2020-11-22

Where in your business process do you structurally find your Aftersales & Service?🧐

The last blog articulated a definition of Aftersales & Service and concluded that it is for the most part actually a process. Therefore it is important to have good transparency of your total business process and get an even better understanding of the parts that are actually Aftersales & Service process steps… At the end of the day - if you want to improve your customer experience and make a business out of Aftersales & Service, you need to have leverage on those process parts to improve it. Hereby, this becomes a structural topic.

This is wherein a lot of organizations things can get challenging. If you take the definition of Aftersales & Service and really look at where their process parts are within your current business process, you could find that some of these process parts today are structurally not part of your current Aftersales & Service organization.

Let’s examine the following example:
The process that establishes your ability to execute remote service could be in your innovation process (today) and the R&D/application engineers are making the decisions on how this gets designed, implemented, and used. This innovative group is influencing not only the customer experience but also the ability to make money with remote service.

Back to the definition of Aftersales & Service, which indicates that the responsibility to execute the remote service and leverage from it business-wise resides within Aftersales & Service - which takes care of the installed base. If that is a dedicated department, there will most probably be an immediate discussion internally on who decides what - a typical conflict of power, which is structural by nature.

This needs a clear solution that the executive management needs to provide; the two departments cannot solve this by themselves since there is a potential conflict of targets. For example, let’s say that the innovations group is targeted to stay on budget and they have to decide which of the features will not be developed at this stage - they could feel the need to decide to stall/cancel the remote service application envisioned. This could be contradictory to what the Aftersales & Service structure is tasked to do - to save money in their processes and optimize revenues for Aftersales & Service.

Ultimately, the solution that would fit best in this example is depending on the company strategy, hence the reason Aftersales & Service why executive management has to provide guidance. There are several models to solve this. For instance, always have an Aftersales & Service representative during the innovation project phase at the table to help decide, or have a dedicated innovation group with Aftersales & Service that decides this for themselves, or Aftersales & Service provides clear development requirements and sharing those with the innovation group so they can (try) to meet those requirements. Perhaps, even a combination of parts of the above.

All these models differ in several ways, but one is clear - without a clear definition for your Aftersales & Service, and a clear understanding of the process (steps) and wherein your organization they are, it will be difficult to provide guidance on what it means structurally. It could be that your business is fine with having all the Aftersales & Service processes distributed in different parts of your organization, but it could make it also difficult to maximize the levers to improve your customer experience and make a profitable business out of Aftersales & Service.

Those companies being successful in achieving both these targets have a dedicated structure that not only provides Aftersales & Service leverage and ‘power’ but does this in an efficient and effective way. The latter is achieved mostly due to the lack of internal conflict and allows your resources to focus on what is really important.

Those same companies went through a process of mapping their processes and established, sometimes after restructuring, a focused part of the business organization for Aftersales & Service.

In case you want to understand if your Aftersales & Service processes are structurally fit for success - let’s talk!

Stay safe,
Peter van Altena - Caresultant.