Search results matching tag 'Experience'

How did HP become a "Green" Company?

christianverstraete — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 07:37:00 GMT

On Monday, Newsweek released their inaugural Green Rankings, and interestingly, HP finished at the top. In an article, titled "The Greenest Big Companies in America" they explain they decided to publicize this list to recognize the efforts of companies, and how they ranked companies in industries as diverse as high-tech and mining.

Some are critical about the way this was done, Rose Gordon in PRWeek for example, points out that "ranks are fraught with subjectivity, or incomplete and self-reported data", but recognizes this is "a best first effort".

HP's position is due to its long term commitment to reducing the environmental footprint of all its operations, and not based on carbon offset or any other substitution program. The environmental subject is an emotional one, but reading through some of the blog comments, I realize many HP programs are not known and not visible to most. Indeed, our objective has not been to market green, but rather to become greener. HP is mainly working in three spaces:

Reducing the environmental impact of a product throughout its whole lifecycle, from design to recycling
Reducing the environmental impact of HP's own operations and facilities
Helping HP employees reduce their own environmental impact

Each of those subjects is worth a whole dissertation, and it is not my plan in this entry to review all measures taken and describe every internal policy, this would take us way too far. However, I would like to highlight some very practical examples that may help you understand what we are trying to do.

Let me first highlight a program, called Design for Environment, we embarked on several years ago. The objective of this program is to include the environmental aspects right from the early design stages of the product. It addresses the impact of the product during manufacturing, during usage and at recycling, so, all the way through the lifecycle of the product. Aspects such as packaging, materials, energy consumption, supply chain impacts, ease of reuse/recycling are all taken into account. Obviously tradeoffs have to be made to ensure quality and ease of use of the product, as our customers do not expect HP to lower their standards.

Let me give you some examples. About one year ago, HP designed a notebook for Walmart, shipped in a stylish bag made out of 100% recycled material, reducing packaging with 97%, and winning Walmart's Design Challenge along the way. Another example is the increased use of recycled material in the production of Inkjet Cartridges. These are just two examples in a series. I will come back to the DfE program in a future entry.

And let me take a minute to urge you to recycle your cartridges and HP products. You can find information on the program in your country here.

To reduce its environmental impact, HP is addressing multiple aspects at the same time. And here is where, a partial view does not allow a real understanding of what is happening. For example, when HP announced the doubling of Green Energy Use in late 2008, we received negative comments from some of our competitors, and that's fine. In the mean time, we are well on the way to reduce our total Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions from our facilities to 16 percent below 2005 levels, by the end of 2010. Our current performance can be found here. We are consolidating buildings; increase the use of renewable energy, decrease emissions per unit of floor space etc. But we are also ensuring our company car fleet uses more efficient cars (reduction of 8% of GHG emissions from 205 level, and 24% from 2006 level in Europe alone) , we are reducing travel and have implemented Halo telepresence studio's in all major facilities. We have also consolidated our IT datacenters resulting in drastic reductions in energy consumption, and are working at consolidating our printing environments.

In many countries programs exist to help employees reduce their environmental impact. In my own country for example, a program for acquiring rooftop solar panels has been implemented. Environmental tricks and tips are available on the intranet to give another example. And HP goes even further, trying to incent its customers to reduce their carbon footprint. The "Power to Change" program, launched last June, is one of the examples. To address the widest possible audience, the program is on facebook and twitter.

Becoming "greener", and I use this term rather than the term "green", as I strongly believe companies can always reduce their environmental impact, is not a big bang announcement, but an orchestration of many small steps that each add to a common goal. Caring for the environment has been in HP's DNA for a long time. Our first recycling program was started in 1966, to recycle punched cards. Most of you probably do not even remember how they look.

We are committed to continue our efforts to reduce our environmental impact. If you are interested in reviewing how we progress, check our environment pages.

Don't forget the Cloud Supply Chain

christianverstraete — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 19:09:00 GMT

There are an increasing number of cloud based Supply Chain services, offered as SaaS, appearing on the market. But that is not the subject of this blog entry. Actually the question is way simpler. Are you aware of all the players participating in providing you the latest SaaS service you have bought?

Let me take an example. Amitive is an SaaS provider, delivering Community Supply Chain Management services, or as they call it, "SCM in the Cloud^TM". I don't know the company, it just happened to be one that appeared in Bob Trebilcock's review of SCM software in the Cloud.

Going to Amitive's web page, I tried to understand whether they run their software suite on their own environment, or whether they depend on another provider to do so. Finally on page 7 of their white paper "Amitive SCM in the Cloud^TM: Catalyst for the Great Leap Forward in SCM" I find following phrase "Amitive manages a customer account via our multi‐tenant servers in the secure datacenter of our world class infrastructure partner". No information about who this partner is. Later, back-up, scalability, high availability and disaster recovery are highlighted. Are all these provided by the same infrastructure partner or are other ones involved? No information is provided.

