Interview with Lois Townsend of HP

[#1]

Hewlett-Packard launched its first consumer community last year -- starting with English and soon afterward expanding to several foreign languages with many more on tap. The driving force behind these launches is the team headed by Lois Townsend, manager of social media strategy and operations at HP.

Lois will join Forrester senior analyst Natalie Petouhoff tomorrow (Sept. 2) for a free, live webcast where they will discuss the value of online communities and how "service and support" is fast becoming home to the "customer champion" or advocate. (Register here.)

I spoke with Lois the other day briefly to get the conversations rolling. Feel free to follow up on any of the points below with Lois during tomorrow's webcast -- or just ask the questions below in the comments area and I'll be sure to point them her way.

Tom: When did HP first add a social media element to its website - and where on the HP website was this added?  Was it strictly discussion forums?

Lois: We actually got started with this about 10 years ago when our enterprise organization launched support forums that focused on our commercial customers and IT professionals within large companies.  Within the consumer segment, we dabbled with discussion forums and community by leveraging (borrowing) the enterprise platform, and also, when we merged with Compaq, where they had been running a support community that was focused on the actual end consumer customer:  families, students, "micro" business owners, etc.

Tom: Did you have clear ROI objectives in mind when you launched the HP consumer support forums?

Lois: Yes, absolutely. The ROI was a key component of the overall business case that we presented to stakeholders and senior management.

Tom:  What has been the reaction internally to the new consumer support community?

Lois: Internal reaction to our consumer support forums has been outstanding.  We have tremendous interest and enthusiasm at all levels of the company.  We've had a number of very passionate employee enthusiasts who are active participants in the forum, and we continue to get a high level of interest from various levels of management, who are keenly interested to learn what customers are saying, and to glean valuable customer input and insight.  They frequently ask for updates and metrics, progress on our ROI, and they also enjoy informally loggin on to the community to see firsthand what customers are saying.

Also, our product development organizations appreciate the opportunity to hear firsthand how customers are using HP products, and to learn about suggestions they may have.

Tom:  In addition to support cost savings, what other measures are you looking at in terms of ROI? For example, are you also considering "Voice of the customer," or "customer-driven innovation" (indentify new product and services opportunities and how to improve existing products and services).

Lois:  Yes!  We have a team whose sole focus is to monitor and report out on emerging issues, trends, and ideas that are surfacing on the forums.  We then take this information to see how HP can learn, mitigate issues, and/or improve our products and services.  We also work to quantify this as a benefit that adds to our overall ROI.

Tom: How about SEO?

Lois:  We actively track our SEO results, and also rely on third parties (e.g. Nielsen) to help quantify the benefits we're deriving from our community in terms of impact to SEO.  While the impact has been significant (e.g. a full page of Google search results), we have not yet factored this benefit in to our ROI.

Tom:  How does customer retention also play into your ROI model?

Lois: We are measuring the customer satisfaction increase attributable to the forums, and have seen about a 15% increase since our launch.  We have a sophisticated ROI model that can quantify the benefits of the customer satisfaction benefits in terms of increase customer loyalty (retention) and the corresponding revenue benefit. 

Tom: Thanks for taking the time to speak with me today, Lois! I look forward to your webcast tomorrow. For the readers out there, feel free to ask Lois questions below in the comments area -- and I invite you to join the webcast tomorrow (Sept. 2) at 11 a.m. Pacific and 2 p.m. Eastern time.