Company: HPE, San Jose, CA
Nomination Submitted by: HPE Aruba Networking
Company Description: The Aruba Support Portal (ASP) was founded in 2018. Along with a few employees in Product Management & Engineering, our Director of Product Management, Beena Nambiar made remarkable progress in the last four and a half years. We now have 370K+ total users. ASP promotes innovation and delivers support for self service to our global users, including HPE Aruba customers and partners of all sizes.
Nomination Category: Customer Service & Call Center Awards Achievement Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Award for Innovation in Customer Service - Computer Industries
 Nomination Title: Aruba Support Portal (soon-to-be: HPE Networking Support Portal)
- Which will you submit for your nomination in this category, a video of up to five (5) minutes, explaining the nominated achievement since July 1, 2021, OR written answers to the questions? (Choose one):
Written answers to the questions
- If you are submitting a video of up to five (5) minutes in length, provide the URL of the video here, OR attach it to your entry via the "Add Attachments, Videos, or Links to This Entry" link above, through which you may also upload a copy of your video. If you are submitting written answers to the questions for this category, provide them in the spaces below.
N/A
- Briefly describe the nominated organization: its history and past performance (up to 200 words):
Total 199 words used.
Aruba Support Portal (ASP), part of the HPE Aruba Networking organization, was launched in February 2018. We are dedicated to promoting innovation and delivering unparalleled support to our worldwide networking user community, including customers and partners of all sizes.
We made remarkable progress [REDACTED FOR PUBLICATION] is a testament to the team's commitment to improving the portal's capabilities (Online RMA, virtual assistant, etc.) to meet our users' needs. We are driven by the guiding principle of "customer first, customer last," and work closely with a range of internal subject matter experts and external constituents to reach this goal. We maintain a close partnership with the support centers, channel partners, sales engineers, product teams, and enablement teams, among others. By leveraging this ecosystem of subject matter experts, we provide a closed loop process of continual feedback, which is converted into digital capabilities for our customers and partners.
In November 2023, our team had the honor of accepting the 2023 TSIA Award for Innovation in Customer Portals that improve the Digital Experience. We are incredibly proud of what we've built in the last few years.
- Explain why the achievement you have highlighted is unique or significant. If possible compare the achievement to the performance of other players in your industry and/or to the organization's past performance (up to 250 words):
Total 250 words used.
With Online RMA, we take pride in pioneering this customer-centric approach. Today, we are the only one in the broader HPE team to intelligently verify the serial number and provide troubleshooting questions based on the product type. Our support center also experienced an increase in CSAT with Online RMA so we eventually added support for more products. To date, we calculate that Online RMA has [REDACTED FOR PUBLICATION] deflected about 57k+ phone support cases. “2-minute online RMA! I stopped buying from everyone else. This online RMA thing has changed our lives!” – Quote from a major networking company.
Asset Automation is a unique system in HPE that automates the asset registration in the support portal. This innovative approach helps reduce human effort and errors in data entry and record-keeping. Automation helps to optimize asset renewals and End of Life notifications. This also significantly helps customers reduce their operational costs and time associated with manual tracking and data entry errors.
Our Virtual Assistant uniquely identifies the contract levels for each user’s account to provide the appropriate services. Based on this identification, Ava will recognize the user and proactively recommend actions such as renewal, contract expiration, end-of-life/support, and software defects. With its success and its modular capability, Ava is being explored by other business units. Soon, Ava will be added to Aruba InstantOn to support their unique customer needs. Through this smart self-service conversational UI, our users receive personalized support and can efficiently manage their support cases.
- Outline the nominated achievement since July 1 2021 that you wish to bring to the judges' attention (up to 250 words):
Total 229 words used.
ASP has a diverse array of self-service capabilities. In tihs section, we will spotlight the three most sought-after and innovative capabilities achieved to date.
Hardware Troubleshooting and Replacement (Online RMA) was introduced in 2020 for customers to simply enter their device serial numbers to request a hardware replacement without having to call the support centers. Second half of 2021, we enhanced with support for all Aruba hardware products and a "dashboard" that allows customers to view their RMA cases, case status, and shipment tracking details. In 2022, we automated the process to get the new replacement device registered to the user's account. We also support users in 24 languages including English.
Asset Automation was introduced in December 2022. This aligns customer’s unique identity across HPE and efficiently tracks user’s purchases. Today, we are seamlessly and automatically uploading unlimited number of devices, significantly expediting the entire process. This has created the foundation for enhancing ASP contract renewal automation.
In April 2022, ASP added a Virtual Assistant, named Ava. Powered by Amazon Translate for two-way translation and AWS Lex as the NLP engine, Ava is trained with industry-specific intents, support center FAQs, and searches knowledge articles, demo videos, and communities using Coveo search engine. We also provide real-time chat with support agents. We are also working on expanding the capabilities to proactively recommend actions for contract renewals, end-of-life/support, and software defects.
- Reference any attachments of supporting materials throughout this nomination and how they provide evidence of the claims you have made in this nomination (up to 250 words):
Total 235 words used.
There’s been a dramatic change in the user experience from manual upload work to automated workflow through Asset Automation. The number of devices show a big jump in just a few months:
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~July 2021
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~July 2023
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As of today
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Devices Onboarded
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1,167,258
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4,388,618
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6,400,176
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Online RMA has saved over $3M+ in support costs since its launch, enabling agents to focus on tasks beyond phone support and troubleshooting. This helps us with cost saving as well as refocusing of staff.
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~July 2021
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~July 2023
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As of today
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Cases (cost varies per type)
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5,955
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46,622
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57,266
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Savings
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[REDACTED FOR PUBLICATION]
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[REDACTED FOR PUBLICATION]
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[REDACTED FOR PUBLICATION]
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With the introduction of Virtual Assistant, we can refocus our phone support staff to handle chat cases, which allows engineers to handle up to 4 customers at the same time.
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~July 2021
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~July 2023
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As of today
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Cases (cost varries per type)
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N/A (launched in Nov'22)
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8,755
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11,578
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Savings
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[REDACTED FOR PUBLICATION]
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[REDACTED FOR PUBLICATION]
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[REDACTED FOR PUBLICATION]
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Users onboarded in the past few months drastically increase. With our Agile framework, ASP team actively interacts with support centers to absorb all feedbacks timely and correctly.
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~July 2021
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~July 2023
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Total as of today
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Users onboarded
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[REDACTED FOR PUBLICATION]
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[REDACTED FOR PUBLICATION]
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[REDACTED FOR PUBLICATION]
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To close, we are pleased to share our improving CSAT that reached 9.14 as of November 2023 (average 9.11).
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