2021-01-17

Is your Aftersales & service portfolio on par?

Your initial question could be ‘on par’ with what? That’s a good one! Is it in comparison with what you can offer? Or what you want to offer? For argument’s sake, and because it is most logical to me, I would compare it with your customer expectations.
Now, it might very well be that your company lacks the capacities or competencies to offer just that - to match customer expectations in Aftersales & Service - then you will have a clear goal set for development.

Your customer expectations are influenced by what you have done in the past, what your competition is offering now, and what expectations your customer has. Two of these factors are constantly changing and will ask you to do your homework to find an appropriate answer.
Continuous benchmarking what your competitors are doing - and how well this is perceived - can be done relatively easily. Join congresses, search the web, buy industry market surveys, and stay in contact with your competition - “keep your friends close and your enemies closer” is what they say.
The expectations of customers are most of the time also relatively easy to find out - just ask them. My experience is that it is sometimes difficult for customers to be very innovative in their expectations and they articulate well what they have liked in the past. This sometimes ‘rules out’ finding the best innovative responses. Most customers are very good at articulating what their minimum expectations are - their so-called ‘hygiene factors’ - and it is difficult to earn good business with those. That leaves you in the position to innovate in Aftersales & Service. That shouldn’t be a problem and is possible - it has been done: if Henry Ford would have provided his customers what they wanted it would’ve been a faster horse… Also, the iPhone wouldn’t have been so successful as it has been and is.
I am not advocating that every Aftersales & Service leader need to be the next Steve Jobs, but the method used by Apple to innovate can be used on every scale. Your customers do play an important role in that method but aren’t leading in the innovation process itself. They are leading in judging the results, though. This means that you, as a business leader in Aftersales & Service, will need to have a closeness to those customers, know of what competition is doing, and have all the ‘hygiene factors’ under control. That is the best position to start developing new and innovating offerings for your Aftersales & Service business and come up with solutions that will awe your customers.
Customers only want two things from Aftersales & Service: it should help them to be more productive (Financial) and to be the best (Quality). The offering you provide - to be on par - should circle around those two topics and every time you develop a service offering you should be able to answer the question ‘how does this bring my customer forward either financially or qualitatively’?
There are companies that have for their spare parts business the policy that the customer doesn’t need to send a wrongly ordered part back if it is under a certain value - this sword cuts at 2 ends and will save money for both. Then there are others that use technologies that provide solid predictions on how the customer invest will behave the upcoming time - predictive solutions. In the market, you can recognize a trend towards supplying total offerings ‘as a service’ and help out customers that really want to focus on their core business.

The better your company is positioned to be a partner - every step of the way - for your customer, the better Aftersales & Service will be as your business component. To be ‘on par’ means you will have to become far more integrated into your customer’s process and be perceived as a real partner and not just as a transactional one.

Stay safe!

Peter van Altena.