The missing parts of the HP-Compaq jigsaw

I've been reading several articles about the service issues that Compaq (now assimilated by Hewlett-Packard) are going through, and I've noticed that a large section of the puzzle is missing from your articles.

First, a little about myself. I am an ex-Compaq Technical Engineer (TSE III) who had been with the company for close to 5 years when the feces hit the rotating air propellant device. I started out in August of 1998 as a TSE I in Houston performing technical support in their call-center (or "cost-center") about 10 miles away from Compaq's main headquarters, on their commercial desktop line of computers (the Deskpro and Prosignia series computers.) I started out as a contractor, and after 7 months of being a "pink badge" (contractors wore a badge with a pink/purple-ish background, while regular employees paid directly by Compaq and with benefits had a white background) I was brought on as a full employee and as a "white badge."

At about the same time as becoming a "white badge" I was elevated to the "consultant" level, which means that I had learned enough about the product lines (then the Deskpro 2000/4000/and 6000 lines of computers) that I was advising other front-line techs (TSE I and IIs) more often on their calls than I was consulting the consultants, so I was tagged to be a consultant. Also at that time we began performing support on the Workstation line of computers (the offspring due to an illicit love-affair between a desktop computer and a server) as well as the desktop line, and I began learning about those units as well.

During this, we had begun to have more calls coming in than we knew what to do with (besides referring to www.rinkworks.com/stupid to see what to submit next) so Compaq had hired an out-source company named "The Answer Group" (or TAG) as it was referred to, who also did support for Dell and Gateway, among others) to become a second call-center for North America, located near Ft Lauderdale, FL. At this time, the Cypress, TX location was the only one performing support for the Desktop, laptop, workstation, and Server units, though the Presario line was handled in one or two other centers in Kansas, and another location that I can't remember right now. We, the call-takers in Cypress, and especially those of us on consulting, had to train the folks at TAG on how to answer the phone, how to troubleshoot the problems, talk to the people correctly, and how to solve the problem by doing things other than giving a software file to download and hang up on the user (they were paid by the call, not the hour, so Cathy Lee's sweatshop was nothing compared to their conditions.)

By the time Eckhard Pfeiffer - then CEO of Compaq - was heading out the door, we had finally started to get TAG in line and producing results like we wanted. We, the "real techs" had great pride in our service, and we wanted to give service like we would like to get, and we had the support of our managers that it was "quality over quantity" (though if you could get the call finished as quickly as possible that would be nice.) Up 'til that point I would get calls and the first thing out of their mouth was "Where are you located?" When we answered "Houston" we would get sighs of relief and cheers of joy. That tells you how it was then. And this was with people they could understand... but incompetent (it was the "burger-flipper" school of tech support there... you can take a "burger-flipper" and have them do tech support.)

I was sent in early 2000 (I'm a survivor of Y2K, by-the-way) to our new call center in Hull, Quebec Canada (which used to be a Digital call center that was now being phased out of Digital support (the Digital units were falling out of warranty and no longer supported) and converted to Compaq) to train our newest batch of in-house out-source (long story short: In Canada, most are contractors that are brought in to work for a company. In this type of work, not many actually work for the company, but they work for the company) TSEs on how to take the calls and solve the problems. They had already been through "boot camp" on all the ins and outs of the products, but now it was time to talk to people, and I was there to be in-person, walk-up consulting and do call assists, and I was proud of my bunch of 14 techs, two team leads, and the manager that I trained. TAG took years to get up and going and have pride in their work, while this bunch took a week to hit the ground running and were proud of being part of Compaq.

When Pfeiffer left and Capellas came in, the message was that we would put the customer first, do whatever we could to make them happy, and that's what we did (well, we in the tech support group were doing it already, but we set the example for the rest of the company.) When Dell put forth that they had the higher customer satisfaction ratings from this magazine or that, they never stated that it was due to skewed results (they would have 2000 people comment about Dell, but 120 on Compaq, so they claimed a victory when they didn't have a true sampling....) but we at Compaq knew who was better, and we knew it because we talked with people daily that stated that they bought the Compaq because of the support, and they heard it from their friends, and they were telling their friends, and bosses, and CEOs, to get Compaqs, and that they had trashed their $2000 Dell machine because their service was past the U-bend and got one of ours (and we fixed their Dell problem too.... "unofficially" and didn't need to replace parts, either.) Then Capellas announced "...a turnaround for the company in 100 days. Mark my words..."

