CBR2 Success Story: Hewlett-Packard

When Hewlett-Packard Company doubled its worldwide sales volume without increasing the number of employees, it knew it faced a challenge to maintain its well-deserved reputation for customer service. While HP needed to handle more calls at its Worldwide Response Centers with the same number of people staffing, they also had to use less expensive service alternatives than sending an engineer on site to provide repairs.

HP enhanced the performance of its Response Centers around the world using CBR2 from Inference. HP has captured expert product knowledge and makes it readily available to non-engineer call agents or customer support coordinators. CBR2 helped HP improve customer service and support by improving the remote resolution rate for its high-volume, high-repetition calls. This reduced the need for on-site visits while boosting call handling capacity by slashing the time per call. Customer satisfaction is improved because many calls are handled more quickly and consistently.

HP is the second largest computer manufacturer and exporter in the United States, with about 100,000 employees worldwide and revenues of $28 billion in 1995. To capture the expert knowledge for the hundreds of computer hardware products HP sells and supports around the world, HP has taken advantage of its global computer network by distributing the case base authoring process among its service engineers in several of the company's major Response Centers worldwide. Working in their local language, HP's German engineers developed a home-grown visual authoring environment based on Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheets and macros for creating the case bases for each product. The spreadsheets provide a graphical way to visualize the troubleshooting tree and let the engineers see the entire case base all at once, with color coding to highlight important items such as additions or changes to the case base.

When a case base is completed, a custom program performs the Lotus 1-2-3-to-CBR file format translation, and the case base is given a trial run at the originating Response Center. Once a case base allows the call agents there to successfully resolve calls more than 50 percent of the time, it is transferred to a shared disk drive on HP's global network and made available to all the other Response Centers worldwide. Each Response Center then localizes the case base, as well as any associated text, graphics or fax files, for its own use. Besides language translation, however, each Response Center must make adjustments to the service delivery solutions recommended by CBR2 to ensure that they are appropriate for the particular locale. An innovative internal web site lets HP's case base authors communicate more easily and share documentation and other information.

As HP continues to roll out more case bases to more countries, its knowledge engineers are working to improve accuracy even further by making sure all the branches are covered, adding new cases to cover product updates, working to improve the efficiency of the localization process, and working with the product divisions toward the goal of providing case bases for new products at introduction.

HP has been using CBR2 for about 1 1/2 years with more product domains being authored all the time. CBR2 has helped HP slash the average call time for some products from 15 to 5 minutes. Some CBR2 domains are providing hit rates of up to 90 percent. As a result, HP's Response Centers are able to handle more calls for more products with the same number of call agents. Response Center Engineers now handle more complex calls, and some have been converted to knowledge engineers. Call agents can handle a broader range of responsibilities and have additional career paths.

"CBR2 provides the lowest possible cost per remote fix," said David Spitzer, CBR hardware program manager for the support delivery engineering organization of HP's Multivendor Support Division. "CBR2 is a powerful, state-of-the-art tool from a reliable vendor that has always gone the extra mile to help us with our implementation."

CBR2 is a critical component of the common Response Center operating environment HP is creating, which also includes a call management system and parts scheduling, availability and shipping system. Currently, HP has deployed CBR2 in its Response Centers in Germany, France, the United Kingdom and the United States where they are being used to provide customers with answers to their service questions for HP's highly successful LaserJet and InkJet printers as well as its PCs, workstations, terminals, scanners, monitor, keyboards, disk drives, mice and other computer hardware products. Shortly, CBR2 will be deployed in HP's Response Centers in Japan, Italy, Australia, The Netherlands and Spain, as well as other Response Centers around the world as call volumes make it appropriate.

HP is also working on a number of other CBR2-related programs, including:

"Knowledge is one of the most important resources a corporation has," said Spitzer. "CBR2 has clearly helped us deal with knowledge as a product and as an investment and to realize the benefits that can come from it."

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