Path to excellence in Customer Support & Services

---

Customer Support & Services activities start when you are developing and drafting the first lines of your product. Maintenance aspects of a product can be very impacting to a customer and to customer support processes and can influence on customer decision to continue working with the product and the company.

All is connected to how much effort is required to deal with the product in regards to maintenance procedures and manhours, downtime of the product (meaning the period of time which the product is not producing anything to the customer), spare parts availability, special technicians and tools needed and naturally the costs.

This can all be well addressed. Just need to happen in the early stages of the program development.

To have the right maintainability characteristics is a way to demonstrate to the customer how deep you focused your design to have him satisfied even when something happens and the product is not producing revenues, by designing the product to fast return it to operation, by selecting off the shelf piece parts and other aspects which we will go thru in this article.

Every customer/user expects to have a certain level of maintenance to be performed on his product. The key is how fast, effective and lean this can be done.

All looks so obvious, but not that easy to implement. It requires a robust process, high level of discipline, knowledge and very customer driven management.

During program development phases, there will be numerous disputes between different engineering requirements when a specific piece / system is being developed. There will be tough calls to make and the process which will allow the arguments and agreements of all parts to be analysed and the best solution chosen will play an important role.
 

Recommendations for Maintainability aspects to be embedded during product development:

· Establish goals for your product, which shall become the maintenance requirements, part of the product requirements. Negotiate with the program manager for these requirements to have the same level of importance as any other requirement.

  - Max maintenance costs 

  - Max maintenance downtime for each maintenance activity (scheduled or unscheduled)

  - Defined scheduled maintenance intervals

  - Minimum number of special tools, ideally zero.

  - Max percentage of special hardware and consumables, ideally zero.

  - Max number of hard time maintenance requirements, ideally zero.

  - Product / Systems / Components reliability targets (see this article for more details)

· Have systems parameters monitoring to allow preventive and predictive maintenance, optimising maintenance activities and product downtime.

· Preventive and predictive maintenance shall be explored to minimize corrective maintenance actions. Let the product informs you when maintenance is needed.

· Make maintainability basic requirements and knowledge spread within all personnel involved on the program development.

· Work with partners and suppliers to follow the same maintainability policy and requirements.

· Use the technology to your advantage. Remote sensors, connectivity, real time monitoring, AI troubleshooting procedures, self-learning systems, smart googles, mobile devices, integration customer-product-company customer support & service, etc.

· As several products have embedded software, make sure they can be easily updated with zero cost and downtime.

· Use the lessons learned on previous products/programs (yours and competitors), to avoid issues which already costed much to correct. 

Have them registered and whenever a new product is to be developed, add them to the maintenance requirements.

Recommendations for the Customer Support & Services processes, which are absolutely connected to the Maintainability aspects, during product development:

As much as the product needs more attention to the maintenance side, the support & services processes as well during the development phase, and might even influence decisions on the product definition. Keep the focus and goals on customers’ needs, low downtime and low cost. You will find several ways of matching customers’ expectations with company’s business plan, adding value to company’s sustainability.

· Spare parts – they shall be easily available, a proper planning way ahead of the game is important, even to define which services philosophy will be chosen.

· Repairs – the service shall be in place whenever the first product is made available to the market. Stock, logistics, partners, costs, programs all well thought.

· Services Network – depending of the product and its complexity and where the it will be sold and used/operated, a services network will be an important cornerstone to support and serve well. On top of the fact that they shall be equipped with all needed tools and specialized and trained people. To guarantee a seamless operation this network must feel welcome and respected by the company. Such respect will naturally be transferred to your customers.

Read this article about suppliers and partnership. It might give some good insights.

· Technical Publications/Information – the customer and the repair services people must be able to quickly perform the required maintenance. Have a program to be able to identify all procedures and allow the team to write and validate on real products, even after done on virtual reality models. Make them available in all possible formats and media. IT is helping a lot nowadays with augmented reality, with smart googles and so on. Be ahead of competition and demonstrate to the customer how much you focus on the product entire life cycle.

· Customer Support Teams – allow them to participate in the development phase with field feedback experiences. Customer expects to have somebody very knowledgeable supporting him whenever he needs. Do not underestimate and minimize the efforts to have a strong team ready.

See these articles for more details:

    Is Your Team Prepared to Excel with Customers?

    Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing But the Truth.

    Effective Communication, a Game Changer

    Listen to your Customer and Act Fast!

    Team Management, path to Excellence in Customer Support & Services

· Customer Training – depending on the product, a very comprehensive training program will be needed. In the same token, the more you prepare customers’ team to be prepared to deal with your product, the easier will be to help them to make the product available. This process shall be ready earlier than most of the others, plan well, use internal resources to validate before training customers.

How to cope with all these recommendations?

· Customer Support & Services shall have a seat in the product/program management with the same level of any other department.

· A team of experienced specialists in all these topics mentioned above shall be assembled to work on the new product development

· All needed characteristics for the product and the support & services shall become requirements and the shall be prepared by this team

· These requirements shall be recognized and validated by the entire development team and management as a set of requirements with the same importance as any other requirement

· Build a robust process which lines out how the teams will work together and how the decisions will be made 

· Have the team of maintenance specialists regularly and systematically reviewing the product during development 

· A continuous monitoring on how the product is attending the requirements is important as it will give you still time to revert decisions which might lead to important impacts down the road

· Create a forum with customers to regularly expose the status of the product/program and listen to their inputs

This list can go on and on, here I just listed some of the basics to help you start. Naturally you will make it stronger.

As mentioned above a robust process and procedure shall be created with the requirements for each type of piece part or system, for example electrical parts, hydraulic parts, they shall have all specific maintenance requirements which will help the designer when choosing / defining what to use.

Industry has several examples of good and bad maintenance characteristics and they become a stigma of the product making it “famous” for that.

Amazingly, although all looks obvious, not that many companies treat maintainability as deep, as focused, as important as the subject deserves and unfortunately the consequences of such myopia comes sooner or later and then the costs are extraordinarily higher to correct and perhaps the impacts can’t be recovered.

A product with bad maintenance characteristics will certainly decrease the ability of the customer to make the revenues he planned to.

It is, therefore, very important to be disciplined, organised, understand and spread the importance of having good maintainability aspects implemented on the product.

It will not cost you more and will definitely make your customer much happier and satisfied and maybe loyal to your product development philosophy.

Sep 19