That's when the layoffs began. They were quiet at first... manufacturing.... outsourcing to other companies instead of doing it in-house... the building we worked in was half call-center and half manufacturing (old Texas-Instruments building that had been converted) where all the parts replaced out of warranty came in for refurbishing, and all the parts to be replaced were sent out from. UPS began to be the warehousing and shipping center for Compaq in Lexington, KY. They did the warehousing, and pulling, and packaging, and shipping, and delivering for us... how convenient. And half of the building emptied... We started to notice the trend that the pattern developing was a trimming down of a company in preparation to be sold (don't let techs have idle time talking to mental-midgets. We're smarter than we try to let on, and we have interests other than just gaming while telling someone how to re-boot.)

After the third round of layoffs (we knew we were safe... who in their right minds would let go the one area that keeps customers happy when all the other departments flamenco-up (more spectacular than a cock-up) and encourage them to buy more products by giving them a good reason to do so in making them happy?) the techs were hit, too. All those who had been there less than 6 months were let go. That put us in shock. Techs let go? A hiring freeze? That can't be right! Suddenly there was fear. The new call center in Atlanta, GA (another converted Digital building used instead of the newly built Compaq one just down the road) thought they would be closed down all-together since they were still "new kids" on the playground, but they were kept... mostly. By this time we had TAG, Cypress, Hull, and Atlanta as our call centers that supported all of the commercial computers that Compaq made (notice there is no mention of any facilities in Colorado?) Next came more layoffs.... Those under a year... bu-buy....

Then the knife twists.... a buyout of Compaq by HP... but they quickly (in a matter of days of first announcing it) changed it to a "merger." "They have what we are looking to expand into and we have what they want to expand into, so we can fit seamlessly together into a larger world-wide company that can hit the ground running and take over the world before they know what has happened....." BS. Of course we all know what hoopla ensued thereafter. We cheered Walter Hewlett when he sued HP to stop the merger.... We knew that the assimilation would ruin both companies, put thousands of people out of work, and tick-off almost every single customer both companies ever had. The only people happy with what was going on were those that were investors that had been snowed by the blizzard of promised dollar signs.

During the period when both companies were trying to woo everyone that what was going on was a good thing, they both tasked a small group of people to work in a "clean room" where people from both sides would work together to make a plan for the new company. They were tasked with organizing the new company and ensuring that the plan they came up with could be implemented quickly and easily once the merger was approved and went through. They were to examine all levels of both companies... keeping the corporate culture of Compaq where the customer satisfaction was high, the customer came first, and the workers were passionate, but laid-back but not to the point of sloth... just relaxed confidence; and HP where they were good at inventing and coming up with new products. They would know which groups would be pruned due to duplicate efforts, which halves of what teams would be moved to where and answer to whom, etc. Also, during this time, before the stockholders had finished voting for HP, the signs at Compaq main headquarters had already been changed to read "HP Invent" (against the writ of the courts orders and law, but done anyway, thinking that no one would really pay attention.)

Now that the board of directors had been paid handsomely for selling off their company and Capellas was allowed to put on his parachute, the shake-down began. At first things seemed fairly reasonable, and made sense, and even looked like it might work.... until the plan hit the 4th level management.... (This is where it gets more focused on techs and the rest of the groups fades into the background since at this point fear was the dominant emotion, along with confusion, hatred and apathy...)

I don't remember the name of the manager this started with, and forsooth, it doesn't matter. He was in Colorado, and was in charge of the Loveland office there where they did support on their workstation line of computers (on the level of early TAG, which by this point in time had suffered the cutbacks and had their contract cancelled...) but not very well. This manager was told that his office was to be closed down, and all support to be done through the Cypress, Atlanta, and Hull offices since they had superior technical support and could "easily handle the new systems." He didn't want it closed. Instead he started the cock-and-bull stories of the "Joys of Outsourcing." Since HP had outsourced all but their contract support anyway (the Loveland office) it wasn't a hard story to swallow.

We, the TSE, knew something was amiss when word started to spread that Loveland was not closing... we were training them on how to work on Compaq systems... or, what were called Compaq systems. The systems were becoming generic, or "cloned", and not up to our usual standards. We also were told that we were going to be training new techs. Yea! New blood!.... from India for a call center there. Urk! Well, okay. I guess that's fine. Having techs who know what they're doing to support systems there is a good thing.... What? They're going to take US calls? Okay.... for the night-shift.... they'll be bored, but we don't feel threatened. So, about 10 Indians come over to be trained by myself and several others, and we spend several weeks with them teaching them not only how to do support (they are so stuck on scripts that if you do something out of what they expect they don't know what to do, but if you're within their script they do pretty well) but how to talk so people can understand them. They speak English, but it's not a form that Americans, Canadians, Australians, or the English can understand (and don't even get me started on the rednecks and southern-belles, either....) Then we find out that they are outsource support that is part-owned by Compaq/HP. They are also being paid $3.00/hr for their work, which they tell is really good money there (compared to the $19.25/hr I was getting, and I was getting the low-end of the salary range for my position.)

