When most companies begin to consider a remote product service program, they think of the classic benefits such as reducing service delivery costs using remote diagnostics or increasing customer satisfaction by proactively discovering problems. These benefits are certainly the low-hanging fruit, and should form the basis of a solid remote service program.
However, once an organization gains experience with remote service, it often discovers a powerful benefit of remote service - customer usage insight.
A good remote service solution should be flexible enough to allow an organization to collect and analyze any piece of data from its products at the customer sight, and to trigger the appropriate business process. You shouldn't stop at collecting information about the health and performance of your asset. Your remote service solution can give you priceless information about how your customers are using your product. Unbiased customer usage data collected from your products is very different to interviewing your customers and asking them how they use your product (which we still advise organizations to do regularly), and can open up a world of opportunity.
Here are some real-life examples of how companies are leveraging customer usage insight:
- A machine manufacturer regularly measures the overall usage levels by its customers. When the remote service agent discovers that a machine is rarely used, an alarm is triggered to the account manager who follows up to discover why the machine was not in use and how the vendor may assist
- A complex broadband vendor monitors for inefficient use of its product by the customer. The vendor then offers custom training (along with a report that "proves" these inefficiencies) to help the customer extract more value from the system
- A company has introduced a more powerful version of its product. The marketing team collects usage information to discover the customers who are currently running at full throttle. The company initiates a targeted campaign for these customers
We encourage you to start thinking about how you can leverage customer usage insight for your products. Incorporating these elements early in your program can have a powerful impact on the way you service your customers.
See also: Procative Support