If You Want to Get Honey, Don't Upset the Beehive

Who doesn't like honey? What does this have to do with remote monitoring of industrial systems?

Consider the following: A customer calls with an urgent problem about a deployed product. He insists your product is defective and needs to be replaced. You, on the other hand, want to ask some diagnostic questions to troubleshoot and understand the full situation. For example, could there be other outside factors causing this issue? Could it have been installed incorrectly? Is there a training issue, etc.?

Yet your customer doesn’t want to hear any of this. He insists that he knows what the problem is, doesn’t need to troubleshoot, and demands the part or service be replaced at no charge, ASAP.

Does this sound familiar? Have you ever been in a situation like this?

If so, I offer two recommended solutions.

The first is to put yourself in the position of your customer, to understand, to express empathy. Is it possible that he is stressed and rushed for time? Is he working under a thought paradigm different from yours? For example, he may be operating under the assumption that "this product will work perfectly, 100% of the time, with no input or adjustments required by me."

Taking this moment to pause and reflect deescalates the conflict and lowers the energy, creating some much-needed space for you and your customer to objectively see the truth of the situation.

This leads to the second solution, which is to investigate the data at hand. Only with remote monitoring can this data be investigated. By connecting your remote industrial system to your phone and laptop, SPI’s unique, secure, and affordable system integrates via our proprietary plug-and-play technology, providing real-time, 24/7 access to your industrial data. Examples of these data are system health metrics such as voltage, amperage, tank levels, chemistry properties, etc. The possibilities are only bounded by your imagination.

In conjunction with this customer empathy you have developed, instead of kicking over the beehive you can collect the honey by troubleshooting, diagnosing, and solving the system health issues using real-time data. Learn more and take action by clicking here.