“I didn’t want a setup for this project where we were on the sidelines and someone came in, did the work, and then left. Heart of the Customer was really flexible and wanted to understand what we were trying to accomplish – to build skills here and retain knowledge of how to do this type of work within HPE. The whole thing was a fantastic learning experience.”
– HPE Customer Success Leader Percy Rose
Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s Technology Services Portfolio (HPE) provides services for server, storage, and networking hardware and software. This multi-billion dollar portfolio is a core component of HPE’s business strategy on a global scale.
HPE set out to understand their current-state customer experience and identify what customers need from them to better prioritize HPE’s improvement initiatives.
HPE Customer Success Leader Percy Rose, who has experience in delivering large, complex programs at HPE, was hand-selected to tackle this undertaking. “When I came to the team,” he said, “much of the design of the new portfolio was in place. However, we needed to balance our internal thinking with a better focus on what matters most to the customer, taking their direct input into account. This had not been done yet.”
Percy knew he couldn’t complete this task on his own. He sought a partner with a proven approach to driving change through customer journey mapping and selected Heart of the Customer. We mentored Percy and his team to accomplish the following objectives:
To accomplish these objectives, Heart of the Customer instructed the HPE team on how best to involve key internal stakeholders early and often throughout the process. Heart of the Customer also recommended recruiting for and conducting 30 customer interviews, identifying the journey’s Moments of Truth, and assigning HPE’s operational metrics to measure the success of the customer journey.
Heart of the Customer’s design team also created a visually compelling, data-driven journey map based on HPE’s design guidelines.
Furthermore, to ensure change resulted from this undertaking, Heart of the Customer designed and helped facilitate a series of virtual Action Workshops that involved a large, cross-functional team to explore customers’ emotions, build empathy throughout the journey, and prioritize HPE’s initiatives to make the greatest CX impact.
“We needed to balance our internal thinking with a better focus on what matters most to the customer.”
“We work heavily in silos here, so getting people to share experiences about the customer to try to put a more comprehensive view of what our customers are like doesn’t happen normally. The Action Workshops gave us an opportunity,” Percy said.
With the HPE Action Teams aligned on the customer’s perspective, they designed strategic, targeted initiatives that focused on the emotions they wanted their customers to feel in the future. For example, teams collaborated to build initiatives that would surprise and delight customers during the quoting process, which had been revealed as a key Moment of Truth that had customers feeling apprehensive and waiting too long to receive a personalized quote.
“Our senior vice president said he noticed that people are starting to talk differently about customer-centricity”
After the workshops, Heart of the Customer and HPE partnered to create a future-state journey map of what the customer journey will look like in three years, after implementation of these improvement ideas. This clear, concrete change management tool serves as HPE’s North Star while they design, strategize, and take action to achieve their goals.
As a result of partnering with Heart of the Customer, HPE now has:
