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Customer Profile

Hewlett-Packard (HP) is a global technology company with operations in more than 170 countries. HP offers a complete technology product portfolio, including infrastructure and business offerings that span from handheld devices to some of the world’s most powerful supercomputer installations. HP also offers consumers a wide range of products and services from digital photography to entertainment and printing. HP equips its sales and marketing operations with state-of-the-art productivity tools and processes such as a customer relationship management (CRM) system and a customer-driven sales methodology (CDSM). The electronic performance support system (EPSS) from Panviva provides employees with support for these tools and processes.

The Challenge: Improved Usage of CRM and Sales Processes, After Consolidation

Historically, HP had spent years building up its sales applications resulting in an infrastructure for sales and marketing that was overly complex and difficult to maintain. HP decided to employ an IT consolidation strategy to lower IT costs and improve service levels. For example, the initiative would reduce the number of sales applications from 100 to 15 over several years. The sales force’s core tool would be a CRM from Siebel. But it would undergo standardization and enhancements, i.e. five upgrades in three years.

While simplifying IT systems, HP wanted to drive its own best practices through greater use of its CDSM as reflected in its processes. In effect, sales people would have to “relearn” their job procedures on new applications and uniform processes.  HP sales operations expected increased user productivity from CRM and sales tools as part of this initiative. To achieve those results they needed greater adoption of CRM and compliance with sales process and methodologies from the start.  An analysis of user needs concluded that

• Sales disliked time away from customers to take IT training courses
• Too much information was presented in training for people to remember
• Sales required frequent communication to stay current with IT changes
• Adoption and accurate use of sales tools required non-traditional training methods

In 2003, HP made a strategic decision to move away from traditional learning solutions and embark on a new approach for increasing performance through better on-the-job training and support. An electronic performance support system (EPSS) would handle the training and support of 15,000 employees in the use of the CRM and other sales tools with limited self-paced training, face-to-face classroom training and e-learning. Training and documentation content would be taken out of all static mediums (manuals, cheat sheets) and made contextual and available on-demand within the sales tools and workflow. A centralized authoring team of six would provide content creation and maintenance services for the global community, ranging from inside sales and customer support to partner sales and service.

The Solution: SupportPoint

SupportPoint is an electronic performance support system (EPSS) that delivers relevant and actionable information about an organization's specific systems, processes, policies, tasks, and products. With SupportPoint, employees know the right way to work - first time and every time.

SupportPoint improves operational effectiveness by helping employees use systems like CRM and apply related business processes correctly. This ensures higher returns on investment in CRM and sales tools, greater compliance with policies and procedures, and less rework resulting from confusion about how work is supposed to be done.

With SupportPoint, HP users obtain assistance through a user friendly interface. While simultaneously performing tasks within the CRM or sales application, users can instantly retrieve documents designed specifically for their job, using a context-sensitive search. Plus, the structure and flow of documentation makes instructions quick to comprehend and easy to follow.

From an authoring perspective, to provide standardization and fast delivery of content, the HP team uses the synchronization feature, which delivers a practical way to maintain global corporate content while allowing localization for regional business and business unit variations. With self-sufficient publishing in the EPSS, the authoring team pushes new and updated content instantly to the global sales community without relying on IT expertise or waiting for the next system release. This makes content as fresh and up-to-date as possible.

The Results: Successful Roll-Out of New Applicaitons and Process Initiatives

Employees use SupportPoint to help them with routine and exceptional tasks. They could do their jobs more easily, accurately, and quickly without relying on peers, supervisors, or help desks for support. In fact, the most common complaint at the beginning of the SupportPoint introduction was that users wanted even more information and content incorporated to make performing their jobs easier and better. 

And by relying on SupportPoint for post-training support, HP saved initial training time. For instance, a two-day Siebel training course had been reduced to just a few hours. Plus, there’s no more need for individual and piecemeal coursework on IT tools. As Catherine Tarbox, of HP Worldwide Training and Development said, “We couldn’t have done these IT application and process change initiatives successfully without an Electronic Performance Support System.”

In addition to better user adoption and compliance, and shorter, better-focused training, HP saved millions in documentation and content creation costs. The company no longer relies on outsourced documentation, paper-based manuals, or difficult-to-update guides. SupportPoint documents could easily be configured, shared, customized, and even translated to meet the needs of different parts of the sales organization in a quick and efficient manner.
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Panviva: Developers of SupportPoint