ARCHIVE FOR THE ‘management’ CATEGORY

Tech support company Mavenoid discovered users of tech hardware have to wait on average eight days to have a problem fixed.
Downtime is known to be one of the largest expenses for manufacturing companies. Swedish tech support company Mavenoid studied a variety of industries, from heavy machinery to consumer appliances, and measured the time users had to wait for a repair technician to fix their broken products. The results show surprisingly long downtimes for all product categories, even when the product’s function is critical for a business’ operation or a consumer’s daily life.

“Eight days of downtime is shockingly long considering how much productivity and goodwill is lost every day a product is not working,” says Mavenoid co-founder and CEO Shahan Lilja. “We see how customers become increasingly frustrated waiting for repairs, while companies’ support teams are held up fixing repetitive problems.”

In the study, Mavenoid compiled data from support requests across social media, online forums and manufacturers’ helpdesk channels like email and chatbots. The requests were managed by human support staff, sometimes remotely and sometimes including physical visits from a service technician. Utilizing cluster analysis on the support cases, and a statistic model to predict the alternative solutions to each request, Mavenoid was able to estimate the average waiting time and how much time could have been saved with better self-service capabilities.

“In half of the troubleshooting cases we looked at, the end-users could have easily fixed their machines themselves, without any wait,” says Mr Lilja. “Time-to-solution is key to satisfied customers, so it’s clear manufacturers underestimate the negative consequences of support waiting times and haven’t yet fully realized the potential of self-service.”

Maximilian Schnippering, Business Specialist Recurring Revenue and Alexander Driss, Project leader VMI, of Heidelberg provide us with their deep level insight into how an organisation can harness the value of logistics services within a subscription model to drive value...

Steve Zannos, Senior Director of Customer Care at Electrolux, suggests an open channel of communication between corporate leadership is crucial and urges senior execs to join their team in the field more often as well...

Michael Blumberg reflects back on some of the key themes from the 10th Annual Extended Warranty and Service Contract Innovations Conference, held in Nashville, USA...

Atos highlights significant new threats and innovative cyber security solutions that have recently gathered momentum in its new paper Digital Vision for Cyber Security 2. 

Earlier this summer we introduced you to three companies that we felt were set up to bring some significant value to the field service sector. Now as we look forward to 2020 here are three more companies that could potentially help drive your field service business forwards..

Copperberg’s Rohit Agarwal suggests that it is time to get our strategies correct before looking for excuses when it comes to misfiring service delivery...

Software firm open Surrey arm in South East of England.

Customers of Service Strategies Corp can qualify to receive the NorthFace ScoreBoard Award℠ (NFSB) for customer service excellence and customers of CRMI can qualify to receive Service Capability & Performance (SCP) certification for meeting service performance standards.