With the manufacturing industry becoming more turbulent over the past few years, it's essential to provide great experiences for your customers in times like these. Why does this matter? With fragmented supply chain disruptions becoming more frequent as a result of the pandemic, it means that despite this challenge, you can always be there for your customers to protect your reputation.
You can do this through enabling an always-on service. Here, we’ll explore four ways this enhances your customer experience throughout your manufacturing operations:
1. Improves your scalability
The impact of fragmented supply chains continues to affect companies worldwide, with manufacturers struggling with their sourcing strategies for their warehouses. For example, 28% of industry professionals experienced stock shortages during the Covid-19 crisis, leading to delays with customer orders.
With the always-on service, you can improve your resource management thanks to its advanced scheduling tools. This way, you’ll be able to identify where stock is running low and where there’s an upcoming peak in product demand through predictive insights, helping you meet customer expectations.
2. Ensures your customer service teams have access to the right tools every time
A Microsoft survey found that 72% of customers expect a company to know who they are when they contact their customer services team. If your data is siloed, this creates a challenge as your customer service teams will need to source important information from different departments, leading to:
- Outdated information as by the time your teams have found the data they’re looking for, it will likely be out of date
- More leg work for your teams to access the information the customer requires, such as their order status
- Creating connected and empathetic customer experiences –when they next look at dealing with your manufacturing business, your team can identify their name, address, and order history, offering better convenience and increased personalisation
- Improved customer satisfaction – the quicker you’re able to pinpoint and resolve an issue with an order before it’s too late, the better experience they’ll have
- Providing convenience for your workforce – your customer service departments won’t have to keep going back and forth to retrieve the information they need, helping you save time
3. Ensures you provide proactive customer experiences rather than reactive
Reaching out to your customers about any issues or updates with their order instead of waiting for them to contact you will increase the level of trust. For instance, if you can see you’re going to struggle to complete their order on time, you’ll need to let them know well in advance there’s going to be a slight delay.
Always-on services allow you to do this through automatic text updates, which can be triggered within your production lines if there's any issues.
Additionally, for your customers who purchase products from you on a contractual basis, you can protect your revenue streams through automatic renewals. This increases your efficiency as your teams won’t need to chase for future payments, and also increases the convenience for your customers as they won’t have to manually renew their contracts.
4. Allows you to be there for your customers on a 24/7 basis
To improve customer experience in manufacturing, always-on services offer virtual assistants like automated chatbots, ensuring you're there for your customers around the clock. 64% of internet users say a 24-hour service is the best feature of a chatbot, meaning it’ll make your customers feel empowered by being ready to answer their queries, no matter the time.
Additionally, you can provide personalised responses to any queries. When asking about a customer’s order details, invoicing, and delivery, you can take advantage of virtual assistants to provide information relevant to their interactions with your business. This means you can maintain a high level of customer experience even when your teams are away, and consequently, they’ll be less burdened to deal with non-urgent matters.
Learn more about enabling always-on services in our infographic
Now that you understand how an always-on service can benefit your customer experience in the manufacturing industry, how can you guarantee this’ll provide value in the long run?
In our infographic, we dive deeper into the main pain points of businesses and how always-on services can help resolve them for now, and in the future, as well as:
- How to achieve insights-based collaborative sales acceleration
- Ways to better engage with your customers via digital channels
- What our value envisioning workshop will offer your manufacturing business
Interested? Get your copy below.
