RTM: Vice president, customer advocacy…that is a fascinating title - what does it mean?

AS: Lew Platt, the then chief executive of HP wanted to make the company more customer-centric as HP was a very technology driven company with a strong engineering culture. So he solicited my help to try to instigate change.

For example, there wasn’t really any system in place  to solicit feedback from customers and partners and to provide a closed loop system. 

RTM: So what did you do?

AS: Well, what I didn’t do was to create a big team of people at headquarters level.  If you do that, you only scare people and anyway headquarters are generally not very highly regarded at decentralized companies to begin with. Instead, we spent a considerable amount of time interviewing customers, as well as our own key managers, to see if we could find some potential breakthrough areas.

RTM: So it was quite opportunistic.

AS:  In a sense, yes. But what we discovered was that the best way to measure customer satisfaction was around "experiences" which is a lot more than just buying the product. Also there was a lifecycle of experiences on which we based our methodology, whether you are speaking about a consumer or a commercial customer.

RTM: How do you mean?

AS: Well, a customer will have a whole series of different experiences as he goes through the cycle ranging from specifying the product, disposal and the purchase of a new machine. We were interested in mapping out their experience at HP at key moments in this process.

RTM: So how did you do this?

AS: We looked  at our call centres first. We had some 50 around the world (another result of over-decentralization) with overlapping responsibilities. So we started a rationalization process which looked at focusing call centers around customer needs, rather than products. 

“The best way to measure customer satisfaction is around experiences.”

By creating unified software and databases, we were able to gather pertinent information on our customers with deeper and more focused feedback.  My personal experience comes from the so-called "CEO customer line", which  was set up to handle direct calls to Platt, and later Carly Fiorina. Typically, these would be from people who had been given the run-around by our call centres and were steaming mad. We intercepted and handled the calls by setting up a team of forty people, most of whom were senior people who had recently retired from HP.

RTM: Why use retired people?

AS: Typically, they have a deep understanding of the company and its heritage, they are very loyal and they have no axes to grind. In addition, they were very motivated – they really wanted to find out where we were going wrong.  Often their enthusiasm for HP would be transferred to the caller!   So I would say they are ideal.

I’d also say that most callers can tell pretty fast what calibre of person they are dealing with. Most customers had a legitimate case, but sometimes somebody was trying to take advantage of a company with deep pockets. Our people became pretty skilled at separating the legitimate caller from the terrorist.