Last week at the Field Service 2014 conference I spoke about customer support.  Today we are offered many ideas and solutions for improving our customer service.  There are many good programs that can be plugged into your business.  But do the meet your needs?  Do they meet your customer’s needs?

I also shared a quote by industry Executive Rick Nichols; “Customers today tell us they need a focus on simple, easy to use and cost effective technology supported by world class aftermarket services.  “Where their products are manufactured is now less important than how quickly they can access the service and engineering support for them once they are built.”

Is this true?  Is our aftermarket support the primary measure of our industrial equipment selection?   How do we measure up?

Some thoughts on how we support our customers:

I spoke about the need of a customer focus being company wide, that all departments from accounting and engineering through to shipping and customer service need to keep the customer need in mind.

We also spoke on the importance of communications forms, research suggests that words are only 7% of communications, that our tone is 37% and body language can be as much as 56% of the communication.   So how much communication is really being done in a blog like this when we write an email?

What is your experience?