Again, I just picked this company as an example. What I want to highlight is the fact most of the SaaS providers use a supply chain to provide their services to their customers, who most often do not even ask questions about the partners, nor assess the risks associated with these partners.

As in physical supply chains, something going wrong with a supplier may result in major disruptions in the whole Supply Chain. One such examples happened on August 8^th, 2008, when a cloud backup service, called The Linkup ceased operations. The company actually used the services from another company, called Nirvanix. Customer data got lost on the way, resulting in closing the service. I found a good description of the whole story in a Network World blog entry from August 11^th, 2008. Again, my objective here is not to argue about this particular case, but to illustrate the importance of understanding the supply chain one subscribes to when using a cloud based service.

You could argue that, like in the "real" world, there are alternatives. And that is indeed the case, but the lack of standards in the cloud today, mean that moving from one infrastructure, platform or service to another is not an easy task.

It is critical for companies wanting to use the cloud in general and Software as a Service in particular, to understand the players in the service provider supply chain, in the same way as they would do for their physical goods supply chain. Similar tools and techniques should be used during that evaluation. As CIO's and IT teams are less familiar with this than procurement departments, they may want to borrow expertise there for such evaluation.

My newest discovery: Secret Facebook users

susie.wee — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 22:06:00 GMT

I’ve been an avid facebok user for years. I started using Facebook very soon after they first opened it up to people outside of the .edu domain. I recruited lots of old people into Facebook… long before it was acceptable for old people like me. And, I’ve been thrilled to watch it go more mainstream. I wrote a post about how my home town in Western New York has even joined in. And now you hear stories about how people’s grandmother’s are joining. This has allowed me to end up with a pretty entertaining set of Facebook friends. I think I passed some invisible threshold where my Facebook social network became large enough and active enough that I can be almost constantly entertained with interesting status updates, posts, and pictures. Pretty fun!

I have a few friends left who are still holding back from joining. They are concerned with privacy, and the thought of blasting their little life events is not at all appealing. Many of my recruits felt that way at the beginning and joined just to be polite to me (and perhaps because I begged a little), but many of them are now actively posting away and having fun. But I still have real-world friends who have not joined.

I was having dinner with old college friends last week and I made an interesting discovery- I discovered a secret set of Facebook users! These Facebook users don’t feel comfortable with getting an account (and some even dis the idea), BUT they lurk by using their significant other’s account! My one friend makes her husband friend her friends. And when she gets home from work, she asks him “What’s going on with my friends?” Another one of my friends just had a shocking event where her friend said “Oh, I saw that you were at so-and-so’s party”, and she thought “how the heck did you know that?”. The reason was because someone posted a picture on Facebook. She doesn’t feel comfortable with joining, but when I suggested she just look at her husband’s account, and she said “Yeah- that would be okay”.

Anyways, I thought it was interesting that there might be this hidden set of Facebook users who are not Facebook account holders. Any idea on how big this group is? Do you know any secret Facebook users?

EODB Assessments and Anniversary

christina.sullivan — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 21:45:00 GMT

I can't believe that I have been blogging a year! I'm not a super-blogger by any means and certainly don't have the volume of posts that most bloggers do, but I'm pretty proud that I've stuck with it a year. It has been challenging, interesting, and a very positive experience overall. So, here is to 1 year. The goal for the next year is to post more and collaborate more with other bloggers in my subject area.

I've been toying with the idea for quite a while to develop an assessment that companies can use to evaluate how easy they are to do business with at a more detailed level and from a customer's perspective. I have tons of survey data that includes “How easy is it to do business with (X company)”?; however, very few actually break "easy" down into components

I've reviewed the Forester's Customer Service Innovation Framework and Self-Assessment http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/0,7211,47688,00.html and think Natalie L. Petouhoff has done an excellent job of defining 150 best pratice capabilities. Although I like her framework, I'd like one that could be applied to any business process.

A former boss of mine, Jerry Wittig, developed a draft assessment that I think could provide an excellent starting point. It had the following categories which could be rated on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being the lowest score and 5 being the best. The idea is that the customer of company X would rate their company interactions based upon the following categories and sub attributes:

Effortless - less time, fewer steps, fewer decisions

Comfortable - friendly relationships/dialogs, free of embarassment

Informal - fewer worries, less rules/constraints

Unforced - per my timeline, few demands

Rewarding - high benefit for effort, unexpected pleasures

Jerry passed away some years ago and I'd like to think his legacy and work continues. What assessments have you seen/used for assessing ease of doing business? What other characteristics do you think should be included in such an assessment? Send me your ideas/comments.

