As I sit here watching my son participate in a summer baseball camp, I'm realizing that if he doesn't have a good experience, and if I'm not happy with the camp (their service), we are not going to come back next year.
The same holds true for equipment, regardless if it's foodservice equipment or any manufacturers' products, right? When something breaks (and it will), is your service process good enough to make the end-user want to buy from you again?
Odds are, your service process is broken. Let's take a look at how other companies are improving it with the HubSpot Service Hub.
THE PROBLEM
Let's take a commercial foodservice equipment manufacturer as the example. It's Friday night. A critical piece of cooking equipment breaks. A part is needed. And time is of the essence.
Does the operator even know who to call? When they do call, who answers? Are they calling your manufacturer rep?
When the rep gets the call, how are they tracking all of the important information you specifically need as a factory? At what point is this information relayed to you, the factory?
Great, the factory has most of the info they need but they still need to dispatch a tech. Does your support team have to call a tech to come out? If this is a manual process, how long will that take?
The amount of time it takes for an operator to call in a request and for a tech to get on site could take days, and maybe even a week(s). End-users expect better.
THE GOAL
What if the mean-time-to-repair (MTTR) goal was set at 1 hour for simple breaks/fixes? What if the service tech was able to get that key piece of equipment up and running again in their kitchen within an hour, minimizing the impact of one of their busiest days of the week? Sound impossible?
The goal is to repair that equipment as soon as physically possible. Why? Simple. If we build an amazing service process, the end-user is going to continue to buy from us.
Customer service is paramount to the overall success of a manufacturer. Do you even know your lifetime value (LTV) of a customer? Great customer service will increase the LTV substantially. And the customer becomes an evangelist for you, your personal brand ambassador, who will talk to their peers about your equipment or product.
THE SOLUTION: TECHNOLOGY.
It's not that easy. It takes time, white-boarding processes, determining gaps, having the right service tech teams in place, and technology.
We have to get to a point where we easily capture data, then use automation to deliver the data to the key people/companies who need to access it. We also need tracking mechanisms in place so that the factory, manufacturer rep, dealers (in some cases), service techs, and the customer are all on the same page.
You may have heard of Zendesk and ZoHo (or may even be using one of these today). Are they connected to your CRM? Is key data being shared? Are automated workflows in place?
HubSpot, a worldwide leader in marketing automation and CRM software, has introduced their own version: Service Hub. Why is this significant?
1) HubSpot becomes an all-in-one system for complete customer lifecycle visibility.
2) Whether you're in Sales, Marketing, or Customer Service, it's the same look and feel system. The adoption rate can be very quick.
3) You can share key data with other companies and partners using the HubSpot CRM through direct APIs (integrations).
4) If you have another system outside of HubSpot, you can create an integration to pull in that data as well.
5) An all-in-one system like HubSpot makes the software cost very affordable on a per-user basis.
The following video clip was taken from a recorded webinar on How A Free CRM Will Change Your Foodservice Business.
WHAT'S THE NEXT STEP?
TMC is currently working with manufacturer reps to streamline the service process. But we need the factories to be 'all in' to nail down the entire process from end to end. Will that factory be you?
Ready to meet with the TMC team to talk about your Customer Service process? We are looking for a few factories ready to make a difference.
