Reaching out and Holding on to customers

[#1]

Part of HP Software Support’s Exceed Expectations philosophy is to quietly and continuously improve the way we support you. We hope the effect is that customers will realise, almost without noticing, that our service levels have risen to be the best in the industry.

One of the key process improvements we introduced in the last 12 months though was a working practice for our support engineers that we call ‘Touch and Hold’. We all know what it is like dealing with airlines, banks of retailers whose various departments fail to take ownership of a query. This can mean speaking to three or more employees before achieving the outcome intended at the start of the call.

The main reason for such woeful service is the inability of employees to ‘own’ a customer issue. Mostly, this is not their fault, but a function of the way their job is designed or the processes they need to work to have been pre-determined. Frustrating for them not, just for their customers.

At the start of this year, we challenged ourselves to look at the way our teams were working. We wanted to empower them to stay connected to their customers for longer in the support incident cycle. There were implications for us in terms of technical and customer service training and naturally, being a metrics-driven organization, we needed to track how this affected our customers.

The results of this research were interesting, while in January we had an 88% approval rating (where customers were satisfied, very satisfied, or completely satisfied with our service levels), in our latest sample this has risen to 91.5%. Clearly you have felt the difference, even if you perhaps did not notice it.

Often what works well for customers is also a win for my team too. Touch and Hold empowers our accounts teams to provide better service, because they have greater knowledge. Producing better outcomes for customers strengthens the depth and longevity of our customer relationships and helps us meet our Exceeding Expectations goals.

Naturally with another 8.5% to get to shoot for in the approval rating we are not yet satisfied with where we are. However, the ultimate decision on whether this has been a success are our customers. If you want to let me know what effects you have noticed from ‘Touch and Hold’, feel free to add your comments.

Related links:

• HP Software Support

[#2]

I have had 2 serious problems with my HP laptop and both times, I was very disappointed with the way that HP handled both of my issues.  Both issues were discovered while the laptop was under warantee.  Unbelievable as it may sound, the second time I returned the laptop to HP with the complaint that the hard drive had crashed, they returned the laptop to me WITHOUT the hard drive.  The HARD DRIVE was actually missing and now HP is calling me a LIAR.  I am a seasoned CEO of a courier service and I have never witnessed this level of incompetancy and wanton disregard for customer service.  Needless to say, I will be broadcasting to all my friends and family and business contacts, etc. this ridiculous episode that HP has put me through.  Now I have a relatively new HP Laptop that is totally useless.  What a waste of $599.00!