Positive Earnings Announcements and Focus on Customer Experience

christina.sullivan — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 19:09:00 GMT

As I receive blog alerts about “Ease of Doing Business” and “Customer Experience”, I’ve been watching the comments regarding the latest Forrester customer experience index (CxPi) Survey which indicates Apple came up with a “good” rating at 80% while Compaq/HP came up with a 63% to 66%, and Dell came in at the bottom of a “poor” rating with 58%. Read Bruce Temkin’s blog on this subject at http://experiencematters.wordpress.com/2009/04/17/apple-beats-windows-in-customer-experience/ . Of course, I’m not happy with the Compaq/ HP rating as my job focuses on making interactions with the customer easier, but I also have insight into customer improvements HP is working on and know sometimes there is a lag between improvements and the results seen in surveys. Other than being distracted by all the comments posted to Temkin’s blog, the other thing I noticed was the large number of Q1 earnings announcements this week and the mention of customer experience. Take a look at Amazon, JetBlue, Stamps.com, Yahoo, and even the newcomer, Chipotle, comments:

“We remain heads down focused on driving a better customer experience through price, selection and convenience. We believe putting customers first is the only reliable way to create lasting value for shareholders”. (Amazon Q1 Earnings)
“During the quarter we continued to enhance our customer experience. We introduced free premium movies for our customers traveling to the Caribbean and we continued to test the sale of food onboard our aircraft. Our goal is to provide our customers with products and services they value, especially at a time when customers are carefully managing their budgets”.(JetBlue Q1 Earnings)
“Second in our 2009 plan, we are going to continue optimizing our business model and our overall customer experience in several ways.”(Stamps.com Q1 Earnings)
“Yahoo is focusing on having a Wow! experience for all of its users around the world.” (Yahoo Q1 Earnings)
“These benefits are apparent throughout our business model, and in nearly every facet of the customer experience. For example, we're providing better customer service and better food while improving the cost of labor and food and reducing our G&A expenditures.” (Chipotle Q1 Earnings)

Is it a coincidence that these companies had strong performance and positive earnings? I think not. I’m pleased to see that those focusing on improving the customer experience are reaping the rewards.

Forbes CMO Network Interview – Michael Mendenhall HP CMO

Scott Berg — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 22:53:00 GMT

An interesting interview from Michael Mendenhall on our marketing focus during this downturn in the economy and his take on digital. Take a look… would love to hear your comments.

Scott

Moving from Marketing/Advertising Campaigns to Ecosystem Management

Scott Berg — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 18:54:00 GMT

No question the marketing and advertising industry is going through a seismic shift. And although the main-line and industry press continues to focus the headlines on declines in budgets and the shut down of newspapers – frankly, I believe the shift is much more fundamental and reduced budgets and newspaper shutdowns are merely symptoms of this shift.

As marketers many of us have focused our efforts on two fundamental efforts:

Brand and
Demand Generation

We first got them to fall in love with the brand and then cycled them through the purchase funnel to the ultimate sale.

However, as content, access and user involvement have become more and more prevalent, it’s time for us to rethink our strategies. We need to connect, engage and listen to customers at every single point along the “relationship” curve.

Point A: Discover – the brand

Point B: Find – find the brand or product

Point C: Confirmation/Validation – checking with others to gain confidence to purchase

Point D: Transact – buying the product

Point E: Support – providing outstanding support post sale

Point F: Feedback/Share – listening to customers about what they are sharing with others

When you look at the entire purchase or engagement funnel or as I like to say “the ecosystem” – you fundamentally are forced to look at how you deploy your marketing funding based on what your customer is doing, not based on media type. In fact, you might necessarily deploy media dollars as much as create engagement platforms, communities, forums, listening tools, metrics platforms, etc.

So start looking at your customer ecosystem…. See where you’re strong, weak, etc. and begin improving and strengthening the system – based on customer requirements vs. a traditional or pre-defined media mix.

Scott

Customer’s Clock Rules

christina.sullivan — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 22:20:00 GMT

In a previous blog, http://www.communities.hp.com/online/blogs/ease-of-doing-business/archive/2008/11/20/disneyworld-does-it.aspx, I cite 5 rules for ease of doing business and improving customer experience. The 2^nd rule I cited was that you must “Evaluate your processes and procedures with #1(put the customer first) in mind”. If you are working to transform a critical customer process, you need to know: 1) what you are trying to accomplish? and 2) how do you know when you get there? The latter gets to developing the right measures. Let me give you an example of this. If I was looking at customer turnaround time for a specific process, would I measure time in business hours (the time that the establishment is open) or would I measure it in customer real-time? If you’ve read the title of this blog you should know the answer, but you would be surprised how many companies don’t do this. Customers don’t care if the office was closed between 6pm and 8am. They want a response and they want it now. If they made a request yesterday and don’t get an answer until today, that’s a 24 hour response in their mind. Systems may have limitations that get in the way of measuring your performance in “customer time” but in order to follow the first 2 rules (#1: putting the customer first; and 2: Evaluate your processes and procedures with #1 in mind), you have to ensure your measurements are consistent with the customer view.

