director of sales centers, HP Home
© Profile of Success, Catalog Success magazine, July 2006
Interview by Matt Griffin
Catalog Success: When was the catalog established?
Nikhil Behl: It was established in November, 2002.
CS: What is your primary merchandise?
NB: HP's consumer direct business in the U.S., entire portfolio of consumer products. More than 4,000 HP home office and supplies, everything from made to order desktops and PCs, as well as inks and paper. Cameras, printers, fax machines.
CS: Where did you grow up?
NB: New Delhi, India. I went to high school there. I attended a small private business school in Silicon Valley, California. I spent the summer before I graduated interning at HP. I worked with the controller at HP. I mentored with the man to understand how HP works, to learn what the HP way is and how unique HP is. When I finished that summer, I hadn't finished the project I was working on. They hired me to stay on part time through the end of school, then hired me when I graduated. I first joined HP on the consumer side. Then came the advent of the Internet, and e-commerce started to become a viable sales medium. HP launched their Web site in December in 1998, and I officially joined up in 1999.
CS: Had you any experience in catalog contact centers before?
NB: No, I joined the group to become category manager for desktop and mobile business. It was a really small organization, less than 10 people in sales and marketing. Over the course of two years, 1999-2001, I helped build out the category management area, and I broke out academic purchase programs. I built relationships with HP's other business units. Then I led a couple of teams that built the build-to-order desktop PC system. Although I didn't have a tech background, HP gave me an opportunity to work with tech and e-commerce. In 2001, I led a team that merged the Compaq consumer direct assets with HP consumer direct. Did that for a year. Then I worked in strategy and development for the combined consumer direct store, and I led internal planning functions for technology assets. Two years ago, the person who led the consumer direct business discussed strengths and weaknesses. One of the areas that needed to be built up was the contact center. I was assigned the task of re-engineering the contact centers to be assets. I took on the project to learn about something I had no real background for. There were some strategic changes that needed to be made. The project really challenged me. HP only had outsourced centers at that point. We completely redid the contact center, and brought some of it in-house. We built it into a strategic asset.
CS: What was your biggest challenge in the first few years on the job?
NB: We'd been growing pretty rapidly. The challenge was to build out a contact center in a really short period of time without shortchanging the customer. That balance was a pretty significant challenge. There was a six month period of time where we built the infrastructure, hired the leadership team, brought on a couple of sales reps, built the technology in time for our back to school season last year. Not only did we not lose any sales, but we increased our revenue per call and our customer service scores from when we started.
CS: How did you deal with it?
NB: I think that it was an interesting challenge. One of the things I had to do was do some self discovery. What are your sacred cows, what is your management philosophy? You need a list of like three or four things that are your guiding principles. You have to have a really clear vision and set of objectives. There's nothing more critical at the end of the day. Two, you've got to build out a fantastic team. You can throw a really bad situation at a great team and they'll figure it out. Third, we needed a plan. How were we going to develop what it was going to look like? Four, coming up with the balance between the art and the science. The science is how many reps we need, what are we selling, that sort of thing. The art is the attitude, the customer service side.
It's incredibly important to me to invest equally on both sides. You don't get to read body language or facial expressions on the phone. Customers buy based on their ability to connect and communicate with the CSR. You have to relate to the customer in the first 30 seconds. If you do, you've got a customer for life. We needed to put together those basic tenets. Then it was finding the best possible people, making sure they understood our objective, and then following through and letting them do their jobs. Communicate, communicate, communicate. It's incredibly important, not just for the team but for the support people, the people who pay your salaries. Make sure they understand what you're trying to do. Then you have to celebrate your successes.
CS: What is your current biggest business challenge and how do you plan to resolve it?
NB: Today our mission is pretty simple. Deliver a great sales channel for HP. We want to deliver the best possible sale for our customers. If you have a motivated sales rep, you'll make sales. We spend a lot of time on the art side of it, so the reps give the best experience to our customers. You've got to deliver a personal experience. If you call up and order a camera, we'll sell you a camera, but if there's no dialogue, you'll have a bad experience. You need to talk about what kind of pictures you're going to take, how you're going to print them, what kind of paper you'll need. If you can open that dialogue, you'll be selling a solution and an experience. That gives us a higher average order size and better margins.
We've also leveraged best practices from other call centers. We're a learning organization. We've got dedicated coaches in the center. Their objectives are to help the sales architects to improve their own weaknesses. They get personal time with the coaches to develop an action plan.
We created a new award called the wall of inventors. And this is an opportunity for us to identify anyone who's allowed us to improve the customer experience. One of our architects developed a new way to sell extended service plans (ESPs). He was selling 75 percent more service plans than any other rep. He shared that with the rest of the reps and sale of ESPs went up 25 percent. So we celebrate that.
CS: What's been your biggest mistake in business, and how did you recover?
