Posted in Trucking on September 22, 2016
As a truck or equipment manufacturer, you spend millions, if not billions, of dollars designing and building products that effectively meet customer needs and, hopefully, provide a level of differentiation at the point of sale.
At the same time, your service and distribution network is made up of independent companies that are operating under various contractual agreements. This makes connecting with your customers and ensuring a consistent after-sales experience very difficult.
So what can you do – beyond good engineering – to impact uptime, ensure service consistency and improve customer satisfaction?
Truck manufacturers Mack, Volvo and Hino have all enhanced their customer experience by enabling real-time collaboration and communication via cloud-based Service Relationship Management (SRM) technology. This ensures that the entire service supply chain (OEM, dealer and fleet) all have in-context access to the right information at the point of service.
The Decisiv platform creates a collaborative environment that ties together two key elements. The first element brings all OEM data into a single portal: internal systems, including build details, warranty coverage, service bulletins, recalls, parts catalogs and VMRS-coded operations with standard repair times (SRTs), along with asset-specific data from remote diagnostics and telematics. The second element consists of all of the various players in the service supply chain, including leasing operations, call center and field staff, dealers and fleets.
Here are three ways cloud-based Service Relationship Management (SRM) technology creates value for manufacturers of all types of commercial assets.
#1. SRM Technology Helps Increase Revenue and Profits
Improving customer relations has a major impact on your profitability. According to a report by Bain & Company, in some industries, “a 5% increase in customer retention produces more than a 25% increase in profit.”
Using an SRM platform increases customer satisfaction by significantly improving fleet/customer communications through the transparency and accountability it brings to all service events. It also:
- Provides field personnel with real-time notifications of high risk events, so they can proactively address policy and technical issues
- Reduces dwell-time and increases service capacity
- Reduces overall cost for warranty-related activities, including campaigns
#2. SRM Reduces Fleet Total Cost of Ownership
By ensuring access to key information at the point of service and proactively communicating with fleets about asset performance, the SRM platform reduces downtime and TCO. This affects your bottom line in several ways:
- Less downtime means less expenditure on rental and safety stock.
- Estimate integrity reduces costs, comeback payments and stress.
- Visibility to service history and warranty status helps drive warranty dollar capture.
- Fewer phone calls and frictionless data flow from dealer to back-end systems reduce administrative overhead and increase reporting quality and decision-making.
#3. SRM Technology Helps Drive Dealer Service Excellence
With SRM technology, your dealers should be able to speed up their triage times and technician efficiency, as well as shop productivity. Your fleet customers get their assets back faster, and your dealers see more repair and parts revenue. By ensuring a consistent service experience, you have qualitative metrics on service performance, which can then be tied to customer satisfaction scores and re-purchase behavior.
Here are some examples:
- Improved internal and external communications and data access decrease dwell-time more than 50%.
- Mobile check-in and electronics inspections decrease check-in time by more than 75% and increase upsells by more than 12%.
- Electronic estimate creation and approval increases billable hours/effective labor rate by more than 10%.
- Invoice integrity improvements increases goodwill by more than 6%.
Manufacturers, Join the Conversation
What strategies do you employ to enhance customer loyalty? What role does the maintenance, repair and servic
e experience play into these strategies? Please share your thoughts by posting a comment below.
Take the Next Step
Discover how cloud-based SRM technology revolutionizes the service supply chain and gives manufacturers a competitive edge.
Common sense dictates that the more value your customers get from your equipment, the more likely they will be both to purchase from you again and to recommend your products to others.