How manufacturing is transforming in the age of the connected customer

Not long ago, every sale was a single transaction.You would purchase a refrigerator, for example, from a retail store, and when it needed maintenance, you’d dig out the owner’s manual to find the manufacturer’s phone number and request a repair from its local affiliate.

Back then, there was no explicit need for a significant relationship between manufacturer and the end user.

Fast-forward to today, it’s easy to buy commodities like refrigerators right from the manufacturer. Now, before you’re ever aware of any issues with your fridge, a sensor will trigger an email to you that outlines the problem and proactively give you dates and times for a local repair person to fix it.

Today’s manufacturers are owning the end-user relationship, and as such, they have had to up their game to improve customer relationship management (CRM).

As technology has changed rapidly, so have customer expectations. The way customers interact with brands has been transformed by mobile and social technologies. Attracting, influencing, and retaining customers is increasingly tricky, especially for those manufacturers that aren’t adopting new technologies.

It is vital that manufacturers embrace new technologies not just to ensure the lifespan of a product, but also to give it the bells and whistles to attract customers. Otherwise, manufacturers risk losing customers to competitors with better end-to-end service.

Creating compelling products will always be important, but what will win customers over the long term is “smart-enabling” products that use sensors and software to deliver value-added services. An easy example is how Amazon’s Alexa is being added to new refrigerators to track groceries, allowing owners to add items to a shopping list through built-in voice command. These innovations are customer-centric business models that manufacturers need to be ready for.

The Connected Customer Experience

Today’s customers aren’t just looking for a product—they’re looking for a premium sales journey to purchase and continued personalized support once they receive it. Salesforce’s 2018 “State of the Connected Customer Report” reveals that 80 per cent of Canadian customers say the experience that a company provides is as important as its products, and 69 per cent say they’ll pay more for a great experience. Yet two-thirds of Canadian customers still find that most companies fall short of expectations for a great experience. The takeaway here is that manufacturers need to use every tool available, including their customer data, to provide the best possible experience.

This applies for business-to-consumer and for business-to-business (B2B) companies. A great B2B example of a Canadian company doing customer experience right is storage manufacturer Montel. Montel’s leadership recognizes that, on average, they need to follow up between eight and 12 times to turn a lead into an order. They use CRM to set alerts to make sure their sales teams follow up properly and manage the customer journey in a premium, efficient manner to sale and beyond.

What does this all mean for Canadian manufacturers?

According to research from IDC Canada, Canadian companies are going to be spending more than $16 billion this year on digital transformation technologies and services, which is almost 20 per cent higher than in 2017. A large portion of this spending will come from Canadian manufacturing companies.

A common challenge for manufacturers is not having direct contact with customers as a result of distributing through channel partners. Even when manufacturers sell direct, often that customer data is held in isolation from other business arms. All too often, information technology systems operate in silos, and a lack of scalability results in data spread across different, isolated databases—which makes it near impossible to extract data and learn how to best serve customers.

Manufacturers must move quickly to adopt digital transformation solutions and technologies to respond to marketplace challenges from competitors, customers, and employees. Benefits of harnessing this new technology include delivering the smarter services that customers are demanding today. Manufacturers who don’t adopt this data-driven approach to their end-to-end processes, from product development to channel partner distribution to customer service, will fall behind.

Manufacturing Best Practice: Connected Systems

As technology changes, customers’ expectations are rising, and customer service is evolving rapidly. This new territory has unlocked unprecedented opportunities for manufacturers to learn about their end customers and develop them into lifelong loyal buyers, in the same way that retailers once did. To make this big leap, manufacturers across any industry must accept that the product is just one puzzle piece of a successful customer experience.

Improving the customer experience is no longer just a retail challenge. By leveraging all the available data—from customer data to connected devices—manufacturers can best deliver the smarter services that customers are demanding today.