Go forth and measure! But, make sure you do it with the customer mindset – not the internal view or just the way the system allows you to.

Putting Customers First

christina.sullivan — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 21:59:00 GMT

In a previous blog, http://www.communities.hp.com/online/blogs/ease-of-doing-business/archive/2008/11/20/disneyworld-does-it.aspx, I referenced 5 steps for ease of doing business and improving customer experience. Although very simple steps, the challenges of the enterprise business doesn’t always allow for these steps to be followed as the rule and are sometimes the exception. Although HP follows this, I’m sure not every company adheres the most important rule:

Rule #1: Put the customer first

A recent study performed by the CMO Council and sponsored by Satmetrix entitled, “Giving Customer Voice More Volume,” reveals only 29% of the 480 senior marketers surveyed say their companies rate highly in their ability to handle and resolve customer problems or complaints.

Additionally, the study citied that “Customer listening, learning and leveling are critical qualities that need to be part of an institutionalized corporate culture, the CMO Council said. Yet, survey data demonstrates that most companies treat customer interactions around service situations and incidents only as problems that need quick resolution:

Just more than one-third (38%) of companies gather customer insight from customer engagement situations.
Less than one-third (32%) look for ways to turn problems into new sales opportunities, and only 15% introduce new products or services to further monetize the relationship.
Less than two in 10 (17%) use customer interaction opportunities to identify and cultivate potential champions and advocates.

Putting the customer first starts with actively engaging the customer. It includes not only listening but taking action on customer feedback. But, more than merely a reactive process to customer feedback, “putting the customer first” means that anytime a new procedure, policy or process is considered, the first critical question is “how will this impact the customer”? It requires the discipline of taking the customer perspective in every improvement effort or strategic initiative. It has to be a mindset and a way of life for the company to be successful and authentic with their customers.

During this economic climate, when the focus is on cost-cutting, putting the customer first can be a challenging concept to get buy-in and to implement. Companies that understand “customer first” or the “outside-in view” will be the ones prospering in the aftermath. Who will step up to the plate? Time will tell.

Let me hear your comments. What companies do you think put the customer first? I’d love to hear your examples of companies that are living by this rule. Send them my way.

It’s Going to Get Worse Before it Get’s Better

Scott Berg — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 15:44:00 GMT

And you’re saying to yourself, duh Berg – think of something a bit more original.

First, check out this article on e-marketer, which predicts newspaper revenue will slide another 15.9% in FY09. The article goes on to say “The future for print media companies is online, as evidenced by the growth in Web readership of sites such as The New York Times. Small and local businesses that once depended on newspapers to get their ads in front of customers now have other more measurable options such as paid search advertising.”

And I agree with the statement in general… but let’s dig a bit deeper at what the newspaper industry faces and the tough choices they need to make.

ISSUE 1: CPM’s for online are much lower than CPM’s for print. So they’re just not going to make as much revenue per CPM for online then they would for print.

SOLUTION: Either increase the number of the visitors to the site (and make it up in volume of visitors) or provide such unique value they can charge more for an online CPM. First, make your content free as the NYT.com did a little more than a year ago to boost online visitors. Second, distribute your content outside your web site to aggregators, etc. Third, make your content easy for bloggers to utilize, so they can distribute the content for free.

ISSUE 2: Fixed costs for printing a newspaper. A big old printer to print those newspapers costs a ton of money to run – labor, electricity, purchase cost, financing, real estate, etc. Not to mention the variable costs of paper, ink and maintenance.

SOLUTION: Start making the tough choices – get efficient with those fixed costs, eliminate the ones you can and get much leaner. Then focus on the “digital” property and invest the savings to make your content the best, web access the easiest, etc. You still need reporters – but as opposed to having a paper deadline of x time, these folks work a 24 by 7 shift and upload data to a data center.

ISSUE 3: Provide a better digital product. Let’s face it… most papers that have a web site… don’t easily migrate to new technology. If you don’t have an active blogging program, a social community site, robust search programs, widgets, mobile content, etc. then get in the game.

SOLUTION: Provide the above… but more than that… upgrade and provide new exciting reasons why the consumer and advertiser should continually come back to your site.

Even if you do all the above, the competition is fierce and much of the financial damage has already been done. FY09, and I predict first half of FY10, will be extremely difficult for the media industry. When local newspaper chains begin to file for bankruptcy protection… I think that will be the signal of a bottom. But it’s going to be a rough and very unpleasant year. Let’s hope the stimulus package Congress and the President is pushing is the medicine we need to cure the patient.

Scott