HP innovates with an experimentation center of excellence

Building a center of excellence

HP is in the early stages of their journey towards creating a true culture of experimentation throughout their organization. HP also knows that increasing the pace of innovation for their campaigns will be essential to ensuring peak performance for various digital business units that have started doing experimentation, including their B2C online store, HP.com website, B2B e-commerce organization, Instant Ink organization and Customer Support site.

HP has invested in creating a program around experimentation, building a more robust process for ideation, prioritization, development, execution and post-campaign analysis. HP shares learnings with business stakeholders throughout the organization in their weekly program reporting meeting and are also planning to roll out a weekly newsletter to help share updates and findings across their teams.

HP’s ultimate goal is to give every employee the chance to experiment and gather data around their ideas. The center of excellence is exploring ways to help scale HP’s testing program sustainably. As a result of their focus on experimentation, they’ve been able to run almost 500 campaigns and have driven an incremental $21 million in revenue with Optimizely.

Data-driven thinking drives experimentation

Here are some example tests that HP’s center of excellence has overseen:

• HP’s omnichannel team wanted to see if shoppers were more responsive to certain resellers vs. others. They added Best Buy, Amazon and Staples links and then tracked orders to see which were driving the most online sales. This data helped HP figure out how to most effectively work with partners.
• HP’s Instant Ink subscription service experimented with different enrollment offers. The experiment involved showing customers an option for a free trial and positioning the service as a printer feature. The experiment increased enrollment by 37%.
• The eCommerce UX team redesigned its printer category page and conducted a 50/50 split test of the old page vs. the new one. The new page increased success metrics by 20% and yielded an incremental $260K per quarter.