One of the tried and tested ways of maximizing the returns from your service organization is so simple
and easy many often overlook it altogether, although the incremental costs are usually negligible and the benefits are many.
Bring service into the picture as soon as possible, so that it helps you design maintainability into your products. Often,
service is the last function brought on board during development cycles. At this stage, because of time-to-market and cost
considerations, service can only react; it cannot help you improve maintainability by designing it in. Designing maintainability
into your products improves not only service effectiveness by reducing costs, but often improves ease-of-use as well, and makes
them more attractive to potential customers.
There are a number of facets to bringing service into the picture early on in the game.
The earlier you do this in the product life cycle the easier to implement and the lower the costs.
Interestingly enough, creative structuring can increase the benefits while minimizing incremental costs. Let's discuss some of
the things you can do to maximize your returns from service. Most will cost you very little incrementally, making the ROI
rather phenomenal.
Assign a support representative to your QA team to be the lead service person during product release.
He or she will bring a customer focus to the QA team and be aware of what a typical customer will do when encountering an unexpected
bug or feature. This will help the development team in creating and prioritizing a fix, work-around, or documentation/explanation.
This rep will also be an important resource for others on your service, documentation, and education teams as they prepare their
contributions to the success of your product.
Address service needs and serviceability in your manufacturing design planning. Including a service/support rep i
n the discussions between engineering and manufacturing to discuss parts layouts and manufacturing processes pays great dividends in
minimizing installation times and mean-time-to-repair (MTTR.)
A smooth and quick install impresses customer personnel and creates a positive environment for your company and
its products. In one instance, the fact that the console displayed the OS log-in banner within 12 minutes of cutting the first shipping
strap so impressed customer personnel that it resulted in selling three additional systems to other units. Re-designing final
manufacturing test processes to achieve this was trivial.
Consider service requirements in your manufacturing build plan. This will help minimize the unnecessary costs
associated with emergency procurements caused by shipments to resolve customer outages. It also helps minimize overall costs by
including service requirements into normally optimized manufacturing build plans.
Decide whether early sparing needs would be better served by holding service spares in your manufacturing parts
inventory. If possible, this will optimize parts inventories until service needs, resulting from a large installed base, warrant separation.
Remember, however, to gain customer credibility: customer outages should take the highest possible priority even over revenue shipments.
Proper planning and inventory controls should minimize or eliminate any conflicts of interest in this area.
Include service and support representatives in your early engineering and manufacturing training sessions. This gives
trainees a head start and empowers them as a local resource for service when confronted with customer issues. Charge these representatives
with disseminating their knowledge to colleagues until formal product training is in place.
Integrate service marketing into your product marketing plans by creating a suite of service offerings designed to
complement product features and make it easy for customers to integrate the product into their existing environments. Having such a clearly
defined and useful suite of service offerings will enhance your product's ability to address customer needs, and enhances desirability in
the customers' eyes.
Providing your sales force with incentives to sell services brings you a number of benefits. First, the incremental
revenue is always welcome. Second, structuring the commission schedules appropriately can minimize or eliminate service "give-aways," which
deprive you of an extended revenue stream. Building service into your sales plans is always easier when done from the start.
None of these ideas involves "rocket science"; all are easily implemented. Since careful attention paid to business
process and cross-functional interfaces will minimize or eliminate any significant incremental costs, the ROI on these efforts can be quite
impressive.
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