When it comes to Customer Relationship Management, Hewlett-Packard has its hands full. The company gets 600 million calls a year from its customers and ships about 500 million products. The task is complicated by new forms of customer interactions, such as blogs and social networking applications. At the helm of all this data management is Prasanna Dhore, HP's vp of customer intelligence. Dhore joined HP last year from Dreyfus, where he focused on reducing churn. At HP, Dhore has more tools at his disposal, but also a lot more data. Last week he discussed HP's CRM program with Brandweek's editor Todd Wasserman. Here are some excerpts from that conversation:

Brandweek: How long has HP been executing a CRM program and how has it evolved to the present day?
Prasanna Dhore: HP has been executing some type of CRM program for many, many years, but as you can imagine with a company that operates in more than 170 countries and last year we did $104.3 billion in revenue, we've been doing it in silos. It's important to have a holistic view of your customer. At HP, that's easier said than done. We have three business groups that focus on selling different products to different audiences. That's a lot of customers in different segments. And some customers buy from more than one group. To give you another idea of scale, in the year before I came to HP, HP shipped 500 million products! Our customers can buy from us via hp.com, they call us and our call center support averages four and a half minutes on the phone with them, and often customers buy from a retail store. We typically have about 2 billion customer interactions a year. HP receives 600 million calls a year from consumers that say 'help.' So my challenge in coming to HP about a year ago was to bring all that customer information together. We were doing a good job in the individual groups, but the sum of the parts is greater than the whole. We've made great progress in the past year and now we're doing it across the company.

BW: What is cutting edge for CRM in 2008?
PD: It's also an evolution. Ten years ago you used to push information, now it's all about unstructured data, collaborative data—social networks, blogs, etc.—you need to have a dialogue with your customers. Capturing and using that information effectively is the challenge. At HP, we're fortunate as for the past three years we've been laying the groundwork; the infrastructure to handle that. [CIO] Randy Mottand his team have done a phenomenal job in transforming HP's IT infrastructure to allow us one view of our customers, regardless of which business they purchased from. The infrastructure, the databases, the software; they've laid the foundation for us to obtain the best information to enable us to make the best business decisions.

We can draw upon HP's own technology, such as NeoView [a data warehouse technology], etc., but we use a tool set from Siebel, SAS, etc. So once you have the infrastructure in place, that's not everything. It's important to take that information and drive sales and marketing. It's what I call the information factory. There are three stages: Data (tells you what); information (so what?); knowledge (now what?). Most people do No. 1, they create reports at stage 2, but then at No. 3 they fall apart.

At HP, we're now taking that information and using the knowledge to drive sales and increase efficiencies. Let me give you an example. In one of our business groups, we looked at 80 marketing programs (such as direct marketing, email marketing, customer loyalty, etc.), and based on the knowledge from our CRM systems, we were able to work out which ones were more effective for our customers. We've distilled them down to two or three major programs now. 

Customer intimacy is also very important. Taking this unstructured data we can learn about the customer and have more targeted communications. The more we know about the customer the more we can help you out. At the enterprise level, it helps that our sales executives are not wasting the time of [the] CIO. Because we know that customer intimately, we can address their needs. This is based on all my experience from Dreyfus and now I'm putting into practice at HP. That explains why I came to HP.

BW: Your previous job was at Dreyfus and one of the things you did was use predictive software to anticipate churn. Do you do the same thing at HP?
PD: Absolutely. The business challenges are different but the approach will be very similar, whether it is customer attrition or cross-selling. HP does business with one in every two households in America, so the opportunity is huge. And it's not just in the consumer segment, in our small to medium-sized business segment (SMB), there's a great opportunity. That's what is so exciting about working at HP.

BW: When it comes to CRM software, what do you use?
PD: We have the whole data warehouse that I mentioned before; HP's own business intelligence software, we use our own technology where possible, and we use SAS.

BW: What has been your biggest success story so far at HP?
PD: I've been here a year, so we've laid a lot of the foundation. We'll truly see the results and successes in the coming year, but I think already we've developed better operating models within the product business groups. We're using a targeted approach to bring more value to us and the consumers. You have to build the right infrastructure to do CRM right.