MEGA-integration
HEWLETT-PACKARD UPGRADES ITS CUSTOMER SERVICE SYSTEMS Judy Kincaid of Hewlett-Packard IT’S A SIMPLE CONCEPT, REALLY: Treat a repeat customer like you’ve heard of him before. A customer service rep at a call center asks someone how the printer he bought six months ago is performing after he answers a question about his new PC. At the company’s Web site, he’s greeted by name and shown offers for products.
But until a year and a half ago, Hewlett-Packard Co. didn’t do that and saw no need to. Each area operated independently. If someone contacted a call center, the company wouldn’t have any way of knowing if that person called another one.
Times have changed. “To stay competitive, we had to resolve this problem,” notes Judy Kincaid, the firm’s director of customer relationship management services. The company decided to integrate all the isolated customer contact points by implementing a program that provided a single identification for a person wherever they contacted HP.
The computer and electronics manufacturer and marketer headquartered in Palo Alto, CA has 85,400 employees. There are thousands of contact points, including 1,000 Web sites and more than 600 sales and support offices and distributorships worldwide. In March, the company decided to complete the process strategically from the top, and all areas would follow a timeline and schedule.
The call centers, the database marketing program and the Web site were dealt with first. About 20% of the customer files – all on the consumer side – have an ID number so far. Business-to-business names are not yet on the system.
An Oracle database holds customer names, addresses and ID numbers. When someone contacts HP, the company’s Customer ID system (CID) checks the person’s name and sends the ID number back through the system. This allows a service rep to look him up; it also frees repeat customers from having to re-register each time they visit a Web site. If someone is new, CID assigns an ID to him.
There’s no central database, and CID will also help address this problem too, by indicating where, in the thousands of databases, that customer’s data resides. “We can start building transaction links between the databases,” notes Kincaid.
Because the program is still in its early stages, results are few, but some marketing benefits have been noted. According to Kincaid, “What we’re seeing is a significant cost reduction in managing the basic data.” It’s expensive to send out mail to the wrong people or to wrong addresses. As HP has started to integrate this area into the CID structure, it’s been able to eliminate undeliverables by more than 40%.
An opt-in program is also being added to the company’s marketing. In “every registration vehicle” such as product registration forms and sign-ups on Web sites, customers are asked if they want information from Hewlett-Packard. Once customers express their preferences to one part of the firm, they won’t have to tell another.
This opt-in program is expected to be popular with customers, as will the improved customer service and marketing resulting from the integration.
