In many industries, the service offerings and the price ranges of products and services are comparable. Companies, therefore, need other unique selling points in order to stand out from the competition and thus delight old and new customers. Your service quality is one of the fundamental starting points for differentiating yourself from your competitors.
Especially in industries where cutthroat competition is raging, it is no longer enough to rely solely on the quality of your goods or services. The customer must like the overall package, and that means, that they must find clear, precise information anywhere and at any time. When the customer needs help or comes into contact with the company, he demands prompt and targeted responses.
Otherwise there is a risk of getting into trouble – and not just on social media, where customers openly express their anger. Today, customer relationships stop without hesitation, if the offer is no longer suitable. There are usually enough alternatives.
And also small and medium-sized companies have to adapt to significant changes in the digital transformation.
What used to be a competitive advantage is now considered standard: impeccable quality of products and services at reasonable prices are now simply a requirement.
However, digital transformation produces new technologies that can relieve your company on many levels. For customer service in particular, digitalization create numerous opportunities to offer modern, customer-centered services.
By focusing on:
– Customer experience & Working target-orientated with customer data
-> Creating sophisticated service offerings
you can make a real difference and increase market value of your business significantly.
When companies see themselves as full-service providers, they create advantages for everyone involved. Not at least for themselves – because the consistent integration of all stakeholders may not be a unique selling point – but it does provide real added value: Internally for sales, marketing and logistics, externally for distribution partners, specialist retailers and entrepreneurs (B2B) and of course for the end customer (B2C).
In this article I describe some services supported by digitalization, that are related to
- Products (e.g. maintenance services & contracts)
Services, that support the product through its entire life cycle, e.g. maintenance, inspection, recycling, remote help with augmented reality etc.
- Process delegation services
Services that exercised on behalf of the customers. Typical examples are PaaS (Product-as-a-Service, where the company keeps owner of the product and the customer pays for the output of the product. Or SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) etc.
- Process support services (services, that improve customer’s business processes)
Services, that assist customers to improve their own business processes, e.g through deeper understanding of processes relating to the customer’s.
- Asset efficiency services (mainly based on real-time data predicting maintenance)
Services that improve productivity, e.g. documentation, online data collection, remote product monitoring.