Emerging technology is changing customers’ expectations for service. Improve your first-time fix rate to save on field service dispatch costs and satisfy customers. How to Decrease Service Costs and Increase Customer Satisfaction, to learn how IIoT-based service strategies are changing the service paradigm.
Leverage IIoT to Decrease Service Costs and Increase Customer Satisfaction
Want to increase efficiency, decrease truck rolls, prevent customer downtime, and provide overall great service? This article will show you how to:
- Save on service costs by ensuring technicians always have the information they need for maintenance insights, right at their fingertips.
- Reduce downtime and implement predictive service through remote monitoring and analytics.
- Decrease truck rolls and increase first-time fix rates through remote diagnostics so technicians can assess root causes of issues and arrive on-site with the right tools, parts, and repair plans.
Table of Contents
Table of contents
Time-Savings that Lead to Cost-Savings
Truck-Roll Savings that Lead to Cost-Savings
Toil-Savings that Lead to Cost-Savings
Learn how to leverage the IIoT to proactively resolve service issues before they require a costly truck roll, or worse—result in downtime. Discover how the IIoT gives technicians the appropriate information to:
- Anticipate machine maintenance to reduce downtime
- Resolve issues remotely to drastically decrease service truck rolls
- Arrive on-site with the right tools, skill, and plan to increase first-time fix rate
Read on this article to learn how to reduce the toil and time it takes for technicians to work on repairs.
For service teams, the cost of customer downtime—planned or unplanned—far extends the cost of dispatching a technician. Downtime impacts customer production, quality, schedules and more. And customers have long memories at service contract renewal time. That’s why it’s in every service team’s best interest to prevent downtime and maintain high customer satisfaction whenever possible.
But keeping ahead of downtime and on top of customer needs is costly. It takes time, truck rolls, and toil: the time sunk into getting the right service information, the costly truck rolls for even the slightest issue, and the labour-intensive repairs that might involve back-and-forth visits to determine the right tools and strategy.
Today’s industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) solutions is creating new ways to reduce the costs associated with delivering high-quality service. And customers are noticing—80% of service decision-makers say emerging technology is changing customers’ expectations of service organizations, and 82% of service decision-makers say customer service must transform to stay competitive. With today’s transformative IIoT technology, you can meet the new industry standards to stay competitive and even exceed your customers’ high expectations—while driving internal cost-savings.
80% of service decision-makers say emerging technology is changing customer’s expectations of service organizations.
82% of service decision-makers say customer service must transform to stay competitive.
Time-Savings that Lead to Cost-Savings
The adage that time equals money is especially true for service teams. Real-time, reliable service data access saves technicians time, which enables them to handle more issues and support more customers—freeing up resources for more robust service contracts and initiatives.
How to Save Time with IIoT
The IIoT reduces time-sunk costs by ensuring that technicians always have the information they need for maintenance insights, right at their fingertips. They can monitor field assets, regardless of location, through real-time, automated data streams. Technicians can focus on analyzing service data—trusting that it’s accurate and timely—instead of spending time collecting data from the field. Service teams always have the information they need to make timely decisions about increasing efficiency, performing repairs, and preventing customer downtime.
Lack of field service efficiency increases the amount of time the customer is stuck with a non-performing asset, thereby increasing the amount of time that the customer isn’t generating revenue from that asset, as well as increasing the amount of time that the customer has to appease his/her own customers. All this eventually leads to lower renewal rates and ultimately customer loss. – “First-Time Fix: The Underappreciated Field Service Metric,” Field Technologies Magazine
Proven Cost-Savings Results
Heidelberg, a leading global printing press manufacturer, turned their time-savings to cost-savings with the ThingWorx IIoT platform.
- 50% reduced repair response time
- 1,000 to 2,000 hours of customer production time saved per project
- 40% of sales now based on service contracts
Truck-Roll Savings that Lead to Cost-Savings
Truck rolls are one of the costliest drains on a service budget. From the technicians’ labour and travel time to the truck operating costs, it all adds up quickly—especially when imperfect and incomplete information causes multiple visits per call. Fewer truck rolls save internal costs while improving customers’ trust that your products are reliable.
How to Save Truck Rolls with IIoT
IIoT-based remote monitoring and analytics enable technicians to anticipate machine maintenance, improve planning for scheduled downtime, and prevent unplanned downtime as they can perform predictive, instead of reactive, service.
Using the IIoT, technicians can resolve more service issues remotely, which drastically decreases truck rolls and downtime. IIoT enables remote software maintenance updates without the need for on-site service, reducing the number of outages related to software. Remote data monitoring improves service teams’ ability to proactively address and prevent service issues before they require a truck roll—or worse, cause customer downtime.
Proven Cost-Savings Results
With the ThingWorx IIoT platform, service leaders are seeing the following results:
- 70% of maintenance problems resolved remotely
- 90% of software problems resolved remotely
- 30% of maintenance problems resolved remotely
- 1,200 hours annually of customer downtime avoided with preventative maintenance
- 63% of maintenance problems resolved remotely
Toil-Savings that Lead to Cost-Savings
On-site equipment repairs traditionally require a lot of labour and toil, as technicians work to diagnose issues then ensure they understand what’s needed to correct and prevent similar future repairs. Enabling more effective and informed hands-on maintenance lowers internal costs while raising customer satisfaction.
How to Save on Technician Toil with IIoT
Remote maintenance is the ideal—but when a truck roll is needed, dispatched technicians have the accurate IIoT-based data they need to best prepare for each unique service call. With remote diagnostics, technicians can assess the root causes of issues and arrive on-site with the right tools, parts, and repair plans. They can also seamlessly communicate data back to the service centre, enabling remote assistance on-site for specialized service. Altogether, this improves operating efficiencies for customers and gives technicians more informed knowledge at the point-of-service, saving them from labour-intensive surprises in the field. And it saves customers from lengthy service calls that extend downtime even further.
A commonly cited reason for not fixing a problem the first time is because the technician does not have the right equipment or skill set. In fact, parts unavailability was by far the most cited complaint by customers, as reported by 51% of field service executives. – 3 Methods for Improving First-Time Fix Rate, Click Software Blog
Proven Cost-Savings Results
With the ThingWorx IIoT platform, service leaders’ savings for on-site costs include:
- 60% reduction in on-site repair time
- 30% reduction in service case duration
- $20 million estimated in cost-savings over 3 years
Source: PTC