Three key elements of a great Technology Support experience. (And a great Support Provider!) # 1
1 – The Personalized Support Experience
At HP, we use the terms Personalized, Proactive and Connected to describe our Support experience – but what do these terms really mean and why do they matter to our Support customers? Over the next few blogs I’ll be sharing the three pillars of the optimal customer experience. Today I will cover industry trends and more about the Personalized experience we provide for our customers.
Industry Trends
When it comes to IT infrastructure, the landscape is evolving. The individual components of IT are increasingly being merged into integrated ecosystems containing servers, storage, networking, multiple operating systems and critical third party software to support things like virtualization. At HP, we are at the forefront of this wave of change and are an industry leader in Converged Infrastructure (CI). We are also a leader in Cloud. While many organizations are starting to incorporate these architectures into their IT plans --and of course other technology providers are selling their versions of CI and Cloud -- most have not fully considered the implications in terms of what it takes to support a Converged Infrastructure or Cloud based computing model. Add in things like mobility and it gets even more interesting.
The fact is, the legacy model of discreet system Support just doesn’t work very well when you are talking about an integrated environment as ‘the System’. This, however, is where HP shines. Not only do we provide Converged Infrastructure and Cloud, we also have a best-in-class Support model to ensure the expected value from CI and Cloud are realized.
What Customers Want
It’s interesting to note that while our customers are moving to more integrated and virtual computing models, many of the Support capabilities they expect from HP as a great Support provider are pretty consistent with what they expected in the past. The difference is that delivering against these expectations is significantly more complex when you talk about CI and Cloud. What do customers tell us they want? It’s really pretty simple when you break it down. They expect infrastructure availability, they want responsiveness, they want us to know them and their IT environments and they want value equal to cost. They also want end-to-end ownership for problem resolution. This is why everything we do within HP Technology Services Support is designed to deliver against these expectations. We call this our HP Always On Support Experience (AOSE). The three pillars of AOSE are Personalized, Proactive and Connected.
The Personalized Support Experience
I’ll start by explaining Personalization. Simply put - our customers want us to know them. They want a Support experience tailored to THEIR specific environment and needs. Some Support providers attempt to address this by putting a person on site in a customer’s data center. We of course can do this too, and this is actually part of our overall Support model with account assigned Delivery Managers and Services Account Managers. However, HP offers so much more based on the unique intellectual capital we’ve developed. A couple of examples of HP tools that allow us to really tailor the Support experience for our customers are our HP Support Center Portal and our Mobile Support Application. These tools are incredible. The Support Portal provides a single interface where a customer can track, manage and engage with both HP as well as others that are part of the HP partner community to manage and monitor their overall environment Support status. They can submit and monitor cases, monitor the status of connected devices, track their Support contracts, download the critical HP firmware and patches required to keep their environments up-to-date and so much more. With the Mobile Support application, they can do all of these things and more from their mobile devices, which means they don’t need to be tethered to the Data Center or a computer to interact with HP. And another great thing is that customers get to decide how they want to engage with HP or one of HP’s authorized support providers via these tools and what information they want to share. This choice is really important and is something our customers tell us they truly value.
Blog 2: The Proactive Support Experience
Blog 3: The Connected Support Experience
UPDATE: Video from HP Discover - I review Always On Support in 9 minutes
The HP Always On Support page: http://www8.hp.com/us/en/business-services/it-serv
Steve King is WW VP of Competitive Sales for HP's Technology Services Organization. He has 25 years of experience in the IT industry with an extensive background in Services and Sales. Steve works with customers and HP teams on a worldwide basis to help them leverage the unique and comprehensive capabilities of HP to accomplish their business and IT objectives. He is a frequent speaker at HP events as well as a recognized leader in developing HP's Sales talent.
