Customer Story: HPE + SupportLogic
In this excerpt from the opening keynote, Krishna Raj Raja sits down with Carlos Quezada, VP of Customer Experience Strategy, to discuss the success his organization is experiencing with SupportLogic.
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I would like to invite Carlos from HP.
Carlos for folks who may know in Silicon Valley is the author of this book, The
Immigration Survival Guide.
He was most recently awarded the Hispanic Technology Exotic Councils, the top
100 influential technology leaders in the Hispanic community.
Carlos, pleasure to have you here.
(Applause)
- Hi, is it?
Carlos, for folks with an HP, you're not a stranger.
I was told that you are so used to speaking to a crowd size of 5000 or more,
all the time with an HP organization.
Tell us a little bit more about HP.
It's a well-known brand and everybody knows what an HP is.
You don't need an introduction for HP, but people may not fully know about all
the business units within HP.
You can tell us a little bit about that and your role, that would be great.
Good morning, everybody. Before we get into that, congratulations on your first
Hopefully, I can be back to your tenths.
So, congrats to you.
- Thank you.
(Applause)
- So, did you hear of HP before?
- That's nice.
So, for those of you folks that may not know, in 2015, HP split into two
different companies.
We call it the Blue Dot HP Inc.
It continues to sell consumer-grade products, so printers, laptops, monitors.
And then HPE, I'd say, does all the cool stuff.
So, we do all the cloud computing, network infrastructure, shout out to my
group of folks in the crowd, right, as well as storage.
And so, in 2015, the company split.
And so, within HPE, we have what we call the hybrid cloud business.
We have the intelligent edge that focuses on networking and that kind of stuff.
And then we have also the computing space and then there's an AI overlay on top
of all of that.
- What's your role Carlos?
I know you started with Aruba Networks, and now you have a much broader scope
within HPE.
Can tell you tell us about your title of your role and what you're trying to do
within HPE.
- Yeah, so, similar like you, I also come from a support background.
I was a former support engineer and kind of worked my way up in the ranks.
I predominantly worked in startup organizations as a support engineer and then
going into support leadership.
I ran global escalations and so I always say, you know, it takes a special
breed of human to be waiting for that phone call from a rate pissed off
customer just to go.
That's your day job, right?
And so, when I joined Aruba in 2017, actually, it was my first non-startup
company.
I actually previously that worked in a number of startups, one of which was
doing a big data analytics machine learning and AI solution actually,
and we were doing a solution for Aruba Networks.
And when HPE had gotten acquired, or Aruba had gotten acquired by HPE, my
startup was actually losing its contract.
And so, I had the opportunity to actually join Aruba in the Global Services
Organization to continue the efforts to be able to drive some of this big data
analysis in the support space,
which you're very familiar with.
To try to drive more efficiencies and support, and specifically try to drive
more self-service ability.
So, just a quick show, how many folks here on the service side of the house?
Awesome.
Customer success?
Awesome.
Customer experience.
Love it.
This is my audience.
So, the reason I asked that is because, you know, my role has been the result
of a bunch of evolution.
So, when I started at HPE, I actually started in the Aruba business unit in the
services side of the house, as kind of the behind-the-curtain person who was
trying to find ways to connect business process technology that we talked about
to drive efficiencies.
And I would say over the last, over the first four or five years, we burst as
part of the digital transformation work that we're doing.
We burst the first ever customer success program inside of Aruba.
And so, you have this former support person now evolving into driving customer
success at this company.
And the reality is, for most of those that are here in customer success know
that it's kind of, you know, kind of the next step of evolution from customer
support,
where you're going from where we act of stuff to now try to build consistency,
build playbooks and do that.
And I would say about two years ago, on the back of the work that the team did
in building out customer success, we were actually recognized by the company
because, you know, we also didn't have budget.
You know, a lot of the metrics that you showed there.
We didn't show up with a bunch of budget to go build a customer success team.
So, we actually started with a very, I would say, grassroots approach around a
digital first approach to customer success.
We didn't have CSMs. And at the time, I know, John Grazell's here. At the time,
you know, when I would present some of this stuff at TSIA, I was actually crit
iqued.
Not by TSA, but my health fellow colleagues, because I was, I was, I was
talking about this work that we had done in building digital first customer
success.
They're like, well, that's not customer success. You don't have a CSM. That's
tech support, right?
