Supernova Award Category
The Problem
HP Customer Support serves a large, diverse and growing installed base of customers globally.
HP has 150 million products in warranty; the support website receives 533 million visits each year, and over 70 million customers use HP Support Assistant software to maintain their personal systems and printers. Through phone, chat, and social media HP conducts 30 million plus service-related interactions each year.
The company noticed an increasing number of its customers were relying on third-party destinations –like Yahoo Answers, Fixya, other community support forums and social media, to find help and answers to questions about its products, and on occasion complain about their product or support experience. It took a great deal of effort to accurately monitor these forums and engagement on numerous social channels worldwide, across multiple languages. Instead of having customers scout the internet trying to find information and resolve technical issues, the HP social care team decided to build its own support community. The mission was to reinvent the way customer service was handled globally with a focus on local relevance – and to unite its customers across the globe.
The Solution
HP seized the opportunity to set up online communities that allowed customers to engage in peer-to-peer support, supplemented with support from HP social agents when necessary.
HP’s Support Community is vital to the company’s customer experience, and they are always looking for ways to deepen customer engagement, improve response and resolution rates, while leaving no customer behind. With more than 125M visits per year, HP communities must support a large volume of diverse customers 24/7.
With Lithium Response, HP can accurately monitor its forums and social media engagement between agents and customers, as well as manage complex workflows between teams. HP is now able to create robust dashboards with precise filtering capabilities to support the goal of leaving no thread unanswered, increasing customer response time and accepted solutions. The ability to see real-time engagement metrics allows HP to monitor its efforts, identify gaps and improve operations.
The results
HP has more than 30 million customer interactions and 533 million web support visits, and they have achieved the most important result, delivering great customer experience at scale, which in turns means happy, loyal customers, and revenue growth. In addition to achieving those lofty goals, HP has also seen greater organizational awareness about social support, and ongoing customer and product feedback. What was previously hidden from executives view is now readily accessible via HP’s Social Care Command Centre. The entire organization has access to what customers are saying and a real-time view of issues as they arrive. The benefit of the customer service changes has been a real cultural and mindset shift throughout the organization. Now everyone is committed to ensuring no customer is left behind.
The company continues to reinvent it customer service experiences. The China customer team recently enhanced its support through localization. As of July, the company’s WeChat support channel reaches 320,000 followers, and delivers a resolution rate of over 80 percent.
Metrics
HP Community Growth (year on year)
- 19% increase in visits
- 21% increase in registered users
- 35% increase in posts
- 44% increase in Experts solutions
Efficiency and Effectiveness in community operations (year on year)
- 10pts increase support NPS and 9pts increase in resolution rates
- 23% increase in solutions
- 43% increase in kudos
- 100% coverage of posts across all boards through Lithium Response
- 540% increase in unanswered posts routed to Social Agents
- 37% reduction in first response time
- 41% improvement in minutes to solution
The Technology
Lithium Community, Lithium Response; Lithium Gamification Package; Lithium Studio; Lithium Monitor Wall, Sina Weibo, WeChat, Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, Line, KakaoTalk
The company also implemented Lithium Monitor Wall to showcase and track the volume of conversations, activity, sentiment, and community contributions in its social care environment.
Disruptive Factor
The journey to deliver great customer experiences has not been an overnight win. HP had to show how the more than 100K+ socially generated cases/month were critical to the business, and its customer experience efforts. The team took the lead in nailing down operational excellence, and then began exporting the skillsets across the organization.
In addition to the internal factors, social care is a fast changing medium. Customers are always going to experiment with new technologies and platforms, and HP has the challenge of making sure service is being delivered where their customers are.
As a seventy-five year-old company, it’s surprising to some that HP is leading the way on social customer service. The company is seen by many peers as driving innovation around how to engage with millions of customers at scale around the globe.
Shining Moment
HP was recognized by winning the coveted 2016 Lithy Award as the Total Community All Star for having a best in class and unified approach to customer listening/response as well as social integration with customer care processes and systems.
The company has received external coverage on the 1.2M conversations the company listens to per year from customers looking for help on more than 100 social networks across 95 countries. HP was also noticed for the work they do to evolve the service landscape.