When servicing your company’s products, your customer has only three choices – you (either directly or through an authorized service channel), an independent service provider, and in-house service. In most cases, there are only two viable alternatives – you and them (aka in-house). Since you are trying to make money for your service operation, your strategic objective should be to retain your customers for the long-term growth of your business. Therefore, your service strategy must focus on helping your customers get the best long-term value from your product by crafting alternative services that offer unique value propositions so your customers can choose the best alternative for their business.
Know Why A Customer Purchases Your Product Before The Customer Needs Service
Answering this question is vital to deciding how to make money selling your services. By now, most people have seen this famous quote:
“People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!” – Theodore Levitt
In other words, people buy your products and services because they need or want an outcome. In the Levitt quote, the hole is the outcome, and the drill is the product. Doctors buy a blood analyzer to know PSA, blood glucose, or another parameter while their patient is still in the office. We buy luxury cars because we want to feel special as we haul the kids to soccer practice.
By getting to the heart of why our products are purchased and the operating conditions surrounding their use, we can design services and service plans that focus on providing the desired outcomes cost-effectively for the buyer. This design process helps some sellers understand that they had to offer 24/7 on-site support to semiconductor fabs, hospitals, credit card processors, food processing facilities, and public safety departments at all levels of government. It also leads analytical and life science suppliers to provide annual validation and verification services of products used in processing FDA-regulated materials.
The challenge for small and mid-size product suppliers is how to provide 24/7 field service globally, especially when each customer may only have a few reliable products installed. It is also why these customers frequently opt for self-service; the technicians are on-site, so response time is no longer a concern. And you can make a good profit supporting this special category of customers. How, you ask? Here is a partial list of services you can offer customers that want their on-site technicians to handle equipment repairs:
- Customized service training
- Technician certification
- Escalated technical support (they provide Level 1 support)
- Remote support
- Consigned inventory with quick replenishment
- Failure analysis reports
- Remote performance monitoring
- Pre-scheduled equipment verification and refresher training
- Software upgrades
- Technician “report cards” showing additional skills needed
A special case in service and support occurs when one of your technicians quits or retires from your company and joins your customer. You may be upset because you lost the skills and experience of the technician. Still, your company gained an internal advocate who will work to keep his income by recommending your products when the opportunity arises. And the customer will be happy with the uptime of his equipment. Not a perfect win-win situation because you probably lost years of experience and relationships with other customers, but not like losing a field technician to a competitor.
Selling Service Contracts
Like all sales, service contract selling is about making it easy for the prospect to buy. In the case of equipment services, the prospect is already your customer, but she still deserves your best advice on how to support the equipment. What can be a better relationship builder than you saying to a high-availability customer? “We have several standard service contracts, but they are unlikely to fully allow you to enjoy the results you promised your boss when you selected our equipment. However, we also have a well-defined support plan for people like you that are better served by having an in-house technician perform first-line service and support. Let me show you what is included….” Do you think your company’s image will improve after that discussion? Do you think the equipment owner will feel she made the right purchase decision? You bet! And, if this conversation occurred during the buying process, you may have had a lockout specification.
So don’t be afraid of in-house field service; consider it an opportunity to care for another class of customers!
Related article: Self-service Plus Augmented Reality May Be the Answer For Many of Your Customers
About Middlesex Consulting
Middlesex Consulting is an experienced team of professionals with the primary goal of helping capital equipment companies create more value for their clients and stakeholders. Middlesex Consulting continues to provide superior solutions to meet the needs of its clients by focusing on our strengths in Services, Manufacturing, Customer Experience, and Engineering. If you want to learn more about how we can help your organization create more value for your customers, please contact us or check out some of our free articles and white papers here.