Online help done right, courtesy of HP
– posted December 9th, 2008 by Brian Donohue Comments (2)
Last month while at my sister’s house in California, her printer ran out of toner. She was cooking dinner, so I confidently said, “No problem, it’ll just take me a minute to fix that.” The replacement toner had no instructions, but how hard could it be? I may be useless when it comes to DIY, but computer stuff is where I get to feel a little bit like a handyman.
Well, 5 minutes later, I was stumped. The toner cartridges just didn’t fit in properly. I tried the same thing about a half-dozen times, and finally surrendered. Sigh.
Then I noticed this:
Worth a try I figured, though I feared I’d be in for 15 minutes of hunting through the website.
HP’s online support experience
It took 2, maybe 3 minutes to get my answer.
- I typed in the vanity URL mentioned on the printer (www.hp.com/support)
- I entered the printer model number (which was clearly visible on the front of the printer)
- I selected “Maintenance”, and then clicked “replacing print cartridges”.
I was starting to feel surprisingly optimistic at that point. And then what did I get?
Not a PDF (which I expected), not even the HTML version of a PDF (which I hoped for), but a video. This could have been a bad thing: videos are difficult to scan through. But this video was specifically on replacing print cartridges for my sister’s printer. And they supplemented the video with the key steps written out beneath it.
Problem solved — I needed to turn the printer on. Then it becomes blindingly obvious where to put the new toner. (I always thought you’re supposed to turn things off when fixing them - so much for my electronic instincts.)
What HP did well - driving a great online experience by starting offline
HP got the basics right — making the support content findable. They then went one surprising step further — they provided video tutorials specific to my task and my printer. That was really impressive, and a reflection of a huge amount of effort on their part. Videos are particularly well suited to this sort of content, where it’s easier to show rather than tell.
But I think their biggest achievement wasn’t online, but rather that the online team was able to persuade the manufacturing team to put an unmissable label prompting me to go online — and they put that label exactly where I needed to see it when I started cursing the printer when I couldn’t replace the cartridge.
And to top it off, they even provided a postage-paid envelope for me to put the used cartridge in, and send it to them so they could recycle it.
HP took what generally is at best a minor annoyance, and turned into such a surprisingly positive experience that it makes me want to buy a HP printer. Nice work, HP.
This reminds me of Paul Adam’s presentation at the iQ Boot Camp earlier this year, when he said “Your website is not enough, your section of the website is not enough.” You have to focus on the customer’s whole experience:
Is this typical of online help?
What do you think — was this a freakishly unusual online experience, or are websites really starting to nail online support nowadays?
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Categories Design
2 comments so far
1. Liam on Jan 3rd, 2009 - 19:12
Don’t you think a printer should be designed so that you (an above average computer user) can fix it without using an instructional video on The Interweb? Maybe the designers were glad to put the url on it so they don’t have to bother making a better solution.
2. Brian Donohue on Jan 5th, 2009 - 18:22
Liam — absolutely. The ideal world is that you never need to go to get help for such common tasks.
In this case, it was super easy to change, but only when you turned the printer on — the exact opposite of what I assumed I needed to do. I don’t know whether it makes more sense to change it when it’s on or when it’s off, but I imagine no matter what you’ll get people trying to do it the wrong way.
Maybe the engineers could have made it work either way - that would be have been nice!