And then COVID hit, and now everybody needed to do more with less.
And then all of a sudden, this digital CS swarm thing became a thing.
And so, we did that.
So now, what happens is the evolution, right?
I sometimes have been on stage saying customer success is dead, but I need to
put an ask just there for the folks that are here.
I feel like customer success as we knew it in the past has shifted a lot.
I think the industry has grown. I think it's, it's, it's customer success has
evolved from being a settlement department to some of those capabilities being
built into the rest of the business, right?
And so, when I look at my grow and my transition, I went from being a services
support leader to then maybe a customer success leader.
Which I actually call more of a transformation leader where the product of the
transformation was customer success.
And now all of those capabilities that we've developed as customer success
leaders are now being adopted by the rest of the business to go in and drive
that single experience, right?
And so, the slide that you show where you have all these different functions
and then the CXB is super relevant.
And so, today my role in the company is I'm the VP of customer experience and
digital strategy, which is really the evolution of having customer success,
only living in services and now bringing that mindset of the support person, of
the success person, into the rest of the business, into demos, to trials, to,
you know, all the other pieces of the puzzle and then bringing all those
signals together that can actually help the support engineer later on, right?
>> So, Carlos, I just want to flash this. HP Aruba is one of the early
customers of support logic.
I think we've been customers, I mean, Aruba has been customers of support logic
since 2018 or 2019, I believe, so 5, 6 years.
And this is what I was saying earlier that a lot of companies are using AI for
years.
And they're seeing tremendous results for years, so the real world impact, the
real world stories exist.
It's not just something that only companies have achieved in the last two years
, we showed two companies have achieved in the last two years, but we have
companies are using it for many years.
Now with the HP's multiple business units, we are with Aruba Networks, Nimble,
Storage and Zerto.
What's the big picture? How do you see the CX initiative at a lot's scale?
Because when customers are buying products from your different business units,
they still want a unified experience, right?
They may buy Aruba Networks routers and HP servers, and then we use some clouds
that are offering, how do you stitch together all this experience?
Yeah, it's a great question. So we've also evolved from our experience journey.
I remember when we first joined Aruba, one of the first things that you learn
is the Aruba model, which is customer first, customer last, right?
That has actually been the kind of initial experience monitor that we adopted
when I joined the company.
Then eventually we evolved to very similar experiences, everything. That
actually became one of the big teams of the leadership summit that we had a
couple of years ago.
Now what it's morphed into is experiences everywhere. That kind of goes back to
your slide, which is, you know, experience isn't just the folks that are
touching the end customer.
It's in everything that we do. So for me, when I took on this role as the
experience leader, I made sure that people understood, when we talked about
customer, there's multiple customers.
You have the end customer, which is the first one that we think about. But as
we're developing all these capabilities, you have to think about the internal
customer, right?
We have a lot of folks that are servicing our customers that also need that
better experience. When I used to run Global Tech, I still have support
engineers.
I want to be able to hear you smile through the phone. And the only way you
accomplish that is by bringing the right data into them.
So that example you gave of the scrape of the interaction and bringing in those
insights into somebody that's actually about to engage with the customer is
huge.
And so to close on this, right? It's really, how can we go and take some of
this goodness that's been built in the support world and the services world
about driving that better experience?
And how can we bring the rest of the company along that journey and have what
we now call kind of this journey to one, the journey to one experience?
Customers shouldn't know when supply chain ends and services begins, right? At
the end of the day, we're all one company.
It's a huge challenge, as you can imagine, we have different business units, so
customers can buy stuff on our side. They can buy stuff from Nimble.
They can buy stuff from Aruba. They can buy stuff from our server side.
But at the end of the day, we'll keep it quite encompassed.
So you want to have that same brand, right? And so for us, I feel very
fortunate in the role that I have today because I'm very proud of the
experience that I bring from the services side of the house.
Because a lot of times support is not always brought to the table. And so I
would say a lot of that comes with Antonio, who is also a former support person
, right?
He actually started as a support person in HPE and worked his way up, and he's
not a CEO. So I feel like we have a lot of support now from the services
perspective to bring that lens into everything that we do.
Yeah, that's phenomenal. And I first heard that Antonio CEO is a support person
. It's extremely rare to see a public company grow up in the ranks and support
and became the CEO.
