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Computerworld - LAS VEGAS -- Ann Livermore, executive vice president of Hewlett-Packard Co.s technology solutions group, spoke with Computerworld last week about a range of issues, including concerns voiced by users and HP business partners about the performance of a customer service operation thats increasingly being moved offshore. The interview took place at the HP Technology Forum & Expo 2007. Excerpts follow:

When I last interviewed you in April 2005, you talked about what then was a new services model, with 20% of your groups 65,000 employees in India, China, Eastern Europe, Costa Rica and the Philippines. Where does that percentage stand now? Its a little higher. One of the things weve found is that we need to get the right balance of work that we do on-site [or] close to the customer, and resources that the customer really doesnt care where they are as long as the expertise and quality are good. Were always trying to balance the geographic distribution and hire where theres good, ample availability of skilled resources.


Expertise and quality are a big issue. Last fall, I spoke with two high-profile HP partners who are OpenVMS consultants. They said the support technicians in places like China and India dont have the required expertise and arent getting the training they need. Whats your response? My view is that customer satisfaction and loyalty are at the heart of everything that HP does and stands for, and that the long-term success of almost any services business, and more broadly [of] almost any corporation, has to do with how well they satisfy customers.

No matter where your resources are, at times youll have an employee who, for some reason, may not meet the quality or performance standard. What we try to do is take the feedback and address it. We actually followed up on the feedback from those partners to see if we had a training issue specifically with some individuals, or if we had a turnover issue, or what the nature was. In particular for our OpenVMS customers, we are very focused on our installed base. We want our installed base to be happy, and if or when they ever want to migrate, we want them to migrate to another HP platform.


Did you find a systemic problem? No. [But] some people believe you can just look at statistics when you think about customer satisfaction. I think you have to look at every single customer and every single instance. Its not good enough to get 999 right out of 1,000, because even then, youve got one person who wasnt happy.