NB: It came down to the ramp process. We ramped pretty aggressively. When you do that, it's very challenging. And it's especially challenging to find people who are philosophically aligned. I believe our sales force needs to be representative of our customer base. If we don't have the diversity of our customer base, if we don't embody them ourself, we won't be serving the customer well. And I think we've done that. The HP way is very important to us. The open-door policy. The management by walking around process. The ability to have a learning organization is so important. When it's my contact center manager, coach or whomever. What we found was we hadn't necessarily hired the people who were comfortable with that attitude. We hired in three waves, and after the first wave, we changed the way we interviewed. We looked not just at your resume, but we began role-playing. We put you in the type of role we expected you to play, somewhat reflective of the job.
CS: What goals do you have for the contact center, and what steps will you take to get achieve them?
NB: We have some very audacious goals. We've increased sales conv year over year 50percent. We increased customer loyalty index 40 percent. But there's no reason we should be happy about that. We have goals in place to improve at similar rates. I think we're already industry-leading in our metrics, but we hope to continue to improve. At the end of the day, we fundamentally believe that we're continuing to redefine the customer experience. It's great to read our customer comments. They really love how we work with them. They love that we are interested in what they want to do with our products. We increased the number of people who purchase three times or more by 92 percent.
CS: What about this business appeals to you?
NB: There's never a dull moment. You're never short on challenges. The business always is evolving and changing. The common thread in all of my experience is strategic assets. I'm a firm believer in balancing the heart and the mind. This gives me the opportunity to hone that part of me.
CS: Which catalog/online merchants do you shop at regularly aside from HP?
NB: I love technology. I like getting my hands dirty. We're in a really interesting period of time. I spend a lot of time playing with our products. I read a lot, so I'm a big Amazon shopper. I have a big stack of books on my wish list. I like reading customer comments and reviews. I like Amazon's web site as well. Amazon manages expectations well.
CS: What's your favorite book?
NB: "A Long Walk to Freedom" by Nelson Mandela. That man is just incredible. You can't put into words his history, his principles. He has so much compassion for humanity. He was in prison for 26 years, but he not a shred of ill feeling for the people who did that to him.
CS: What are your hobbies?
NB: I love to read. I love golf. I love spending time with my family. I love to travel as well. It's a great learning experience. It's fascinating to learn how other cultures and people live. Other ways of life.
The Retailer's Source for Content & Community
A Chat With Nikhil Behldirector of sales centers, HP Home
director of sales centers, HP Home
© Profile of Success, Catalog Success magazine, July 2006
Interview by Matt Griffin
Catalog Success: When was the catalog established?
Nikhil Behl: It was established in November, 2002.
CS: What is your primary merchandise?
NB: HP's consumer direct business in the U.S., entire portfolio of consumer products. More than 4,000 HP home office and supplies, everything from made to order desktops and PCs, as well as inks and paper. Cameras, printers, fax machines.
CS: Where did you grow up?
NB: New Delhi, India. I went to high school there. I attended a small private business school in Silicon Valley, California. I spent the summer before I graduated interning at HP. I worked with the controller at HP. I mentored with the man to understand how HP works, to learn what the HP way is and how unique HP is. When I finished that summer, I hadn't finished the project I was working on. They hired me to stay on part time through the end of school, then hired me when I graduated. I first joined HP on the consumer side. Then came the advent of the Internet, and e-commerce started to become a viable sales medium. HP launched their Web site in December in 1998, and I officially joined up in 1999.
CS: Had you any experience in catalog contact centers before?
NB: No, I joined the group to become category manager for desktop and mobile business. It was a really small organization, less than 10 people in sales and marketing. Over the course of two years, 1999-2001, I helped build out the category management area, and I broke out academic purchase programs. I built relationships with HP's other business units. Then I led a couple of teams that built the build-to-order desktop PC system. Although I didn't have a tech background, HP gave me an opportunity to work with tech and e-commerce. In 2001, I led a team that merged the Compaq consumer direct assets with HP consumer direct. Did that for a year. Then I worked in strategy and development for the combined consumer direct store, and I led internal planning functions for technology assets. Two years ago, the person who led the consumer direct business discussed strengths and weaknesses. One of the areas that needed to be built up was the contact center. I was assigned the task of re-engineering the contact centers to be assets. I took on the project to learn about something I had no real background for. There were some strategic changes that needed to be made. The project really challenged me. HP only had outsourced centers at that point. We completely redid the contact center, and brought some of it in-house. We built it into a strategic asset.
CS: What was your biggest challenge in the first few years on the job?
NB: We'd been growing pretty rapidly. The challenge was to build out a contact center in a really short period of time without shortchanging the customer. That balance was a pretty significant challenge. There was a six month period of time where we built the infrastructure, hired the leadership team, brought on a couple of sales reps, built the technology in time for our back to school season last year. Not only did we not lose any sales, but we increased our revenue per call and our customer service scores from when we started.
