High-value Manufacturers Need to Maximize Customer Ownership Experience

“Getting it right the first time is critical to the customer ownership experience – and a challenge for complex manufacturers.”

By Randy Saunders, Cincom Systems

Manufacturers of high-value capital equipment and their distributors recognize that the initial purchase of a complex industrial product is a fraction of what the customer will spend over the course of owning and operating that equipment. Over a product's 10- to 20-year lifespan, customers will rely on your service and warranty department's support to minimize downtime and keep their equipment performing.

Consistent and reliable customer service – the ability to “get it right the first time” – is critical to satisfying the ownership experience. Customers care nothing for the complexities that make delivering customer service in the manufacturing industry so different and more challenging than other areas. They don’t want excuses or delays. If the customer’s production line is at risk while waiting for a spare part or service, they demand immediate service. Manufacturers that meet these service expectations and challenges have an excellent competitive differentiator that can lead to winning new and repeat business.

The Nine Key Customer-Service Issues of Industrial Equipment Manufacturers

Manufacturers of complex equipment have many unique challenges when it comes to customer service. That's why most companies find that ordinary contact center software doesn't meet their needs and that they require a more specialized solution. Here we’ll consider nine of the key issues facing many complex manufacturers and what to look for in customer-service technology that will help you address these challenges.

1. Segmenting and prioritizing high-value customers and projects - Every manufacturer has its top-revenue or profit-generating customers. Or maybe it's the customers with the greatest global potential, a specific project with a tight deadline or a pilot project with a highly desired account. For any number of reasons, you might want to make specific customers or projects a top or higher priority.
What to look for: “Most people leave a company because they feel they’re not treated well,” according to Arthur Hughes, author of “The Customer Loyalty Solution.” “They feel that, for some reason, they have been ignored or not treated properly. The ability to dynamically set priorities so that all interactions from your most critical accounts either go to the top of the queue or are always handled by your top service specialists is a critical first step to preventing this neglected feeling.”

2. Complying with individual service level agreements (SLAs) by customer or even by project - Service-level management for customer support varies from manufacturer to manufacturer and is often one of the most critical and contentious elements of a contract. Some may have a single published service level, while others offer tiered service contracts with perhaps two or three levels of service. Or, individual service-level agreements may be customized by customer or even by project; an agreement may call for different service levels and different metrics for each product the customer buys. Needless to say, this can become very complex to manage in the contact center, magnified even more when there's a merger between companies or even a consolidation of divisions.
What to look for: One manufacturer has found that without a “single view” of the customer through a unified desktop, meeting specified service levels quickly became unmanageable. The ability to track and report on SLA performance metrics allows them to quickly and easily identify any problem areas, and to more precisely negotiate future contracts and SLAs.

3. Supporting complex equipment that's routinely modified and reconfigured over a long production life - Over a product's 10- to 20-year life span, complex machinery is often reconfigured to address changing maintenance requirements or customer needs. Many times the discrepancies between a product's original configuration and its current configuration can be dramatic.
What to look for: One Midwest machine manufacturer had this very problem. Because its machines are highly specialized and have a long service life that may extend more than 20 years, each time a customer called, the service agent had to manually research the customer’s history to ensure that they received the correct part or service order. This led to much longer customer wait times than the company felt was acceptable. A unified agent desktop that automatically searched and displayed a complete profile and history enabled the company to respond quicker as well as measure and track customer interactions and transactions for improved productivity and reporting.

4. Solving customer issues quickly - Most customer-service departments routinely access four or more different business applications to find an answer. Often this is because of existing databases or systems that are not able to collaborate across applications. Not only is this time-consuming for the service rep, the customer is waiting.
What to look for: A unified desktop that gives your service reps a 360-degree view of all pertinent customer information will enable them to improve first-call resolution and call-handling times. By delivering the right amount of back-end information to address the task at hand without toggling from system to system or drilling through information, the service rep’s time and effort is reduced and the customer experience enhanced. One manufacturer found that such a system enabled them to improve their call response time by 73%.

5. Sharing customer and product knowledge across all reps - Duplication of efforts is frustrating for both service reps and customers alike and practically unavoidable when the systems don’t integrate across applications and stations.
What to look for: While it would be great if a customer could communicate with the same customer-service agent with every interaction, often this is not physically possible. However, it is possible to create a case management and contextual knowledge base that reps can tap into to resolve customer issues. Make sure the application can be configured to store any information about customer communication history, product issue-related events and status, and any product information such as operational and warranty/repair information.

6. Consistent handling of customer requests through their communication channel of choice - Gone are the days when customers just picked up the phone to call customer service. Today, they may communicate using web forms, web-based live chat, e-mail or fax. On a single problem or issue, they may interact with your service center using a combination of all the above.
What to look for: The ability for service reps and engineers to manage, synchronize, and coordinate all customer interactions over multiple communication channels. So no matter how the customer interacts with the contact center, all communications are managed, queued, and tracked consistently. For example, the parts and services group at a large machine manufacturer uses a hosted application with multiple channel capabilities to interact by phone, e-mail and fax. They are able to view all previous interactions regardless of channel to get a complete view and status of any parts or service orders.

7. Intelligently routing customer interactions to the best available service rep - All service reps are not created equal, and as every business will testify, not all customer interactions are of equal importance.
What to look for: The most successful contact centers are able to group service reps by skill level, geography, and familiarity with a specific customer, dealer, or project. This is especially true for complex manufacturers. The manufacturer mentioned above intelligently queues all customer interactions and then distributes the contact using skills-based routing to ensure a qualified rep handles each interaction. Additionally, if a customer needs to be escalated to a knowledge worker such as an engineer, you’ll want that knowledge worker to view the same history, case management, and resources so that you can have an uninterrupted, continuous conversation.

8. Balancing the workload across all service reps and locations - A key to maximizing call center operations is to optimize the call distribution and level the workload by managing the interaction queue and routing all communications appropriately. What to look for: A web-based, hosted system that can route calls and present desktop views anywhere, giving you flexibility to manage high call volumes and leverage company experts at home or in other locations. This also provides a strong level of business continuity capability in the face of an emergency or other event that might otherwise impede service.

9. Performing real-time measurements and reporting on your customer-service and warranty operation - In the pursuit of the continuous improvement required to remain competitive in today’s business, it is a necessity to be able to track, analyze and report on what's happening in the service center.
What to look for: Managers should have the ability to analyze critical service metrics including service-contract performance and profitability, up-to-the-moment service activity by customer, and actionable customer and business insight. Managers should also have the option to select from standard reports or create their own ad hoc reports. This has enabled the contact center manager of one manufacturer to track the number of quotes converted to purchases and provide detailed reports on results, helping to guide future actions.

Manufacturing experience delivers rapid ROI and implementation

The unique nature of industrial manufacturing and the common issues of multiple databases and applications often bring complexity to the contact center. Manufacturers looking for a customer-service and warranty communications system should look for a vendor that has experience in the manufacturing industry and understands their unique environment. They should expect to see examples or testimonials from existing installations that show measurable results in the following areas:

· Improvements in service efficiency

· Increases in parts and service revenue

· Increases in new-equipment sales and replacement parts from new and returning customers

A recent trend in the industry is a move to hosted solutions. Hosted solutions can greatly streamline your implementation, minimize internal IT requirements, eliminate hardware investments, and reduce maintenance costs. With these advantages, you can reap the benefits of a robust customer-service application, with minimal risk.