very far behind on a problem. The big challenge is how to deliver a consistent experience across millions of transactions.
Q4. So how do you go about ensuring consistency in customer experience?
A4. The key is to have standardized processes and content. By this I mean that we are very careful to ensure that we document all of our knowledge so that’s in our systems and is accessible by everyone and not kept in people’s heads where others can’t access it. We also make sure all of our processes are well documented. This helps ensure we can ramp up new agents very quickly. The other thing we do is invest in customer empathy training which is integral to our curriculum and certification path for support personnel, along with the core technical training elements. Again, it comes down to striking the balance between the soft skills and technical skills.
Q5. What major changes in the support industry do you foresee in the next 5 years?
A5. I believe we’re going to see a shift from product to customer centricity. Today, the first question that a customer is typically asked is, “What product do you have?”. This approach has worked well for a very long time. But we are now operating in a highly commoditized world, so it’s critical to differentiate based on your services. To that end, I believe we need to move to a much more segmented model where you really understand your customer base and place extra emphasis on taking care of your best, most valuable customers first. Of course this isn’t done at the exclusion or expense of serving other customers, but it’s important to know where you need to place your emphasis. It’s the old 80/20 rule applied to our industry.
The other big change is that we need to become much more solution-centric in our approach. Today’s consumer IT environment is very complex and is made up of multiple components – hardware, software, networks, peripherals. The typical home office is not unlike the commercial world where customers are operating highly complex heterogeneous environments. So we have to figure out how we solve for these individual complex environments at massive scale.
Q6. Which non-technology sectors really excel at delivering service and support that technology service providers can learn from?
I think Singapore Airlines has a really great model. They emphasize something called “Customer Delight” wherein their focus is on maximizing the number of letters of appreciation they receive vs. minimizing the number of complaints. Our industry hasn’t fully internalized the full impact of services on the overall business. We’re still very product-centric. This needs to change.
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