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PaulGi
Lithium Alumni (Retired)
15 years ago
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Best Community Business Integration: HP - Forum Parties Save Millions

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Category: Best Community Business Integration

 

Community: HP

Submitted by: HP Director of Community LoisT

 

 

It was a crazy time at HP. Windows 7 was shipping any day, and we were busy getting ready for the onslaught of questions and calls that would come pouring in.

There were thousands of posts on the new OS on the HP Support Forum, and Windows 7 had been the most searched on topic on the community for the last six months.

It was the perfect time for our executives to challenge us to find a way to use the community to help customers.

After looking at all of our options, we decided that we needed to have a party – a Welcome Windows 7 party. We went out to our support engineers and got them to agree to come to the party, which we hosted on the forum. More than 75 HP Windows 7-trained experts from around the world signed up from HP’s desktops, notebooks, and printers organizations for the 24 hour event.

Since the whole focus of this event was Windows 7, we invited Microsoft to join us. They promised several engineers.

The day of the event was set for the first Thursday in November. There was so much interest in what would be happening on the Forum that we broke the record of the highest number of page views on Wednesday, the day before. The new record was short lived.

The day of the event dawned. HP engineers sat in conference rooms made into make shift labs. They worked online with customers to recreate problems, direct customers to the correct drivers, and answer hundreds of questions. Again we saw a record number of page views on the site.

hp.JPGWhile customers raved about the help they got, the support engineers were even more enthusiastic.

 

They enjoyed helping our customers, and discovered several issues that they hadn’t known about as well as support documents that needed to be created or improved.

The party, which we called Windows 7 Expert Day, was so successful that we held two additional events. The discoveries made during the Expert Days saved the company millions, and helped countless customers.

Not bad for a day’s work.