So he's bringing that customer centricity mindset and basically championing
that experience with the organization, which is great.
One last question for you. We know that it's a complex org. HPE is a complex
org. It's a 30, 40 year old company.
How do you make a change and impact? One of the things I really admire about
what you do at HPE is that you brought change.
You brought the startup mentality within a large company. Any advice you want
to share to the crowd? Because a lot of the leaders here that want to make an
impact like what you're trying to do, what is your advice for them?
Yeah, it's awesome to have my folks here from the Rivecide. When Rivec got
acquired by HPE, one of the big concerns is like, we're going to lose this
startup culture.
We're going to lose this mentality. Obviously, you can imagine a company of 55,
60,000 people. There's a lot of politics and bureaucracy that happened.
The two folks that I have here, the room with me, I think, were co-pioneers of
making sure that it didn't happen.
We've fought a lot to, for those of you guys that I'm not aware, Aruba's colors
are orange and HPE's colors are green.
We fought for the orange quite a bit. Honestly, I feel very fortunate because
we had a lot of support from leadership.
To your point, to this day, one of the key values of Aruba was we want to still
become the biggest, we want to stay the biggest small company.
Let's go and keep that same startup mentality in everything we do.
I would say that, and I can, since moving from the Aruba side over to the HPE
side, that's still not lost on me.
I think that that has actually helped us have a level of success, is that when
we go into these conversations with folks that have been at HPE for 15, 20
years,
I get comments like, "Wow, it's like a breath of fresh air," because we go into
everything with a very collaborative spirit.
I ask people to always assume good intent. We're not there to build our empire.
We're trying to go in and actually do fun stuff.
One of the things that we say is, people don't destroy what they help build.
As I start engaging, as my team starts engaging cross-functionally with other
organizations of the HPE,
the first conversation is always very kind of bland.
It's almost like, "Hey, what's this guy going to do now? What are we going to
step on?"
For me, it's almost like, "Look, how can we go and leverage the scale that you
guys have, the power that you guys have?"
As people are open-minded about how we can leverage that to do something
different.
We work on really, really cool stuff. I would say, in almost every one of the
engagements that my team has gotten involved in,
there's a lot of hesitancy at the beginning, but somewhere in the middle,
something clicks,
and people start seeing the awesomeness of the opportunity that we have to
build something different.
Then the beautiful part is when the project is delivered and everybody gets
recognition.
You end up on stages like this with a fictitious character that's not brand-
approved,
that you just said, "I'm going to do this anyway," to drive digital engagement,
and people can start associating yourself to that.
All of a sudden, it makes the next conversation with the next team that you
want to work with even better,
because you've now established this brand of, you know, you're changing the way
the company works,
you're actually getting a lot of recognition for the work that you're doing.
I always say two things is, "I asked for forgiveness not permission, and I
built Trojan horses."
What I mean about the Trojan horses is, I said, "What are the things that's
helped me a lot is?"
Rather than taking the age-old approach of putting together a proposal,
presenting it,
and taking all the arrows and all the million reasons of why it's not going to
work and budget and stuff,
is I go and I build a small village of relationships and say, "You know what?
Let's go build this in a very, very small pilot, and let's not tell a whole lot
of people about it,
because they're going to tell us, you know, cyber security, all this stuff."
Obviously, we protect that, but we don't ask for a lot of opinions.
We just go and say, "So we do this."
And we go and we build it in a small scale, and this is where I tell people,
right,
at the next thing you know, people are studying in the shadow of the Trojan
horse,
so like, "What's that?" You pull the cover back, and now they can't tell you
can't, because you already did.
And so that's kind of the way that my team operates is we've now morphed since
leaving Aruba.
I feel like Aruba was almost, it continues to be our showcase of the art of the
possible.
Aruba still has a very much, you know, start-up collaborative mentality,
and I continue to point to the stuff that Aruba has done and continues to do,
and in reality, it's two to three years ahead of the rest of the HP company,
so I create that healthy competition and say, "I can help you guys get there
too."
And I have the opportunity to really highlight the work that Aruba is doing,
and bring a little bit of orange over to the green.
Carlos, we can talk for hours, and you have a lot of wisdom.
I really encourage people to get as much wisdom from Carlos, and always impact
the change.
Thank you for-
Thanks so much.
Yeah, that's it.
(Applause)
[BLANK_AUDIO]