Cost of product failure
When your product fails, it costs your customers money, and the longer it remains down, the more it costs them. And sometimes, the customer’s cost is not only money but also customer retention or employee stress. And often, they wish they had a self-service option!
Whatever the cost, your customer wants or demands three things:
- Speed
- Low cost
- No hassle
Examples
Many physicians’ offices have a blood analyzer that can perform most of the most common tests. They schedule annual physicals early in the day and instruct the patient not to eat breakfast before going to the office. A nurse immediately collects and analyzes a blood sample and gives the doctor the report before she meets with the patient. The advantages are:
- Reimbursement – the doctor makes money.
- Convenience – the patient does not have to go to a lab
- Follow-up – if the test results or the exam indicate further tests are necessary, the office can sometimes perform the test, and the doctor can discuss the results immediately with the patient
When the analyzer fails, the advantages disappear.
Credit transactions are critical to retail businesses. Most of us use a credit or debit card to pay for almost everything we purchase. Think about gas stations, restaurants, and stores. Imagine what you would do if you stopped at a gas station to fill up your car and the pump had a sign reading, “Sorry for the inconvenience, but our card reading system is down. Cash only.” I think many drivers would go to another station because we carry a minimum amount of cash these days.
A manufacturing plant depends on your equipment to assemble its product. When the equipment fails, they stop production. Depending on the outage duration, it may only cost them some overtime to compensate for the lost output and get back on schedule. Or they may have to eat the cost of expedited shipping to meet the customer’s production requirements.
Or maybe they are on an offshore oil platform, and a pump fails. We can all imagine the cost of the lost production, putting a field engineer on a helicopter, making the round trip, and shipping a replacement pump to the rig.
For each of these examples, the customer sometimes wishes for a better way to return the equipment to service. They may wish they had a self-service option.
Self-service is frequently the answer.
Some years ago, I wrote a post called 7 Services to Sell To Customers Who Choose In-House Field Service. The post listed the following seven services which an OEM can offer to his self-service customers:
- Train and certify the in-house team
- Provide a dedicated technical support channel
- Priority on-site response
- Remote support
- Special tool kits with unique items
- Inventory kit with critical parts and rapid replenishment
- One or more Preventative Maintenance visits
Not every situation will require all items, but a few cases might. However, there is one new service that I would recommend – augmented Reality. Even though this list is five-years-old, it still works except for one significant addition; a customer portal with FAQs and links to an eCommerce site.
Augmented Reality may be the killer app for minimizing customer downtime
When I first created the list, AR existed as a laboratory experiment and maybe a little more. Still, it did not come close to having the capabilities of currently available systems. AR comes in several flavors with very different abilities and associated costs. The easiest to use, set up, and afford is Merged Reality (MR).
Many businesses are doing OK using FaceTime, which allows two or more people to look at the same thing simultaneously. Very useful but not compared to MR.
MR uses intelligent devices or computers and links two or more users in a single session in which the person closest to the “defective” product (either a field technician or the end-user customer, the receiver of help) controls the main image and the most knowledgeable support person (the giver of service)moderates the session. Some things the moderator can do are:
- Insert objects (like a finger, meter probes, or tool) into the main image so anyone looking at the screen sees both images together, i.e., merged.
- Talk and coach simultaneously.
- Share mechanical drawings or electrical schematic drawings
- Share documents, e.g., pdf’s or Word documents, with the on-site person near the product
- Draw lines and shapes either with her finger or using standard shapes like circles and arrows
- Freeze the image so the person being coached can put the tablet or phone down and still have the picture with the figures for visual reference
- Record the whole session to use it as a training video for the on-site technician, to prepare other field techs before they tackle the same, or very similar, issue, or to be posted as an FAQ for self-service customers
Here are the names and links to the most popular MR suppliers listed in alphabetical order:
I am most familiar with the Help Lightning offer. It does everything on this list plus more, constantly enhancing its capabilities. MR’s beauty is a minimal capital expense, and the monthly costs seem very reasonable, especially considering the benefits. One of my clients is preparing for a multi-week pilot test, and two others are researching to define initial use cases.
Key takeaway
Coupling AR with complementary self-services will help many B2B and B2C businesses provide their customers with the best cost vs. uptime trade-off. This package of services can be monetized profitably and still create a high level of customer satisfaction.
The AR offering is another example of moving the data, not the people!
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 identify and implement opportunities for self-service, please contact us or check out some of our free articles and white papers here.
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