Company: HP
Company background:
Founded in 1939 by engineers Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard.
- Start-up capital: $538
- First product: Model 200A audio oscillator
- Earliest customer: Walt Disney Studios
From its origins in a Palo Alto garage to its current position as one of the world's leading technology companies, HP has grown and evolved significantly since its founding in 1939. Our vision is to create technology that makes life better for everyone, everywhere — every person, every organization, and every community around the globe. This motivates us — inspires us — to do what we do. To make what we make. To invent, and to reinvent. To engineer experiences that amaze. We won’t stop pushing ahead, because you won’t stop pushing ahead. You’re reinventing how you work. How you play. How you live. With our technology, you’ll reinvent your world.
Contact: Wendy Schippers and Jamie Muzzana
Title: Community Program Managers – Community strategy and CX
Related URLs: HP Support Community
Kudos Category: Best-in-Class: Community
1. Describe your community(s) and how you decided to start a community or grow/change it?
Being where our customers are and putting customers at the core of our support strategy was the driving force behind initiating a support community back in 2008. More and more customers were increasingly turning to multiple digital channels for support and we wanted to offer a platform that enabled customers to engage in peer-to-peer discussions while also enabling us to learn from those customer conversations. The support community is a key component to HP’s comprehensive digital customer support strategy.
The primary functions of the HP Support community are to:
- Solve customer questions through their preferred mode of engagement, while also deflecting cases through peer to peer support with easy discovery for browsing customers
- Enable us to quickly recognize emerging customer issues for solution development
- Utilize customer voice, ideas, and feedback for product innovation and customer experience improvements
The HP Support Community is also home to our longstanding and loyal group of volunteer Experts who engage with HP customers on behalf of HP, providing a support option beyond traditional company generated knowledge articles and building relationships with other community members.
Just before the HP Community would celebrate its 10-year anniversary, our team came together in a face-to-face meeting to define the community strategy for the years ahead. Just as HP as a company had a goal of reinvention, we aimed to reinvent the community customer experience.
Before we reinvent, we always like to take a moment to reflect on what went well and what opportunities we see for improvements.
In our English community alone over the past years, nearly 2 million people had provided over 3 million answers to nearly 1 million questions. We've also had three major redesigns, six meetups with HP Experts from all around the world, and 33 #HPExpertDay events during that time.
You could say we were running a successful mature community, like a well-oiled machine. However, mature communities face their own challenges and we saw growth stagnate and changes in customer behavior and needs. We knew it was time for change.
And as we reflected and reviewed insights, a story started to unfold.
- Community growth had stagnated, and more and more customers were accessing the community from a mobile device. And this in a time that mobile continued to be on the rise! Something needed to be done about that!
- Top contributors had topped out of the ranks. It wasn’t obvious to community members what activities were recognized and rewarded. There was little or no motivation to progress.
- Our community had generated a lot of content. And we mean a lot! But we did not have a clear content strategy or methods to help customers find the best answer to their question.
After these key observations we drafted our initial Community 2.0 transformation strategy around three primary pillars:
- Improve access and optimize navigation on any device across multiple user personas.
- Curate and enrich solutions to enable customers to easily find and use content to prevent and resolve issues.
- Revamp our recognition and rewards program for community contributors to increase engagement.
2. Tell us about how you made it happen? Did you stage it first? Who got an early look? How did you drive adoption? Did you get executive buy-in? Did you have any key iterations?
After successfully pitching the new strategy to the Customer Support leadership team, it was time to take the essential next step of formalizing the project structure and assigning the project leads aligned to an overall framework. HP Support Community 2.0 was born.
We started with an audit of the community by analyzing survey data along with community usage metrics to understand user behavior and needs. Turning insights into actions, we created multiple user personas to define personalized experiences and fine tune into the Design phase. We built our first set of requirements, which were each tied to the defined user personas and validated through benchmarks and several review sessions.
We went from design to deploy in 2 months and provided HP Experts a sneak peek of the new design by sharing detailed feature descriptions and screenshots from the Stage environment.
Our journey started with a major overhaul of our community by deploying an entirely new Responsive design, and then followed with subsequent enhancement releases to make further incremental improvements utilizing agile project methodologies.
Responsive Community launch (Phase 1)
The community overhaul started with a transformed and engaging responsive user design offering a consistent customer experience across all devices. Aside from a new customized design across every page template, we introduced several new features keeping in mind the HP Cyber Security and Privacy standards.
