Create Enhanced Customer Experiences by Reimagining Service Lifecycle Management

Top Priorities

The top priorities for manufacturers and services organizations driving investments around service innovation are improving the customer experience, driving revenues, and innovating through shared knowledge. These priorities are only becoming more critical as we face the test of the next normal. End-to-end service excellence enables the framework to meet the challenges faced today and in the future.

Challenges Faced in a Time of Disruption

While disruption caused by innovation, it also provides opportunities for manufacturers to assess what marketplace conditions benefit them. The platform economy and rising customer expectations allow companies to utilize the intelligent everything world to your advantage.

With technological advancement in every industry, enabling product and service innovation, it’s the people behind it that are most vital to success. The shortage of skilled workers negatively impacts your business performance, with a lack of resources and knowledge. Improving employee recruitment and retention, skills development, and equipping them with the technology tools to move your company forward is crucial. An average of 50 percent of businesses identified these areas of need, and are addressing them, according to IDC’s Worldwide Talent Management Survey 2019.

End-to-End Service Lifecycle Management Trends & Opportunities

IDC’s Pinder indicated that solving customer problems faster and growing revenue intelligently hinged on an organization’s service lifecycle management (SLM) efforts. According to the IDC survey, the top 3 were:

• Capturing and making available service knowledge and best practices
• Increasing self-service revenue
• Faster response to product quality issues and customer complaints

Warranty management facilitates collaboration and value creation, improving the interaction between cross-functional teams, and increasing Net Promotor Scores (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction Scores (CSAT). To achieve this, 55% of companies surveyed indicated utilizing cloud-based systems adoption for Warranty and Recall Management.

Technology Accelerates Transformation and Service Excellence

The premise of becoming a digital company resonated throughout this presentation. The concept of moving beyond making your business digital (with IT-enabled business processes and services) to making digital your business (IT is the product; creating digitally enabled products and services) demonstrated the ideal path forward. This transformation starts with having digital technology in place to monitor and manage SLM. The IDC survey indicated 67 percent of manufacturers currently would soon utilize Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) for SLM.

The Future of Service

Related to AI and ML, service needs continue to develop around Connected Warranty Management, remote and augmented services, equipment self-diagnosis, and Outcomes as a Service (OaaS).

The use cases for these capabilities include:

• Customized dashboards and reporting
• Automated Preventative Maintenance
• Augmented / Virtual Reality Customer Support – Remote Expert to Customer
• Outcome-based Service Contracts / Models
• AI Intelligent Services
• Training Services
• Connected Products / IoT-Enabled Products
• Closed Loop Innovation

For a successfully reimagining SLM, Pinder’s advice for Service Leaders and IT Buyers included keeping your focus on customer value, striving to deliver a consistent quality of service, and exploring innovative tools enabling a connected ecosystem. At the same time, your company transforms for a prosperous future.

Your Digital Service Lifecycle

Stuart Ransom of Mize highlighted customer expectations of product and service data’s instant availability across the service lifecycle, extending from warranty management to product support Field Service Management, Service Parts Management, and logistics services.

Most companies (Yours?) typically have a maze of disconnected, interdependent service lifecycle systems, business processes, and service interactions that are not integrated. This disconnected service environment creates friction with customer engagement, limits product utility, impedes service delivery, and can result in a negative, and competitively undifferentiated Customer Experience.

To fix this, Ransom advised companies to create an implementation of customer-centric and service-first service delivery model. The Mize Connected Customer Experience Platform, will enable you to seamlessly share product data and orchestrate service interactions across the Warranty Service Contract Management lifecycle, and to all value chain participants, leveraging modern cloud and native mobile app technologies. Watch the on-demand webinar now to learn more.