2020-12-06

How can your customer benefit from your Aftersales & Service strategy?🤩

This website states that you can ‘optimize your customer experience and build a business out of it’. This means there are two sides to this - a customer-focused side and one focusing on your company’s business. Both need to be able to identify advantages in your Aftersales & Service strategy. Again, Advantages need to add value in comparison to a current situation, so a continuous improvement is also needed.

Improving the customer experience and providing value asks for an understanding of what those are and which ones your customer appreciates. In Aftersales & Service, your customer looks either for monetary benefits or quality benefits - all other benefits fit in these two ‘buckets’ (categories).
Customer Aftersales & Service values like responsiveness, speed, failure-free, good, cheap, up-time of operations, competence, reliability, ‘easy-to-do-business-with’, etc, which all find themselves in one of these buckets. Some of these values even address them both: If your Aftersales & Service is excellent in quality and avoids downtime, it will have a monetary effect for the customer too. For instance, a perfectly executed and timely calibration of a measurement technology addresses the Aftersales & Service quality provided to your customer and helps also to keep the customer’s production up, thus influencing the bottom line. The quality component in this example becomes very real for your customer if the measurements are done as part of an academic study for instance - it can make or break the research outcome and the customer’s ability to publish.

My recommendation is to have some kind of diversification in the value you offer and supply to different customers and how you do that. The larger, loyal customer will expect to be treated better and to get more Aftersales & Service for less. A smaller customer who suddenly needs a same-day repair is willing to pay a surplus most of the time. There are also ‘hygiene-factors’ that your customer will expect in your Aftersales & Service provision and have a very limited appetite to pay for. A hygiëne factor could be that spare parts provision is secured for at least 5 years after purchasing the product - topics that your customer will perceive as ‘normal’ to get and are part of the initial deal in the customer’s perception.

It is the mix of all these expectations and the way you manage them as part of your Aftersales & Service strategy, that will determine how successful you will be.

There are industries that understand this diversification well, like airlines. They provide the most value to their most loyal customers with dedicated programs. Big tech, like Microsoft, offer you Aftersales & Service as a customer only to address what you could perceive as ‘hygiene-factors’. If second-level support is needed you need to have a support plan that you will have to pay for. The banking industry becomes more and more affected by self-management technologies in order to make it easy to do business with them, almost 24 hours a day.

Some of us will immediately recognize that the main driver for the last example might not be the improvement of customer experience, but more a cost-driven one that mainly the bank itself benefits from. However, that will articulate advantages for your company of a good Aftersales & Service strategy and those will be a topic for the next blog.

We probably all know the ‘memes’ where there are three topics for Aftersales & Service articulated: ‘cheap, fast & good’ and the customer can only pick two. My question would be: is this true, today? Why can’t the customer have all at the same time, especially with the trends of digitalization at hand?

If your service strategy is well-chosen you can do it all at the same time these days… Right?

Stay sale,

Peter van Altena