When it comes to preparing for the demand of Industry 4.0, leading manufacturers must work on turning customer exclusion – disconnected processes that create silos and negatively affect customer experience – into customer inclusion, especially with growing demand from customers, explains Nils Olsson, chief product officer, Tacton.
Beyond being a buzzword, what does digitalization actually mean for industrial firms and manufacturers? How can they actually put digitalization into effect in a meaningful way? One key area is customer experience.
Driven in large part by business-to-consumer buying experiences, customers’ expectations of their business-to-business purchasing experiences seem to be changing, according to DeloitteOpens a new window . 90% of B2B buyers now use online resources to research industrial products, and close to 60% of the B2B buying process is now completed online before a salesperson first meets with a customer. Beyond simply researching products, the majority of B2B buyers prefer to purchase industrial products online. Despite their customers’ increasing preference for digital engagement, few B2B manufacturers have made significant investments in digital commerce capabilities. This means that sales representatives and channel partners often lack sufficient insight into their buyer’s journey, due to a lack of integrated systems and automated processes for sales.
Learn More: Building Customer Trust in a Post-Pandemic WorldOpens a new window
Facing this new normal, manufacturers need to figure out a way to offer their customers easy and digital customization of products, no matter how complex, and at low cost and high quality. Those who do so will succeed and those who can’t, risk losing to competition.
To get there, manufacturers need to take strides to change their internal culture and meet customer needs with the notion of customer inclusion. If not, a culture of customer exclusion persists. Even if that isn’t the intention, the perception can be just as damaging to reputations in the eyes of customers, and, ultimately, to business, overall.
Preparing firms to leverage digitalization in order to include customers in every step of the product lifecycle – from gathering requirements through quoting, manufacturing, and delivery – is the challenge. So how to tackle it?
Step 1: Be Clear on the Ability to Support Customer Requirements and Digitalize Wherever Possible
In many cases, understanding and documenting customer requirements is a manual process. Questions are asked to uncover needs and desires of the customer but too often there are a number of questions manufacturers should ask but don’t: Which processes in this step can be automated? How can customer requirements be managed? How are these requirements met well enough while ensuring a quick understanding?
In one classic example from past years, a salesperson might get a call from a customer, who is looking for a particular type of product. The salesperson enthusiastically says, “we can do this!,†then relays the information to engineering to get the design and production process underway. This interaction could take place in the form of a forwarded email or by manually entering requirements into an Excel spreadsheet. From there, the engineer needs to ask numerous questions to understand the nuances and projects.
In this scenario, the whole interaction becomes exponentially slower and is no longer customer-centric. Sales teams inevitably need to go back to customers to say, “I heard that you wanted these specifications for your product but those aren’t possible so we need to go back to the drawing board.†This not only causes a project to take much longer than originally promised, but it creates an annoyance for the customer. It makes the process extremely inefficient and can damage your reputation with the customer, while also adding costs for the manufacturer to correct any errors that have arisen.
Step 2: Take an Unfiltered Look at Data to Find Efficiencies That Benefit the Customer
It’s vital to leverage the data that comes out of internal systems, including analysis and insights that come out of product portfolios. If internal efficiencies can’t be created, the only other option is to drop prices. So get ahead of the game and leverage insights that likely already exist across product portfolios.
For instance, leveraging insights with the sales process could help to see how to optimize the sales cycle by being smarter about finding commonalities and patterns in different customer needs or requirements. This could include looking at typically slower processes or general inefficiencies during the sales process and fixing operational bottlenecks. Or, identify the strong and efficient aspects of the sales process and doubling down on these efforts.
From the product side, it’s best to understand who buys the products offered and how they can leverage that from the supply chain and manufacturing points of view. What are the variants that are inexpensive to produce yet meet the needs of custom requests? Once identified, customer offerings can better be identified, avoiding similar, higher-cost items.
Step 3: Make the Leap to Compete in Value, Not Just Price
Though it may feel uncomfortable to stray from comfort – especially after years of perfecting price competing strategies – now is the time to compete on quality and value. With this in mind, use the insights in the above steps to compete in value, not just price.
One way to combine insights with the customer requirements is by leveraging visualization. Deloitte explains that AR- and VR-assisted interfaces help designers quickly engineer products and intelligent interfaces to provide avenues for customers to better realize value throughout the customer lifecycle. Seeing is believing and visualization allows customers to immediately see which customization requests are possible within the engineering and governance parameters. This kind of transparent interaction provides customers with a more thorough understanding of the end product that can’t be communicated with 2D renderings.
Learn More: 5 Steps That Will Change How You Think About the Customer JourneyOpens a new window
Step 4: Create a Seamless Omnichannel Experience for the Customer
Building on the notion of competing on value, manufacturers need to embrace real-time collaboration across multiple channels for every step of the process.
If customers request a new product or change via a call or online form, it is nearly impossible to act on the requests immediately wasting valuable time, money, and resources. Too often, weeks will pass before finally getting their response or update. Instead, by leveraging big data and connectivity between core business systems – CRM, ERP, PLM, and so on – it allows for a quicker response rate. We’re talking minutes versus days.
Are you prepared to put customers first in an Industrial Revolution-immersed world? To do so, combine all of your silos to understand your customer needs and leverage your product variance. If you don’t, you risk effectively communicating exactly what it is you’re selling and likely lose customers in the process.