CX obsession at HP Inc.

What customer obsession looks like in practice

Customer obsession,
the HP way

A brief history of HP

Founded in a Palo Alto garage in 1939, HP has been through countless incarnations in its journey to becoming the brand we know today. Famed for its engineering expertise and consistent ability to build innovative, market-leading products, HP has constantly reinvented itself in response to shifts in the business landscape. However, its biggest challenge arguably came in 2014, with its split into HP Inc. and HP Enterprises, breaking its hardware and software arms into two separate companies, and sparking HP Inc. to reevaluate the relationship it had developed with its customers.

With the printer market becoming increasingly commoditized and a decline in printing leading to stagnant growth, HP knew that it needed to make changes to remain relevant to customers in the digital age. Furthermore, the strong product innovation focus that had served it well in the past meant that it frequently prioritized new features over meeting customer needs. The business had also grown to comprise numerous distinct business units, creating siloes and preventing a single view of the customer journey. The upshot being that customers frequently felt confused and frustrated in their dealings with the company.

Recognizing the challenges it faced, HP set about shifting from a product innovation focus to one of CX obsession, with the aim of building a new HP, which used customer insights to drive its decisions, communications and product developments. Hence began a business transformation initiative, to understand and commit to a process of continuous improvement of the customer experience.

The transformation team began by clearly profiling HP’s key target customers, mapping the journeys they go through when engaging with the company and pinpointing areas of friction. Net Promoter Score (NPS) was implemented as the key metric to measure customer success, and four moments were identified as having the biggest impact on improving the score: research/purchase decision, in-store experience, out-of-box experience, and post-purchase support. Finally, the team spearheaded a ‘top-down, bottom-up’ approach to engaging the whole organization in the change, implementing core transformation principles and maximizing customer case studies, insights and training to bring all employees along on the journey.

New cross-functional processes were developed to meet the needs of the customer journey and, with constant repetition of the process, teams started to collaborate and come to decisions over experience gaps more quickly. The new CX focus was also fed back into new initiatives and product development, with ideas only pursued if they scored highly in the CX prioritization process. HP even began designing and developing products that specifically addressed gaps in the CX of its competitors, seeing significant sales uplift as a result.

HP’s CX transformation initiative was rolled out across 25 countries, with 202 separate CX initiatives. It has led to a turnaround in the fortunes of the tech giant, driving substantial cost savings, thanks to a reduced reliance on external vendors. Meanwhile, HP continues to grow after an incredible 80 years in business, with revenues up 12% in 2018.

Source: Forrester