In manufacturing, everyone’s doing their best to deliver a great product. It’s the foundation of any offering, and manufacturers will always fight for those marginal gains in product performance.
But that means a laser focus on product quality is no longer enough to make you stand out among your competitors. Like many other industries, manufacturing is becoming a customer experience arms race – and if you’re not focusing on the service you deliver, you’ll lose out.
With over half of consumers admitting they’ve left a company to take their loyalty elsewhere for a better experience, it’s time for manufacturers to respond. When efficient customer experience is the standard, you need to start thinking bigger.
You need to start thinking about service obsession.
In our Next Level Customer Experience e-book, you can explore how the manufacturing industry’s attitude to service is changing, and the three-step journey you can take to deliver superior experiences from phone to field.
To give you an idea of what you’ll learn, here’s a taster from each chapter…
1. The changing face of customer service
Right now, customer service is somewhere between a complex challenge and a potential management nightmare. Previously neat, linear customer journeys have been splintered by a growing range of channels and growing demand for on-demand contact. Combine that with increasing expectations regarding personalisation, and delivering the level of service your customers expect can be beyond difficult.
The secret is to prioritise performance and consistency. The best way to do that is to break down the silos that prevent your people delivering contextualised experiences at every stage of the customer lifecycle.
Fortunately, over 70% of customers are willing to pay a premium for a company that delivers a higher standard of service – so it’s worth the effort. (Plus, they’re five times more likely to buy from you again, and seven times more likely to try a new product or service.)
2. The three-step path to service obsession
End-to-end customer engagement might not come naturally to your people – particularly when they’ve been used to handling a specific, discrete stage of your service. The process to get there might sound like it involves a whole lot of work and dramatic changes to your business.
But it’s simpler than you might think. We’ve split the journey out into a three-step path to creating a service-obsessed organisation:
- Gain a bird’s eye view of every engagement
- Contextualise every interaction with customer data
- Start delivering enhanced experiences
Work your way through these stages, and your customers will start seeing the benefit as you optimise your operations and give your people the information they need to boost service.
3. Charting the future of intelligent sales and service
Making the shift to intelligent sales and service is going to require some changes to the way the manufacturing industry uses tech in its business operations.
Now, we’re not just talking about a branded app, or a self-service web portal. We’re talking about innovative technologies that will take your organisation into the realms of forward-thinking early adoption.
That means considering how you might use tech like:
- Artificial intelligence
- The Internet of Things
- Connected components
Our research points to more than half of consumers actively looking for innovative companies to buy from – and you’ll reap the rewards if you’re one of them.
4. Critical systems and critical service in the manufacturing industry
The era in which manufacturers just sell products is almost over. As it gets more difficult to differentiate based on product alone – a key challenge, according to 52% of manufacturing executives – service-based models are seeing a spike in popularity.
That means a renewed focus on field service and long-term customer lifecycle management, preferably without adding to your overheads. This, in turn, requires a more agile approach to the way you manage resources and meeting demand. The way we see it, there are three considerations you need to make:
- How can you use connectivity to minimise downtime?
- What can you do to enable predictive maintenance?
- Where can you add extra value in the service you deliver?
5. Intelligent sales and service for manufacturing
Success in the age of service obsession looks different for every company in every industry.
In the final chapter of our e-book, we recap the journeys of three of our manufacturing clients, each of which took a slightly different approach to turning the customer appetite for superior experiences into leading service offerings.
You’ll get insight into:
- How global lift and escalator manufacturer KONE is building user-friendly apps for field services including instant access to key information for over 20,000 technicians.
- How Mitsubishi Electric’s streamlined Cooling & Heating division sales pipeline made quoting 90% faster and cut approval times from two days to just two hours.
- How home electronics manufacturer Vax turned nine separate service systems into a single consolidated platform and created a 360-degree view of over 2.5 million customers worldwide.
Get on the fast track to service obsession
The path to service obsession in your organisation doesn’t need to be long and difficult – you just need a map to take you in the right direction.
Hopefully, this overview has given you an idea of what you can learn from our e-book. Dig in for more detail, so you can start creating intelligent sales and service in your organisation today.
Read Next Level Customer Experience: Three Steps to Service Obsession now – and keep an eye out for more blogs exploring its themes and key takeaways in extra depth.
