HP's Desire to Focus on Customers

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HP's Desire to Focus on Customers 1) The case mentions several times HP’s desire to be more customer focused. In your view, what does it mean to be customer focused in the PC business? According to the case, what has HP done in its PC business to become more customer focused? Have they achieved this objective? Justify your response. Simply stated, to be customer focused is to "know the facts" about the client. By doing so, you will not only see the client's needs and business objectives from their point of view, but you will also learn about their unexpressed and/or future needs. In particular, in the PC business is to know what features are more important for them: price, brand, speed, mobility, reliability, and so on; and then make your product fit those characteristics. According to the case, some steps that HP has done to become more customer focused are: • Create the Customer Solutions Group, a sales force empowered to sell the entire portfolio of HP products and services. • The creation of “Operation OneVoice” (2002) in order to align the company to customer focused metrics: loyalty measures, brand awareness and changes in market share. • Creating 3 mainly customer segments with different marketing strategies: (a) Enterprise, (b) Small Business and (c) Consumer. • Centralized marketing strategy with certain decision making power at lower structural levels. • The conception of special programs to enhance the customer focus of HP’s employees, such as “Total Customer Experience and Quality” (2004). The key features were: Employee Training, Listening to the Customer, Metrics and Rewards. All of them aligned to help the customers have a better experience with HP products and services. • Focus on satisfaction levels, given customer’s desire about price and branding. • Voice of customer program , and “Carly Hotline” We believe that the actions taken by HP helped them to become a more customer focused company than they were before. They managed to relate to their customers in different ways depending on the business sector they are located. Bottom line, these actions gave them in 2004 a number one ranking in customer satisfaction index for Intel servers and IT services. 2) Ms. Carly Fiorina wanted HP to be a unique combination of high tech, low price, and superior customer experience. Visit the HP website as well as of one of its key competitors and configure a custom PC. Based on your visits, do you agree that HP has achieved the above combination in its online PC business?

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