After years of development, China's construction machinery market has become more and more available, and it has gradually entered the stock market from the incremental market. At the same time, the after-service market has become more and more important. It can not only become another profit point for enterprises. Another great benefit is to reduce the rate of customer churn. The future market pattern will be proliferation of products and shortage of customers. The future competition will also focus on the competition for high-quality customers. Who has the most high-quality customers will be the market. Winner.
How can we retain old customers? How can we create a good reputation and build a good brand? Of course, it is to improve service! Outstanding service will be an important guarantee for product differentiation, especially in the construction machinery industry. Whether customers can make money is closely related to the company's service support Related, the service cannot be eliminated for several days, and the parts are out of stock for 10 days. How can customers make money? Improve customer loyalty through high-quality services, let old customers continue to repurchase, increase wallet share, and take the initiative to give them the best Of friends recommend brands, which is the most important driving force for the continuous increase of corporate customer groups and the continuous development of the market.
How to improve the service? Many companies call the service "after-sales service", that is, when the product fails, try to repair it in the shortest time and restore the performance of the product. They regard the service department as a cost center, use the profit of the whole machine to support the service, and give the service to the customers free of charge. In the context of today's continuous decline in machine profits and declining equipment sales profits, companies are able to "subsidy" services less and less. This also leads to a serious shortage of service technicians, uneven service levels, and out-of-warranty services. Timeliness has declined, and a large number of old customers are lost.
In recent years, many manufacturers have begun to pay attention to service and the aftermarket, and put forward service improvement plans. However, most companies’ service improvement focuses on service timeliness, focusing on timely repair of products, such as: increasing service outlets, recruiting Service technicians increase technical training, increase spare parts inventory, manage service processes, monitor service performance indicators, improve customer satisfaction, and ensure that the repair time is as short as possible.
Enterprises hope to bring value to customers and enhance service competitiveness by improving service capabilities. To this end, they set up a lot of service performance indicators, 30-minute service effect rate, 24-hour repair rate, rework rate, spare parts stock rate, customer satisfaction, etc. In this regard, the author has a different point of view, hoping to look at the service and aftermarket from another perspective.
The author believes that the above-mentioned service improvement measures cannot really increase customer loyalty at all. This is also the reason why the loss of customers in recent years has been serious and the service has become more and more tiring. Just like a football team only focuses on passive defense and puts 11 players in the penalty area, they will not be able to win the world championship no matter how tough their defense is. It will also make the sport of football lose its charm, because of this. Will make the audience lose interest in watching the ball.
The same is true for the service. First of all, after-sales service is a passive service mode, which is not broken, not repaired, and not called out. When the product is damaged, the customer's loss has already occurred, affecting customer profit and satisfaction. It is completely wishful thinking that companies can restore trust and even increase customer loyalty by relying on quick repairs. This "remedial" service model has a probability of customer loss that is 3.97 times the probability of increasing customer viscosity (data source: Gartner Research Report 2016), and cannot increase customer viscosity at all.
Sales is the process that allows customers to recognize and recognize brands and products to subscribe. It is a process from 0 to 1; while after-sales service is a process from -1 to 0. Timely after-sales service can calm customer dissatisfaction as soon as possible. , So that they can return to a state of peace and communication with the company, but this can only be a remedy at best. If the company still hopes to increase customer loyalty through after-sales service, it would be naive.
If you want to improve the service level of an enterprise, you must jump out of after-sales service, analyze the needs and pain points of customers from the psychological aspect, try to design and improve customer experience, so that customers have not thought of it, we have done it, and customers have just discovered that we It has been resolved, proactively and preventively to meet customer needs, and bring surprises and value to customers. Outstanding service companies understand one truth: the object of service is not machines, but people, so service personnel must improve communication skills, pay attention to customer experience, not only repair equipment, but also help customers use equipment well and make more money. To achieve this, it is necessary to make good use of IoT data and failure warnings to avoid failures in advance.
A well-known real estate company has established a "Customer Behavior and Psychology Research Institute" to gain deeper insights and understanding of customer behavior and design better customer experience maps. However, many of our companies are still stuck at the level of "Where is bad and repaired". There are a lot of device IoT data in hand, but few people mine the data to improve services. To increase customer viscosity, you must make customers feel happy. Every contact with the company is very labor-saving, convenient, and comfortable, just like getting along with friends. This is the basis for customers to come back.
Second, construction machinery and equipment have a large inventory and a wide range of construction. Manufacturers and agents can never meet customer needs only by increasing service outlets and technical personnel. Moreover, the labor cost is rising rapidly, and enterprises simply cannot afford it. Therefore, companies must abandon the traditional "after-sales service" model and avoid failures from preventive maintenance and intelligent early warning of equipment failures instead of focusing on maintenance capabilities. To improve service timeliness, it is necessary to make good use of social service resources, adopt scientific and technological means, remote support, artificial intelligence and fault diagnosis to empower frontline service personnel, and increase agent service resources only linearly according to the amount of equipment. It's a dead end.
Third, the current service model is no longer on-site maintenance, but component replacement. Therefore, the timeliness of spare parts supply often determines the timeliness of service. In the past, in order to increase the spot satisfaction rate of accessories, companies have been pursuing "what you want, what is there." This has also caused a large number of sluggish and excess inventory of manufacturers, agents and accessories stores, not only failed to increase the spot rate of accessories and customers Satisfaction has also seriously affected the profitability of the company.
In the future, companies will not only need to use parts forecasting tools to make inventory plans based on demand data, inventory parts more accurately, and better meet customer needs, but also use Internet thinking to network parts inventory data between companies. Let customers easily find their nearest spare parts resources, and revitalize the sluggish and surplus inventory of the enterprise. To this end, companies need an open cooperative mentality and innovative business models.
In short, service improvement must first be customer-centric and determine the development direction of the company around customer needs. Secondly, use big data of customers and equipment to insight into customer pain points, profile customers, accurately predict customer needs, and take measures to meet them. . The way to improve services must not be to increase manpower and outlets, but to use technology to drive changes in services.
In the era of intelligence, companies must abandon the traditional "after-sales service" model, use artificial intelligence to better understand customer needs, including the needs of services, accessories, and use, and actively meet them. If you can make your customers inseparable from you, you are the winner in the market!
