Are you frustrated with your access to warranty information?
Is EXCEL your “go to” tool for warranty analysis?
Do you have a “warranty management process” or are you just chasing OEM provided numbers?
If you don’t like the way you had to answer any of these questions, you’ll want to join us for this informational webinar!
Despite the enormous benefits of IoT, field service leaders face many challenges to implementing IoT platforms. First, many of these leaders have not defined a clear outcome for IoT projects. In other words, they haven’t created solid use case or achieved clarity around what types of actions, decisions, or benefits they can obtain from IoT. The possibilities are endless and often overwhelming. Second, these leaders need to create a clear road map with respect to when, how, and where they will implement IoT. Questions often exist as to whether they should implement IoT on their existing installed base or roll-out with new product releases. Applying IoT to an existing installed base may seem like a time-consuming and arduous task. However, the benefits that a FSO can achieve when a large segment of their installed base is IoT enabled is significant. Third, IoT produces a vast volume of data. FSOs are often not sure how they will make sense of all the data or how they will ensure that actionable and measurable results will be achieved from this information. Fourth and most importantly, many field service leaders are concerned that they must overhaul their entire service delivery processes prior to taking advantage of IoT. This seems like an impossible order when they may have millions of dollars invested in the current ways of doing things.
| This post originally appeared in the August 2017 issue of Field Technologies Online. |
Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) are one of the hottest technologies hitting the field service industry today. This technology provides field service organizations with the ability to remotely solve customer problems through a collaborative video platform that superimposes a computer-generated image (e.g., annotation, technical instruction) onto a user's view of the real world, thus providing a composite view.
According a recent study by Warranty Week, warranty claims in the U.S. Automotive Industry have remained relatively stable over the last 15 years. Among Power Train Suppliers, Warranty and Accrual rates have averaged less than 1% of sales during this time frame. Apart from outlier years due to the Great Recession and a large-scale recall by one manufacturer, Warranty and Accrual rates have averaged between 2.5% and 2.2%, respectively, for manufacturers of Truck and Large Vehicles.
| This article is guest post from Sam Klaidman. He is the Principal Adviser at Middlesex Consulting. |
Many business leaders link their employee’s variable compensation to satisfaction or loyalty survey results with a view to improving the customer experience provided by their company or just to game the survey results.
In this article I assume the business leaders actually want to improve their customer’s experiences.
Why you should not automatically link survey results with variable compensation?
The fundamental reason is that metrics and compensation should only be linked to influence behavior that will result in the business achieving its desired business outcomes. Some of these outcomes are increase profitability, grow customer lifetime value, and mitigate business risks.
With many capital equipment products the cost of changing brands is so high as to make the likelihood of change non-existent and therefore the impact on the desired business outcomes also non-existent.
B2B capital equipment products generally have very high switching costs. For example, airlines that fly the Boeing Max 8 or 9, or have them on order, cannot easily stop purchasing new ones as their needs grow. Crew training, maintenance and logistics, and long deliveries from Airbus mean that existing users and customers who await delivery will be flying the Boeing planes from many years.
When a company has selected brand X products for one manufacturing site and decides to increase capacity by duplicating the production line at another location, they will usually buy the same equipment; it will reduce startup time and costs and make it easy to benchmark each facility against the other. Intel has used a practice it calls Copy Exactly! for many years to deploy each new generation of manufacturing equipment. They not only duplicate equipment but also use the same exact paint (color, manufacturer, and type) and flooring so they can troubleshoot production problems by eliminating everything that is the same across their factories. Standardization overrides experiences.
Another useful data point. In their article “CX Metrics Aren’t Customer-Centric, But Should Be. Learn How”, Peter Fader and Sarah E. Toms describe how companies with high switching costs break their customers into three segments based on any CX metric. The three segments are:
| Segment Name | Hostile Hostages | Neutral Hostages | Caged Loyalists |
| CX Metric | Bad | Neutral | Good |
Either your customers are hostages or are at least caged. In either case, they have to be extremely upset to even consider switching, if it is at all possible.
You might be wondering “what about referrals?” In my survey work, I find many people who rate a company 9 or 10 on the NPS question but never actually refer. There are many reasons why but their behavior doesn’t match their intent. I have also found people who rate a company with a 0 or 1 NPS score who referred the company to associates. When I asked about the difference, I heard things like “They were not good for us but would be perfect for my friend.” The takeaway – intent does not always match behavior.
Why improve the customer’s experiences with your company?
Even though your B2B capital equipment customers are likely locked-in to your products, you should still work to improve all the experiences you create. There are still the referrals (some people actually do what they say) and when the current product reaches end-of-life, they will make a new purchasing decision. They will still purchase the product they believe is the best for their intended use but, if the final choice between you and a competitor is close, service experience may be the deciding factor.
Where to invest your CX money?
You should invest your time and money motivating your teams to improve on the actions that will help your customers extract the most value from your products because this is why they originally purchased from you. Their business outcomes are much more important than how they feel about the intangible interactions with the service engineers. Areas to invest in include:
In last week’s webinar, Enabling Service Technicians to Deliver Better Customer Experience, our viewers learned how to equip service technicians with the tools they need to enhance customer experience (CX). Viewers also got an inside look at Mize’s connected CX solution which demonstrated key applications of the Mize software.
Our speakers included Michael Blumberg, CMO of Mize, and Andrew Thomas, Product Manager of Mize. Blumberg led us through reasons why field service companies should focus on enhancing their customers’ experience while also providing solutions that, once implemented, would enable service technicians to perform their work more efficiently. Then, Thomas walked through an end-to-end process for service requests in Mize, including a first look at Customer, Administrator, and Technician portals.
