Why Digitizing After Sales Service is Pivotal to Creating Integrated Customer Experiences

Here's a gist of the post.

Trends driving the need for integrated delivery + service experience

• Ensuring a seamless experience for services like installation and maintenance and realizing the benefits of sale-related costs
• End customers want flexibility in scheduling service requests along with real-time visibility on its status?
• Developing workflows to empower CRMs to prioritize particular service requests
• The growing need to gain real-time visibility of a technician's availability along with Live tracking and ETAs
• Instantly gratifying customers by providing "express" service options?

Measures that'll help master these trends

• Sending customers a link to book service slots and ensuring they have visibility of available time slots on different dates
• Driving real-time communication interventions across different stages of service, starting with when a technician begins a trip
• Using a technician's live location and analyzing their skills to provide express service?

Let's delve deeper.

Customer experience is determined not just by the delivery of goods but also by the delivery of services associated with those goods. Therefore, it's necessary that when logistics managers think about customer experience, they should focus on providing an integrated experience. In other words, strive to provide a seamless experience of both goods and service delivery.

We've heard a lot about the significance of improving the goods delivery experience. In this post, we'll focus on the post-sales service part. Let's glance through five rapidly emerging trends driving businesses to ensure a superior service delivery experience.

#1. Ensuring Post-Sales Service Excellence

Customer experience does not end at the sale and delivery of goods - delivering a seamless experience on services like installation, maintenance and others is vital to retaining customers and realizing the benefit of the cost incurred in making the sale.?

#2. Providing Instant and Flexible Booking Experience

Booking technicians for servicing home appliances can get challenging. Calling customer care, following lengthy instructions, and waiting for days for a technician isn't ideal. Consumers seek flexibility in scheduling requests like installation, repair, and maintenance. Customers prefer brands that help them complete a booking with few clicks.

Gartner highlights that if customers have effortless service interactions, they are 94% more likely to repurchase the product or service

#3. Leveraging Established Customer Relationships

When it comes to services like installations and repairs that require access to a customer's home, trust and service quality are crucial. To ensure customer satisfaction, offering the option to rebook the same technician who has already established rapport is only fair for the customer.

#4. Driving Customer-Centric Servicing

Irrespective of the service request source, it's critical that businesses empower customer relationship managers to allow consumers easily select service dates and slots.?

#5. Gaining Real-Time Visibility of Capacity?

To provide a delightful service experience, gaining visibility of a technician's availability becomes critical. So, businesses need to know their reserved and available capacity in advance and in real-time. Also, consumers would want brands to provide real-time updates on service progress. It's ideal to send notifications when a technician begins his/her trip.?

While these trends will influence logistics stakeholders to double down on providing integrated customer experience, let's explore how logistics stakeholders can stay on top of these.

Enabling Customers to Enforce Service Decisions in Real-Time

By sending a simple link over WhatsApp or SMS, customer relationship managers can allow consumers to select their service time slots. For even better service and to ensure first-attempt success, businesses can show customers available time slots on different dates and confirm appointments based on the customer's convenience.?

Building Loyalty by Personalizing Service Experience

Providing customers access to a technician's schedule, businesses can easily create workflows that allow customers to rebook a field technician. In case of a technician's unavailability, customers can reschedule the visit for the next best time slot available.

85% of brands believe they offer personalized customer experience, but only 60% of consumers agree–Shopify

Instantly Gratifying Customer with Real-Time Service Status

To enhance the post-delivery service experience, businesses can provide real-time updates to customers after confirming a service booking. Proactively communicating the exact service attempt time, requesting customers to pin location, sharing tracking links with dynamic ETAs, and offering online chat options all contribute to a superior experience. Additionally, enabling easy online payment for CoD requests further enhances the experience.

Fulfilling Service Needs in an Express Manner

To take customer experience a notch higher, brands can consider providing express service. This can be easily done by considering the live location of a field technician and his availability and quickly analyzing whether his skills match the service request.??

45% of consumers say they will switch brands if a company doesn't actively anticipate their needs–Salesforce

Being able to seamlessly manage customer service requests in real-time will become a competitive differentiator for manufacturers and fast-moving consumer durable brands. Hence, businesses must build strategies that provide complete visibility of available capacity and automatically map technicians to customer requests.