Steve Downton, Downton Service Management Consultants Ltd, Noventum Group
This article will examine how business’s attitude towards service is changing and highlighting the need to balance the tensions between local service and central support to provide unparalleled service at the frontline and consistency of process globally. The attitude of business towards service has necessarily changed and become an area of considerable importance for boardrooms, as they see this as an opportunity to extend their reach and develop their customer base, taking advantage of their position before competitors erode it.
In support of this the strategic business requirements of an after-sales service operation are to raise efficiency and effectiveness and deliver the cost-effective performance required to maintain satisfied customers. The performance bar continues to be raised by ever more demanding customers; achieving this level of strategic performance and value creation requires companies to transform their “service-toprofit” supply chain into a “customer-centric service business”. They must take advantage of the software tools available, and view their after sales operation as a competitive differentiator.
Service businesses today need to be highly efficient, to continue to deliver cost effective service in a break/fix environment, while developing and enhancing the customer-facing role of the service organisation. The service representative role is necessarily changing, and the style and attitude of engineer and business support are also shifting significantly. Although final roles might be very different from current manifestations, the secret to successfully maintaining service while containing costs is to adopt a gradual change philosophy, developing operation processes and attitudes in line with the changing customer requirements. Recognising the importance of achieving a development rate, at a speed that the customer can absorb, is crucial in developing the optimum customer interface.
The challenge is to provide a managed environment where the supplier provides a balance between innovation and existing support so that the customer is able to develop and utilise the service at a pace and in a manner that bests suit both their current and future requirements and that can support the different rates of change require
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