By Philippe Hammond
Packaging is an essential part of manufacturing, whether you’re talking about feed for animals or food for humans. It’s one of several areas Premier Tech has made its speciality over the past 97 years — and an area where we continue to flourish, even during COVID-19.
Within our Systems and Automation Group, we make it our mission to enhance manufacturing facility efficiency with the best packaging equipment possible.
The kind of equipment I’m talking about can last for 25 years, but it needs the same regular care and maintenance you would put into your car. Normally that might be a routine operation, but the outbreak of the novel Coronavirus forced us to get creative in addressing the needs of our global customer base.
When governments had to make the tough decision to close their borders, for example, there was an immediate impact on the delivery of our packaging equipment. Items could still be shipped, but they still needed to be installed within our clients’ facilities. How could we do that without being able to send installation technicians?
This was where an investment we had already made in digital technology provided an unexpected payoff. We had decided to deploy Service Cloud Lightning to 16 of our sites around the world for our partners team, our technical support staff and field service employees.
Moving to cloud-based technology made sense because, like many businesses, we wanted to have a full overview in real time of client requests, as well as the resources we had available to help them.
Just a month before the pandemic began, we had completed our Salesforce deployment— the timing could not have been better. It has meant that we were not only able to continue offering the kind of client experience we always had, but also to outperform what we had been doing in the past. Let me explain what I mean.
Bridging Physical Distances To Solve Customer Problems
Through monitoring requests and measuring our response time in Service Cloud Lightning, we were able to get a clearer picture of sites where our installation technicians wouldn’t be available.
At the same time, however, we were able to determine which service technicians might be nearby, and were able to reassign them. Given that installations and service technicians have similar backgrounds, they were able to ensure the job got done.
This is huge for us, because while clients pay us when we send in field technicians, one of our competitive differentiators has been the free remote support we offer for the lifetime of our equipment. Even amid COVID-19, Service Cloud Lightning has helped us to deliver on that promise by letting customers reach out for help via email, call or text.
Better yet, since deploying the technology we were actually able to reduce our usual global response time, despite the challenges the pandemic created.
Innovating With Video And AR
We didn’t want to stop there, however. We wanted to bring innovation to our customer experience, so we installed a plugin that allows our clients to open up a videoconferencing-style application where they can show us exactly what’s going on with their equipment.
Then, using an augmented reality (AR) tool within the same Salesforce environment, our experts can draw over the image the client is seeing on their screen. They can see exactly what they can do on their own to solve a particular problem. It’s an unprecedented way for us to bridge the distance we have to maintain because of COVID-19.
Working on the cloud has brought a lot of benefits internally at Premier Tech, too. For many weeks now, the president of our Client Service division has been producing a regular video update that gets sent out to team members around the world. He uses data to explain how we’re meeting our KPIs during the current crisis.
These videos are keeping us all on the same page, and proves the power of acting as a truly digital business. Most of the KPIs and screen shots he’s sharing are coming right out of Salesforce.
Building On Success
Next up, we’re going to be expanding the scope of our Service Cloud Field Lightning deployment so it can benefit all of our installation and commissioning technicians this summer. That means they will get a similarly full picture of the projects they need to complete, and be better able to optimize the resources they have to do so.
At the same time, we are in beta with a Community Cloud project that will bring self-service capabilities to customers, a B2B commerce project to ease the purchase of spare parts and have plans to extend our use of AR to all our technicians around the world.
Overall, we feel we’re in a really good position to expect more growth in our business next year, just as we did during the last recession. The secret has been staying local to our clients — even if the nature of acting “local” means being more strategic about how we use technology.
