Managing Customer Service

Service business is all about people, about customers. In service you are at the front end with little room for error. You have to make yourself available to others and keep your own problems to yourself.

Customer satisfaction is high on your list of priorities but you know that the customer is not always right so you have to strike a balance between looking after them and looking after your business. There are customers who will never admit to being satisfied no matter what you may do for them, and then there are others who are always happy to see you.

An important rule of a service manager is to make regular visits to his customers. He has to be seen and build up a relationship. The human side is very important. Every one should have customer relations visits entered in their agenda.  Setting up a visit allows you to get to know not only how well you are doing, but also to find areas of common interest and expand your business.You have to be a diplomat and a good listener letting customers speak and get their problems off their chest. You have to be sure not to miss either what they say and how they say it. You have to be patient and helpful.

Some visits should also be made with your engineer in attendance. You must not make such visits when the customer has problems. On those occasions, he expects solutions which only your people can provide. When meeting customers find out if there are added services that you can give that would make their operation more profitable. Organising their stocks or providing them with back-up facilities  can be of some use. They may need a loan unit temporarily or lease a peripheral device such as a printer. You have to be a diplomat and a good listener letting customers speak and get their problems off their chest. You have to be sure not to miss either what they say and how they say it. In short you have to adopt a low profile and be helpful, making them think that they are always right.

You should also pay attention to the operators of your equipment. They are,  in an indirect way working for you in keeping the machines in good working order and  giving a good opinion of your products. In the end, your maintenance contracts  are more profitable. Identifying and thanking users when they have solved a problem is appreciated by customers.  In cases where you cover a large territory, visits to the field, also help you stay in touch with your local service reps.

Not all customers expect the same level of service. Those who enjoy low overheads by having their business in remote places make their own provision and do not  expect the same response times as those in metropolitan areas. Then there are those that hardly ever call because they are well organized  and take total responsibility for their equipment. Customers range from the near expert to those who no matter what you may do will run into problems and for whom a service contract can be an expensive business for you. No matter which type of customer, you have to placate and hand hold them because in the end they are all potential buyers and service is there to generate new business.



Take the case of a customer who has refused a service contract after the warranty because they want to save money. A major module fails after some months and the customer doesn't want to pay because the failure was just after the warranty expired. He writes to your president complaining and pointing out his budget difficulties and the president in turn passes the letter to you. You need to find a solution that satisfies both the customer and your business. A compromise is needed . You propose a free of charge replacement as if he were on a contract on condition that he takes a back- dated contract. The customer will now save face with his administration and you will have the contract to help cover the cost of repair. Every one wins.

Another customer complains that he is not getting the results expected from his system. You know from the field reports that the problems are due to lack of proper customer maintenance. You cannot  blame his staff so you have to be diplomatic and offer a face saving solution, one that will get the maintenance done and save both sides from conflict. To fix the real problem you agree to taking the system out and replace it temporarily with a loan standard so as to give his machine a thorough check-up away from his premises. This satisfies him and in return you ask that for a period of time his people must send a daily report on the loan standard so as to follow - up until such time as you are satisfied that all is working well. The customer now has to maintain an updated daily log which means that maintenance will not be neglected. In the end you make the customer feel that he is right but you solve the problem to your satisfaction.

There's never a boring day with such a variety of customers and problems. A good service can be profitable and at the same time it can be satisfying because you help people.

Providing a high level of Customer Service can be a very expensive business unless steps are taken to recover that cost  through different strategies. Some may charge very little but offer even less. In such cases the Customer Service is symbolic with a phone number to ring and an e-mail address as well as some information on FAQs.  In other cases the customer may be a large organisation that provides its own trained engineering maintenance and only needs initial product training and documentation both of which can be includewd in the product cost. Where the product is complex and the customer operators are not skilled in engineering most offer a comprehensive service which they charge and on which they expect to make a reasonable profit. In such cases the service has two parts. One is part of the product sale and unchargeable such as warranty, and installation, while the rest is chargeable and offers a guaranteed up time saving the customer cnsuiderable time and money.

By extending the usable life of products and providing parts for peripherals that are no longer being marketed the customer benefits well past the expected times and this in itself can be counterproductive for the manufacturer who wishes to supply new products more frequently.

It also becomes convenient to bundle and hide other engineering services into the service budget and thus product development and post design retrofits and software revisions are not accounted as the costs of product short fall. Quality protocols on alpha beta sites and some manufacturing costs are also put into service. Specification short falls and testing that should have been done at final test are also left to the field to resolve and incomplete products are passed to the field being maintained on site at no cost. Marketing no charge and inventory write offs due to retrofits are also absorbed by service. aswell as documentationre writes.

The customer who has already paid for the product is paying again  through the contract charges which are calculated to recover the service cost. In reality, product development, marketing and manufacturing budgets would be better exposed if customer service was passed out to a third party with an incentive to make a profit. The customer service strategic potentilaa has been often misused and misunderstoodwith the convenient result of covering for mediocre performance.

Who would object to the manufacturing when they come up with cost reductiions bringing down the product cost on which everything is based? Yet often these cost reductions are only temporary and simply shift the costs to the long term. Reducing the metal thickness or using a cheaper frame would be welcome were it onot for the fact that this would cause errors in alignments leading to numerous countless interventions for recalibration or for searching to fing the causes for final error of results.

With a little imagination it could even appear as technician incompetence

leading to countless visits with little to shopw for it. Organisation then can play a big part in efficiency simply by having a system that identifies the costs and puts them where they belong. A chief executive who knows little of the process would find it difficult to argue with those who look at service as the necessary evil at the end of the chain and where efforts should be made to get them to reduce the costs. His reports in other areas can reap benefits which are not deserved. Shippig systems that do not pass the specifications as layed down to customers is a typical problem.