April, 2003. I and 40 other desktop support technicians (I look around the room, all of our best people are there... but where are the screw-ups... those that take very few calls, and don't know what they're doing? Maybe they're getting laid off while we're here so they don't raise a fuss... yeah, that must be it... we know more are getting laid off anyway, and this is when we expected it...) are told that our services are no longer required. India is taking the desktop calls. Napean, ON Canada (near Bells Corners) is taking part of portables (laptops) and London, ON Canada is taking the other part. Workstations are being handled by the group in Colorado that don't know a software fix from a virus.

Over four months later I have been listening to reports from the few remaining techs (the screw-ups survived because they politicked and fit in with the HP "culture" (forget the Compaq culture... that was severely squashed when we were told that our "lifetime warranty" no longer meant parts replacement for the first 3 years (now 1) and free phone support to troubleshoot and give part numbers for them to purchase their own replacement parts as long as you were the original owner (we never paid attention to that... if you had the unit, and you hadn't stolen it, we'll assist as best as we could if we could do it fairly quickly...) "lifetime" was changed to the "length of the warranty period" because the units were considered to be warranteed for as long as the unit was expected to be "alive" and last, so therefore if the warranty had expired, "Thank you for calling the new HP") and survived, as well as a few good techs to provide consulting support to the folks in India) and have been terrified at what I've heard and am glad I got out while I could.

Now there is practically no severance package. I was given 9 weeks of pay at a regular schedule, and then a lump-sum at the end of that based on how much I had earned and how many years I had been with the company, both with health insurance until the end of that 9 week period. Effectively I was given a 9-week vacation. Now, if there is anything, it's no more than 2 weeks and no lump-sum.

I have been hearing that customers are hanging up when they hear they are talking with someone with an accent, and keep calling back until they reach someone they can understand. The international phone connections are like making an analog cell phone call from one coast of the US to the other, and when the tech transfers the mis-routed caller (very frequent) the call quality decreases to being twice as bad as before (US call to India back to US is two international calls, and quite expensive, too.) Now, I hear that Sytel (I'm not sure of the spelling, but another out-source company hired to take server and desktop calls) could not handle the call volume, and the same day that the server support team was let go they had 40 calls waiting in the queue with over 20 minute hold times MINIMUM, with over 1000 calls dropped PER DAY. This means that 1000 people each day decide they can no longer stand to wait on hold before they talk to a tech. AND THIS IS WITH SERVERS ALONE. Servers are the big-ticket items, and that most of the internet is run on Compaq servers (see Yahoo and ebay as examples.) Businesses who want to upgrade their corporate computer network are so dissatisfied with HP for their support and poor quality systems that they are going to IBM and Dell for their systems, and not buying Compaq/HP. HP is stating that they are in the black... that's because they are cutting back on facilities usage (we had to go 2 months with no printer because we couldn't get toner) by cutting back on the number of buildings used... people that telecommute... office supplies... Their own in-house IT is out-sourced and they don't even get their own systems fixed in less than 6 hours... and the people they keep laying off. This is how they stay in the black currently.

So, Compaq Australia may be a nice example, but it's only a small portion of what is going on. The main world Headquarters in Houston is now half empty. Those who run the company (not manage, but run, which means they are at the bottom of the org chart but they know what's going on) know that the company is dieing of the corporate version of Ebola, and at the rate this is continuing, in less than three years HP will be going the route of WorldCom. HP management - mostly HP culture, not Compaq - will not put forth the true facts of where the company is headed, but report to Carly that all is well, so she does not see what is truly going on. She makes the occasional walk-through, but sees only what her upper-management want her to see. And even those that hold the company "town meetings" can't answer the questions as to why they state the company is doing well and have the highest customer satisfaction ratings than ever, when over 1000 people a day hang up before they can get to a tech because of the hold time, and that's just for one group... that doesn't take into account desktops, portables, workstations, iPaqs, etc.

In conclusion, I know that this has been a long note, and you've probably come back to it several times before finishing it (if you really have stuck it out this far, which I commend you) but with the glaring holes, I felt that I just had to try to plug some of them so the rest of the story (thanks Paul Harvey) could get out there and maybe the financial backers will finally see what smells in the woodshed and do something about it.

Sincerely,

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