Introduction

 key factors such as price, quality, delivery, service or specification are all factors that influence the buying decision. Service alone may not be enough, but you will certainly not buy a system if you have no service.

In modern times, service has become an integral item in dealing with sophisticated products that rely in complex software and computer based hardware. When you pay your money, you expect to use the complexities in the systems and you cannot afford downtime because of a glitch in the software, or a 5 dollar component keeping a high dollar machine out of service.

Today's service is  key in reducing scrappage that would mean unnec essary replacement. By servicing and extending the life of systems, it is also an employer of young and well educated people employed in telephone centres and in repair work. Additionaly, it can help reduce the import bill,  by extending the life of expensive imported instruments.

 With all households equipped with computerised devices, more and more service will be required even for low cost equipment which can be dealt with by carry in service.

 

 

Strategies and Tactics

The strategy for a manufacturer's service is one of using service  to improve customer relationships through customer satisfaction. Service business is all about people. The service headcount is the biggest within the company, and a far as customers are concerned, there are those who have bought equipment over a number of years and are  known to Service. 

In an organisation that sells capital equipment, service has the role of supporting sales and the company image. Its performance is measured partly by the sales,  although it has to be ran as a business handling the large costs of manpower and parts inventories necessary for keeping customers running. 

In a way, service acts as the intermediary between the customer and the company. To the company, it provides vital information to departments such as R&D, Operations, marketing and sales, as well as to general management and to Quality Assurance. To the customers it is seen as a friend providing training and useful advice as well as being accessible to help maintain uptime to make profitable use of their purchased equipment. Its people have to be approachable and available to others while keeping their problems to  themselves. Customers may not always be right but they have to be approached with patience and humility.  A balance has to be struck  between looking after them, and looking after the costs of the business.  

 Naturally,  not all customers  can expect the same level of service. Those  who enjoy  low overheads by having their business in remote places cannot expect the same response times as those in metropolitan areas. There are those who think that they economize by extending the use of consumables past their recommended  dates  and run the risk of low performance.   They blame you when their results do not come up to expectations. Others may have staff problems with high turn-over  so there is little knowhow left at any one time, putting the onus on you to continue visiting and retraining.  Then there are those that hardly ever  call because they are organized to look after 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 of your company's equipment.

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.

Take the case of a customer  who 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 immediately 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 replacing 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 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 you get to help your companies image that can lead to further sales.

Support

 

Support

 

If someone said to you that you are a necessary cost you would not  feel very secure. If on the other hand they said to you that you are the brains of the business and you make things happen you would be very happy to see that your efforts are recognised. Technical support is to service what strategic marketing is to the company overall.  Doing business, selling complex products or software is primarily dependent on first class technical support.  

 

No matter how comprehensive the information, running automated sophisticated equipment is still  difficult in the hands of the layman. You can improve your product quality any number  sigmas but in the end you cannot do without the technical support to the user. The industry will have you believe that anyone can run a personal computer, but when you talk to users you soon see that people need support when confronted by  abnormal events. 

The Pareto 80:20 rule means that of 100 problems, you'll need to support the 20 which are outside the onboard diagnostics and the user competence. This is the support operation which while lower in numbers is higher in knowledge.

In general terms, a field problem that cannot be resolved within day will not fall into the simple category and if left to the service engineer it may cost unacceptable downtime and frustration. so these problems must be escalated to the support engineer. This person will have been trained in the whole system by the engineering design people and with their deeper understanding will if not able to solve immediately, provide a work around or patch to the problem that will give time for thorough investigation that will lead to a modification and a revision or retrofit. Having a total view of the field,  the support engineer will see the whole picture and determine if the problem is a one off,  or if it is across the population in which case a modification may be needed.

 

At the same time, a pattern may develop where the problem may be specific to the individual engineer or customer that may require training or even reorganisation of the customer's environment. From these considerations, it can be seen that the support engineer is the overall technical manager of his or her product line. Where the field engineer may be a generalist covering a number of products and customers, the support engineer will be specialist trained on a single product line.

 

A hot line will also be available to the field engineer for help but this is distinct from the general customer help line. the support engineer will be available to the customer hot line consultant as well as the field engineer. When launching a new product, the support engineer will also be involved with the field where he is expected to evaluate the product performance and  support the few systems on alpha and beta sites.

 

Additional responsibilities of the support engineer include  inputs to documentation in collaboration with engineering as well as the recommended spares lists at different levels  from engineer kits to local area kits, and then depot stocks for back up.

 

You would think that the massive communication tools now made available  would by now have caused a major revolution in the field of technical services. You can now multiply the coverage of a single knowledgeable person. You can put the expert in direct contact with the end user thanks to the explosion of telecoms and computers. It is no longer necessary to send someone on site to see and confirm, let alone repair a problem. All you need to do is connect the customer to the support expert who can then teleguide the user. Granted, there may be certain skills in carrying out the repair  or adjustment, but this too can be overcome by sending a preadjusted module for replacement. Any one of the majority of  problems which are knowledge based can now be dealt with through the internet  Broad band can enhance this even further with video so that  both ears and eyes that can be put to use.

 

A person sitting literally at the other end of the world can guide you and simply all you have to do is use your hands  borrowed by the expert.

 

Costs are falling drastically. With service being based on parts and labour you can cut down the cost of labour through technology and parts can be more intelligently used,  so, no more shot gunning and lost wasted parts that are sent out for testing but never get back. On line real time conversation with video cameras if necessary can teleguide users to solutions.  Shrinking the field force is now here to stay. The support expert location can be anywhere in the world where knowledge exists. It seems then that all the new tools have impacted the service function more than any other within the company. Service which is costly due to manpower, has now become remote technical support. 

Productivity

A field engineer needs key productivity tools to help him fix problems quickly and thereby satisfy customers. By being able to quickly identify and correct a problem saving a couple of hours can solve  a problem A system down can be very costly to a customer especially if there is little back up. If the Mean Time To Repair is say 4 hours then allowing for travel time saving an hour could make two visits possible within a day. The engineer  usually has in his kit, a number of band aid spares that allow him to quickly get the system going even by changing a higher level item which camn be returned to the depot for thorough analysis. If for example, a particular board or component is known to have  a higher failure rate then carrying such a spare can save a lot of time. Using  diagnostic tools such as software routines that help quickly identify faulty components can quickly pinpoint the problem area and a component or higher level sub assembly can be changed.

 The availability of parts is fundamental to productivity. Spares  may ber kept by the customer or may be accessible at suitable drop points. In either case,  although frowned upon, a certain gun shot action may take place where good parts may be replaced but this is of relatively low  cost since effective parts are returned to depot for further testing and recycling. This means that the action of service service is taken off site and carried out in the depot under better controlled conditions rather than the customer premises. Modern equipment is normally fitted with onboard diagnostics in which case the intervention is one of changing parts but the time is taken in checking out the equipment for proper functoning according to protocol.

The most effective  factor to productivity is training. Consider a  repair as the combination of labour and parts, so at the extremes little knowledge and a lot of parts or a lot of knowledge and few parts. A well trained engineer will identify a misalignment and need no part, whereas an untrained operative will change the pre adjusted unit  to fix the problem.

Knowledge of the customer is even more critical to service productivity since it is the operator who will initiate a service call. A well trained operator is in fact the best unpaid service engineer. Knowing to carry out the diagnostic routines and calibrate the systems, a customer operator can manage the intervention and save a visit altogether. Given that the customer has an insurance maintenance contract,a well trained customer operator  is the best weapon in productivity.