Q. You mentioned that Hewlett Packard has moved from customer satisfaction to customer advocacy and for that you have even developed a Customer Loyalty Index. How does this index work?

A: The Customer Loyalty Index will work as measurement system for customer loyalty and advocacy. It looks at three different levels. There is customer satisfaction which ranks highly satisfied customers on a scale of zero to 10.Thereis a similar scale for loyal customers who have shown a strong desire to stay loyal. And then there is a zero to five weightage of customers who are advocates and who strongly recommend HP. Together the three give us a customer loyalty index, and through that we are trying to grow the number of customer advocates.

But remember, we are particularly looking at the high value customers, because you always want to specially look at such customers. You want to differentiate between the value of customers over time and build the number of customers who are high value and strong advocates.

In fact, in 1998 we ran a customer loyalty survey worldwide, which covered not just our customers, but even our competitors' customers and even looked at issues such as why a customer is buying one brand and not the other or not buying at all.

Q: Hasn't HP's Quality Management System matured over time from a vehicle for TQM, to a vehicle for delivering corporate strategy at HP?

A: Right. TQM is now so fundamental toour system that we don't even look at that as a strategy. It's just inherent in our management system.

Q: You mentioned that in financial year '98, HP - Worldwide managed to increase net revenue to $ 47 billion up from $41 billion last year, but net earnings remained flat. How much do quality and profitability go hand in hand?

A: Today, at the Maruti presentation they said something extremely important. They said, ``We can pay our employees the highest level of pay and still have the lowest cost per unit.'' We have to learn how to manage quality as a matter of process orientation. If you get a high level of employee satisfaction along with the knowledge to use quality tools, you can't help but get a high degree of productivity and customer satisfaction.

Q: However, there are innumerable examples of companies failing to profit from quality and eventually tripping on their quality journey. Why does that happen?

A: Primarily companies trip because either there is too little commitment ortoo little internalisation in the top management or the owner of the company.If the leader has the knowledge sponsorship and the passion, you can get through the barriers to quality. Typically, the barriers tend to be communication to employees and the change in the management process. I can only recommend: Get hitched to this whole concept and be passionate about it.

Q: So the success of implementing quality is directly proportional to the leader's belief in it?

A: There are empowerers and those that take power. I think it reflects the mindset of CEOs, what the ministre of industry Sikandar Bakht said today: It was hard for him to come to this Quality Summit, because he felt he was not qualified to do so. I was impressed by his admission.

A lot of CEOs end up delegating rather than turning up themselves. It's easy for a CEO to say `I'm a believer in quality, but I'm not going to get my hands dirty. You get on with it.' That's immediately a red flag. This way quality won't get deployed on along-term journey and believe me, it's not a short-term area of focus. The leader has to have passion, convinction and show personal leadership.

Q: If that indeed is your belief, how do your practise being a leader who drives quality? For example, what change will we see in HP India next year which would have been triggered by you?

A: It's one of my two focus areas for this year: Contact management. The whole customer experience is important and a good part of it is related to the contact customers have through telephone, e-mail, faxes and the internet. In a study I initiated four years ago, I found that HP received 100 million calls from customers, a year, round the world. Every call is a moment of truth--and in the next ten days I'm meeting all the general managers from the region and working on systems to capitalise on that. u