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Hewlett-Packard

Providing the best customer experience worldwide requires global capabilities to adapt to and manage change.

The merger of Hewlett-Packard and Compaq, completed in May 2002, marked the technology industry’s biggest merger to date and forged a dynamic, powerful team of 140,000 employees with capabilities in 178 countries doing business in 10 languages and more than 40 currencies. With the power of the combined companies came many challenges, one of which was enabling the new HP to interact with millions of customers as one company. Overcoming this challenge required a tremendous collaborative effort by thousands of employees working across multiple business locations using hundreds of thousands of disparate servers, desktops, applications and network devices. It also required HP to rapidly adapt its enterprise to keep delivering on its commitments to customers in spite of the massive change going on behind the scenes.

Two years later, the company continues to enhance its focus on customers, synchronizing business and IT to make it ever easier for them to interact with HP. Key among ongoing strategies to adapt its business ecosystems to customers is HP’s business CRM initiative, an integrated approach to identifying, acquiring and retaining customers that enables organizations to more effectively coordinate and manage customer interactions across multiple channels, lines of business and geographies.

The Challenge: Serving Business Customers Better

At the time of the merger, HP had hundreds of CRM solutions using different products from different vendors. HP’s own research showed inconsistencies in the quality of experiences among HP’s business customers – including small and medium-sized businesses, public sector and enterprises – depending on where and how they chose to interact with the company. HP also realized the many customized and independent systems being used to serve customers were an obstacle to its global go-to-market strategies. In addition, the time, effort and investment required to develop and maintain so many systems were considerable. These combined factors meant change was inevitable.

HP began to examine the business processes and IT systems that made up its many CRM solutions to identify ways to better deliver bestin- class business customer experiences while lowering the costs of managing complex IT environments. The study of these differences in customer experiences revealed a number of common underlying issues and causes. First, the business processes developed and used by HP across its local and regional business operations were often inconsistent across lines of business and channels. This caused variations in the way the company engaged with its customers. Second, HP’s visibility into customer experiences was often limited to data from individual points of contact, with little capability to see the total experiences of any one customer across businesses and geographies. Third, when customer data was captured, it was often held by individuals and organizations in a variety of formats and systems, limiting the transferability and usefulness of the information to the broader organization and slowing down any efforts that were attempted. Fourth, as the quality of the customer data naturally degraded over time, they required significant effort and expense to maintain. Getting and keeping good data on millions of HP customers proved more costly and complicated than just rebuilding information over from scratch, preventing the company from developing more valued, long-term customer relationships over time.

HP realized that providing the best customer experience worldwide would require more consistency, visibility, flexibility, speed and simplicity than could be provided by the many inconsistent, nonintegrated business processes and customized IT solutions then available. It also would require global capabilities to adapt to and manage change.

Delivering More To Business Customers

In one of the largest and most comprehensive projects of its kind, HP launched a companywide integrated CRM solution, based on globally consistent business processes, to provide business customers with the best experience when interacting with HP. To support this objective, HP adapted its CRM infrastructure to standardize on one CRM platform, including Siebel software and HP hardware, across its worldwide marketing function and direct and indirect sales channels. This initiative is being rolled out to approximately 20,000 HP marketing, call center and sales employees and more than 40,000 HP partner resellers.

HP’s approach was to first define the business processes required to support the company’s go-to-market strategies before designing and deploying the targeted CRM capabilities. HP prioritized customer-facing investments that would significantly improve its ability to address customer and business needs with globally consistent processes, support global development and deployment of CRM information technology, and simplify or consolidate CRM operations wherever feasible.

HP is implementing CRM solutions to improve the visibility across every customer interaction, helping HP to use that information to know and serve customers better. From offering the solution to completing the sale, the company is linking and capturing every experience at every touch point. For example, HP’s CRM solution provides marketing a better view of where advertising campaigns are yielding the best results, enabling HP to leverage what works well or to tune execution in real time. In addition, by automating many of the processes used to qualify and route leads, HP is able to share them with inside or outside sales and channel partners faster and easier than before. HP also is installing tools to determine which partners have the best closure rates for different types of business, allowing HP to route leads not only by geography, but also by the partner’s track record in accepting and closing opportunities. HP’s CRM strategy makes it easier for sales teams to serve customers in a more integrated fashion and dramatically improves visibility by systematizing the management of sales funnels and forecasting. Capturing information from every customer interaction also promotes more cross-selling and upselling, while providing customers with a more seamless experience. Finally, CRM helps turn the customer knowledge held individually by more than 140,000 HP people into organizational knowledge accessible to all. It also enables every HP person using the solution to collaborate and contribute to keeping this information up to date, saving the expense of having this data pre-screened or kept current by external vendors.

The Benefits Of Adapting To Customers And Change

The benefits of HP’s adaptive approach to CRM include improved customer experiences, increased sales effectiveness and reduced operational costs. For customers, HP’s CRM solution helps provide them more access to the technology solutions they seek and makes more consistent interactions possible across multiple channels and sales divisions. What’s more, by integrating the full range of customer information from all sources into a common repository, HP will gain a more complete view of each customer, enabling tens of thousands of HP inside and outside sales representatives and channel partners to meet customers’ individual technology solution needs and business objectives more effectively. In addition, global business process consistency and IT solution standardization make a rapid, cost-effective implementation possible worldwide by reducing the expense and complexity associated with maintaining multiple systems and customization. Such an approach also enables HP to easily and quickly develop, upgrade and enhance its CRM applications worldwide in the future.

HP is achieving cost structure improvements by simplifying and standardizing its approach to CRM. By eliminating multiple regional systems, HP has already saved $31 million in operating expenses. As this CRM implementation expands, the entire HP organization will operate more efficiently, not only reducing costs, but also increasing the quality of service to customers. HP expects to continue to increase sales revenues and decrease costs, with specific effectiveness and efficiency goals set as follows:

• Attain measurable improvement in the customer experience based on the HP customer loyalty index;
• Increase lead-to-revenue conversion rates and boost overall revenue directly associated with new and integrated processes;
• A double-digit reduction in non-sales time to maximize revenue-generating activities;
• Improve HP’s overall data quality index and reduce the number of duplicate customer and company data; and
• Reduce operating expenses by another $15 million per fiscal half year, starting the first half of fiscal 2005.

Learn More About HP’s Adaptive CRM Platform

HP has built and is deploying a powerful and adaptive CRM platform for managing change that delivers more to business customers. HP’s CRM solution helps the company deliver a consistently superior customer experience, increases sales and reduces costs. This new solution also enables HP to capture and share across the organization a more holistic view of a customer’s experiences from every marketing or sales interaction, and to leverage that knowledge to serve customers better and to make it easier to interact with HP. More information on implementing HP-Siebel solutions is available at www.hp.com/go/siebel.