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Introduction and challenges

Maintenance and after sales service should be considered as strategic activities for any business that sells and services equipment. Both activates drive customer loyalty and can also drive profitability in their own right. 

In an increasingly demanding and competitive consumer environment, with higher consumer expectations, companies that manufacture and sell equipment must capitalise on service and maintenance to differentiate themselves. This can be effectively achieved through adopting customer intimacy strategies.

To achieve a customer intimacy strategy, organisations have to make best use of their customer information and strive to improve the interaction between their employees and customers. This interaction can be improved through targeted training and encouraging cultural change, and by doing so, also ensuring that revenue is enhanced through commercial upskilling. 

To ensure sustainability of a customer intimacy strategy it is critical to gather customer insight to understand their needs and to tailor customer relationships accordingly at the local level. This means that organisations need to think differently about training and capabilities. Traditional technical skill sets need to be complemented with customer relationship management to garner trust and loyalty and move away from the transactional relationships associated with traditional approaches to sales and service. 

How we can help

Argon & Co supports its customers in the development of their maintenance and after-sales service activity:

  • Structuring and supporting the deployment of sales teams and their capability development
  • Improving commercial performance, including: KPIs, dashboards design, governance structures and continuous improvement 
  • Developing the commercial mindset and moving from a reactive to a proactive commercial approach 
  • Structuring and improving the management and control of installed assets
  • Developing understanding of customer needs and expectations (e.g. voice of the customer)
  • Defining strategies to enrich the customer service offer, including audit, training, preventive/predictive maintenance, hotlines and web catalogues
  • Review of pricing strategy for service offers
  • Developing design-to-value approach that considers the impact on maintenance and after-sales service from the product design phase