Customer Experience, Group Collaboration, and IT
Customer experience is one of the great opportunities and challenges for the CIO and IT.
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Customer experience is one of the great opportunities and challenges for the CIO and IT. Historically, IT focused on systems rather than people, creating inefficiency rather than fostering innovation. In this video, HP's Senior Director of Employee Experience and Support, Gwen Becknell, explains how her organization deploys technology to improve user experience and foster collaboration. She discusses how IT helps groups inside the company collaborate and work together with tools and communications platforms, such as Zoom for video conferencing.
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Michael Krigsman: We are speaking about customer experience, and customer experience applied to IT. I’m Michael Krigsman. I’m an industry analyst and the host of CxOTalk. And, I want to thank Zoom for underwriting this episode and making it possible. We are talking with Gwen Becknell, who is with HP. Hello to you, and thank you for being here and being a guest on CxOTalk. How are you doing?
Gwen Becknell: Thanks, Michael! Thank you for having me today. My role is really around the things that touch an employee. It's all the tools that the employees need to make sure that they can get their job done to then serve our customers - our external customers.
Michael Krigsman: And, I know a lot of your focus is, in fact, around treating your IT stakeholders as customers. That’s what you do!
Gwen Becknell: That’s absolutely what we do.
Michael Krigsman: So, Gwen, this notion of the technology just working; is that… Can we say that’s kind of the foundation that you’d push forward?
Gwen Becknell: I think, to a large extent, that’s true, right? We want to be the lights-on organization, so people don’t have to think about the technology. That’s a good day for us. So, in my team, we’re really working on the mobility play and how we can ensure that they can work seamlessly from one modality to another. It doesn’t matter if I’m on my phone, or I’m on my computer, or I’m on my tablet that I should be able to seamlessly go from one thing to another. I should be able to transit around the building and not worry about my WiFi. And so, what we’re trying to do now is just really look at the easy button, right? So, how do I walk in and just hit one button and instantaneously connect it? My boss harps on this every day and until I get that easy button done, you know, our work is really not done.
Michael Krigsman: So, the whole collaboration piece is essential in the transformation of IT to be more customer-centric.
Gwen Becknell: Absolutely. Communication is our number one, you know, mode with being able to get back to the employees and really collaborating with them and helping them to be able to get their jobs done.
Michael Krigsman: So, briefly tell us about what you do with Zoom. I know it’s all around this issue of collaboration.
Gwen Becknell: Yeah. We've been working with Zoom for about a year now, and in that time, we are utilizing Zoom from a video conferencing perspective so, again, we can help to bring the employees together so that they can get their jobs done. That whole collaboration piece from a video perspective has done a couple things for us within HP. We have about 125 video conferencing rooms across the globe that allow people to have a pseudo-face-to-face engagement between them and that's done a couple things.
One, it's really allowed us to reduce costs from a travel perspective because, now, you and I can have a conversation even though we're thousands of miles away, but we feel like we're able to collaborate together. There are whiteboarding features and lots of different collaboration pieces that come along with Zoom that allow us almost to sound like we're all in the same room to be able to collaborate. So, we see a cost-savings there and also, the ability that you're bringing our employees together more closely.
We have about five thousand users currently within HP that are using Zoom. It’s just starting to take off now. We have around… This last month, we had about 700,000 minutes on Zoom.
Michael Krigsman: Wow! That’s a lot of minutes! So, where does this all fit into this sense of creating a bond or sense of community, or shared culture at HP?
Gwen Becknell: It allows us to enable that collaboration, right, and […] it really allows us to bring people together so that they can have that communication mode that they need to without having to worry about… You can imagine a company like HP; hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars that we spend on travel a year. And so, if I don’t have to travel, I save time, I save money, and I’m able to then have that same feeling of being face-to-face without having to worry about it. I can literally just be in my current location in San Diego and I can be having a good conversation with my boss or whoever the rest of my team that are sitting in Palo Alto, without having to worry about hopping on a plane and taking a half a day out of my schedule to go do that.
Michael Krigsman: Well, Gwen Becknell, from HP. Thank you for taking the time! We really do appreciate it.
Gwen Becknell: Thanks for having me! I enjoyed it.
Michael Krigsman: And, a huge thank you to Zoom for underwriting this episode. It makes it possible for us to have these incredible conversations. Go to CxOTalk.com and “like” us on Facebook! And also, subscribe on YouTube, because that’s a good thing to do. Everybody, thanks a lot. Bye-bye!