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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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:
Interested? Get your copy below.