CS: How did you deal with it?
NB: I think that it was an interesting challenge. One of the things I had to do was do some self discovery. What are your sacred cows, what is your management philosophy? You need a list of like three or four things that are your guiding principles. You have to have a really clear vision and set of objectives. There's nothing more critical at the end of the day. Two, you've got to build out a fantastic team. You can throw a really bad situation at a great team and they'll figure it out. Third, we needed a plan. How were we going to develop what it was going to look like? Four, coming up with the balance between the art and the science. The science is how many reps we need, what are we selling, that sort of thing. The art is the attitude, the customer service side.
It's incredibly important to me to invest equally on both sides. You don't get to read body language or facial expressions on the phone. Customers buy based on their ability to connect and communicate with the CSR. You have to relate to the customer in the first 30 seconds. If you do, you've got a customer for life. We needed to put together those basic tenets. Then it was finding the best possible people, making sure they understood our objective, and then following through and letting them do their jobs. Communicate, communicate, communicate. It's incredibly important, not just for the team but for the support people, the people who pay your salaries. Make sure they understand what you're trying to do. Then you have to celebrate your successes.
CS: What is your current biggest business challenge and how do you plan to resolve it?
NB: Today our mission is pretty simple. Deliver a great sales channel for HP. We want to deliver the best possible sale for our customers. If you have a motivated sales rep, you'll make sales. We spend a lot of time on the art side of it, so the reps give the best experience to our customers. You've got to deliver a personal experience. If you call up and order a camera, we'll sell you a camera, but if there's no dialogue, you'll have a bad experience. You need to talk about what kind of pictures you're going to take, how you're going to print them, what kind of paper you'll need. If you can open that dialogue, you'll be selling a solution and an experience. That gives us a higher average order size and better margins.
We've also leveraged best practices from other call centers. We're a learning organization. We've got dedicated coaches in the center. Their objectives are to help the sales architects to improve their own weaknesses. They get personal time with the coaches to develop an action plan.
We created a new award called the wall of inventors. And this is an opportunity for us to identify anyone who's allowed us to improve the customer experience. One of our architects developed a new way to sell extended service plans (ESPs). He was selling 75 percent more service plans than any other rep. He shared that with the rest of the reps and sale of ESPs went up 25 percent. So we celebrate that.
CS: What's been your biggest mistake in business, and how did you recover?
NB: It came down to the ramp process. We ramped pretty aggressively. When you do that, it's very challenging. And it's especially challenging to find people who are philosophically aligned. I believe our sales force needs to be representative of our customer base. If we don't have the diversity of our customer base, if we don't embody them ourself, we won't be serving the customer well. And I think we've done that. The HP way is very important to us. The open-door policy. The management by walking around process. The ability to have a learning organization is so important. When it's my contact center manager, coach or whomever. What we found was we hadn't necessarily hired the people who were comfortable with that attitude. We hired in three waves, and after the first wave, we changed the way we interviewed. We looked not just at your resume, but we began role-playing. We put you in the type of role we expected you to play, somewhat reflective of the job.
CS: What goals do you have for the contact center, and what steps will you take to get achieve them?
NB: We have some very audacious goals. We've increased sales conv year over year 50percent. We increased customer loyalty index 40 percent. But there's no reason we should be happy about that. We have goals in place to improve at similar rates. I think we're already industry-leading in our metrics, but we hope to continue to improve. At the end of the day, we fundamentally believe that we're continuing to redefine the customer experience. It's great to read our customer comments. They really love how we work with them. They love that we are interested in what they want to do with our products. We increased the number of people who purchase three times or more by 92 percent.
CS: What about this business appeals to you?
NB: There's never a dull moment. You're never short on challenges. The business always is evolving and changing. The common thread in all of my experience is strategic assets. I'm a firm believer in balancing the heart and the mind. This gives me the opportunity to hone that part of me.
CS: Which catalog/online merchants do you shop at regularly aside from HP?
NB: I love technology. I like getting my hands dirty. We're in a really interesting period of time. I spend a lot of time playing with our products. I read a lot, so I'm a big Amazon shopper. I have a big stack of books on my wish list. I like reading customer comments and reviews. I like Amazon's web site as well. Amazon manages expectations well.
CS: What's your favorite book?
NB: "A Long Walk to Freedom" by Nelson Mandela. That man is just incredible. You can't put into words his history, his principles. He has so much compassion for humanity. He was in prison for 26 years, but he not a shred of ill feeling for the people who did that to him.
CS: What are your hobbies?
NB: I love to read. I love golf. I love spending time with my family. I love to travel as well. It's a great learning experience. It's fascinating to learn how other cultures and people live. Other ways of life.