2020-12-14

How can your company benefit from your Aftersales & Service strategy?

The best way to benefit as a company from Aftersales & Service is to ensure that your whole business benefits from it. Not just trying to earn more money against lower costs and add growth to your P&L, but really to make Aftersales & Service an integral part of your business. This has the potential to provide a compounding effect on all your business results.

First and foremost you should aim at ensuring that everything that the customer expects as a standard is provided the fastest and cheapest way possible.
Let’s take the example of a customer trying to make an appointment to get a provided product/solution fixed during the warranty period. Most of the customers expect that to happen quickly, without a hassle, and for free.
It would make sense to provide the customer with dedicated access to your company. For example, by using digital technologies to get in contact with your company, or to have a knowledge-based system like FAQs or some Wiki-like technology available. Another option would be to have a place to book a technician immediately at the time it would fit the customer.

If that same customer has to call you (only during business hours, of course), then has to talk to someone and to ‘defend’ his need for assistance and ultimately have to provide credit card information (in case it isn’t a warranty topic…) and then has to wait on a technician that will call the customer back to schedule a visit, the customer will be dissatisfied, to say the least.
Besides creating a customer who won’t be a fan, the whole process itself is quite costly for the company too: resources on the phone, time-consuming discussions with subject matter experts, and a technician that has to start to become unproductive, since the customer needs to have a visit scheduled that two of her/his colleagues were already involved in. On top of that, it’s probably a challenge for all involved to ensure proper documentation of this process too.

So if we look at the possible consequences for your company of this simple example, you could envision that the sales department won’t be having such a great time trying to up-sell with this customer again and will have to battle against detractor effects created in the market.
The innovation part of your company probably will miss out on an opportunity to improve the product with the next version, since documentation of the issue(s) wasn’t automatically captured - hence you open the company up to the risk of making the same mistakes twice.
Your finance department will most probably be confronted with the customer paying behavior that is turning in the wrong direction and is confronted with the need of wasting resources on the topic at hand.
Executive management will have to - in some cases - be ‘dragged’ towards the customer to provide a Mea Culpa. These Mea Culpa’s don’t come cheap, unfortunately.

This example was just a simple warranty case - a case your customer perceives as a hygiene factor most probably. If your company isn’t able to provide a flawless experience in those instances, what will you provide when the customer buys an enhanced service offering from your company? Assuming the customer gets into the situation to even let that thought cross her/his mind…

The great part of this is the huge potential available of possible improvements most companies still have. Aftersales & Service is a double/triple/quadruple edged sword since there are so many parts of your company that can leverage a good Aftersales & Service strategy.
My experience is that it is very easy to identify those examples for your company, just talk to your customer, back-office employee, and your technician - they will provide ‘gold’ for your company…

Stay safe,

Peter van Altena