New Key features:
- Developed more filtering and sorting options within board pages to help users find relevant posts more easily.
- Implemented Khoros’ “Me Too” feature on the original post to more readily surface top issues and indicate importance for Experts.
- Added a new “HP Recommends” indicator on designated replies to establish additional solution credibility.
- Created new branded avatars to allow for more personalization.
Tribal Knowledge Base (TKB) implementation (Phase 2)
- Launched TKB! Introduced four Knowledge Bases in the community that allows experts to collectively, write, edit, and repurpose community content into easy consume articles. TKB has enabled Experts to share their best solutions and product tips & tricks for further promotion throughout the community.
Improve content findability (Phase 3)
- Added filters to the Recent Discussions page to enable quick access to unanswered questions for improved response time.
- Implemented a floating, dynamic “Ask the Community” button on the topic pages, which are the pages that generated the most traffic from external search, to stimulate customers to post a question.
TKB enhancements & onboarding component (Phase 4)
- Integrated TKB further in the community by restyling TKB pages and featuring popular knowledge base articles on the home page.
- Developed an onboarding component customized to each visitor with a personalized call to action – whether it’s a seasoned Expert, a casual member, or a brand-new visitor.
- Added a banner on the home page to celebrate the Community Heroes and their contributions to the community.
Gamification – Updated ranks and permissions (Phase 5)
We knew our Gamification framework was in desperate need of some TLC. We had been working with a legacy model that hadn’t been changed for years. Our ranking structure did not provide community members with a sense of progression and many of our Experts had topped out on the final rank. Furthermore, with the implementation of the TKB, we wanted to ensure that we recognized the value community members bring when they share valuable knowledge about HP products.
Results of this enhancement release:
- Community members can progress through the levels faster by completing activities or by reaching milestones.
- New Community members can earn additional points when they personalize their profile avatar and read the community FAQ.
- A simplified and expanded rank level structure rewards quality over quantity.
- “Knowledge sharing is caring” and valued as such. Community members earn points for publishing TKB articles.
- Permissions that enable users to be more effective in the community are earned as part of the rank structure.
- Rank level notification emails provide community members with tutorials and their next achievement.
Operational management improvements (Phase 6)
With several new features and capabilities in place to enable and engage volunteers, curate and enrich content, and flag issues of importance, we then created a closed loop logic operational framework to identify emerging and top issues across the community, including:
- Comprehensive and formalized process to analyze metrics across communities with defined action triggers and closed loop resolution or activity to optimize the experience accordingly
- Defined quality activities to continuously maintain communities content health
- Optimized community moderation model
3. What were the results? Tell us how it impacted your customer experience or the outcomes you seek as a business. Please include metrics if possible.
After our initial major Responsive Redesign, we saw some very positive growth and conversion indicators after just one month.
Results one month after Phase 1 launch
Results after Phase 6 launch
The growth, conversion of users, and engagement continued to increase further at exponential levels throughout the incremental releases and community experience improvements. Community usage and solution rates after the final phase of improvements increased by double and triple digits in all areas as compared to measures prior to the initial launch.
While all overall community metrics increased across all devices, each measure had an even further significant increase on mobile devices.
Community Value Results
As concluded in a value assessment conducted by Khoros Business Value Consulting team, the HP Support Community delivers an annual $16.9M in support contact deflection savings utilizing the Khoros Community Contact-Deflection model.
Considering additional value calculation inputs, Khoros found monetary benefits from the HP Support Community to be a total value of $63.9M.
Aside from significant improved measures across the entire community, we utilized features and capabilities launched throughout the Community 2.0 program to quickly and effectively respond to customers experiencing work from home issues during the COVID-19 crisis.
We launched a community group hub page where Experts and SMEs could share work from home related tips & solutions and customers could ask questions. Content was proactively published within the group hub based on trending issues and hot topics, and then promoted across various HP digital support channels.
Within just a short time frame, a TKB article with curated solutions for working or learning from home issues drove a substantial impact to KPI results with greater than 550,000 views.
Our journey doesn’t stop here. As customer needs and expectations continue to evolve in this global and digital economy, we will continue to serve customers with innovative, personalized and customer-centric community experiences across HP digital support channels. We will continue to reinvent.
More to come!
