Service Business Process Excellence Key To Customer Loyalty And Sustained Profitability

Until recently, After Market Services (AMS) was not seen by the CEOs and CFOs as

a key lever for driving customer loyalty or contributing to the companys top and bottom-lines. During the last recession, when revenue growth slowed down for a lot of companies, Service Revenues from the existing installed base continued to grow. Today, most CXOs agree that service is key lever for sustained and profitable revenue growth.

However Manufacturers are finding it difficult to organize their internal processes and bring in the customer focus required to make this happen. There are several execution challenges to this, including:

Broken processes across service fulfillment cycle,

Multiple technology systems

Lack of data driven insights for decision support

Incorrect inventories including obsolete parts

Warranty and Service billing leakages

Lack of actionable insights on installed base

Superior customer service is a commitment to deliver a truly reliable process experience enabled through people and technology. This can be made to happen when multiple organizational silos are coordinated to deliver a seamless process experience.

For companies to achieve this, executives need to focus on five pillars across Service Lifecycle Management (SLM) i.e. customer contact, warranty, service contracts, field service and parts management and logistics. This has to be driven through an enterprise-wide focus both on efficiency as well as effectiveness.

For example the field services and parts processes may be highly efficient individually, however, from a customer perspective if they are not coordinated resolution is delayed, customers are unhappy, adding to the service cost and impacts the bottom line. More specifically metrics like FRT (Field Response Time) are good efficiency metrics to track in field operations, its really the First Time Fix Rate (FTFR), an effectiveness metric that matters the most to the customer.

Another example is that, most organizations have efficiently working contact centers that measure metrics like Average Time to Answer and Average Hold time etc. focusing on response. However the customer calling in is looking for resolution which requires effective coordination/hand-offs and integration with the service fulfillment organization.

To be able seamlessly and effectively execute, and deliver best in class service to customers, companies need to deploy a multi dimensional initiative across planning and execution comprising:

1. Focus on business outcomes

2. Identify KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) linked to these business outcomes and measure business performance on these

3. Define structured and standardized business processes

4. Leverage right technology platform for execution and optimization

5. Create centralized Support and coordination to enable local execution

This will ensure superior customer satisfaction and therefore loyalty, which translates to profitable service revenue growth..

Source: https://solutionxchange.com/_Layouts/Blogprelogin.aspx?Page=ViewBlog.aspx&BID=jZ2PdXVpGzgWSWpG9ko2PQ==

by: Amit Nath Kapoor

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