ABI Research insights: Digitally transforming manufacturing after-sales service

After-sales challenges in the manufacturing sector

When they raise a service request, your customers expect you to respond immediately. And to resolve their issue without further ado.

But there are several factors that can make it difficult to meet these expectations. We’ve outlined three main challenges below.

Labor shortage

Many businesses struggle to find enough skilled technicians to meet their customers’ service needs — especially in the manufacturing sector.

The UK recently experienced the biggest manufacturing talent shortage in more than 30 years. And the Manufacturing Institute expects these problems to continue. It predicts that more than 2 million manufacturing jobs will be unfilled by 2030.

It’s not just that understaffed teams can’t respond fast enough to customer requests. Overworked employees are also more likely to experience stress and burnout, a leading cause of employee turnover.

Operational complexity

Complex processes and procedures create an additional challenge for after-sales service teams, especially in manufacturing. In large-scale supply chains and assembly lines, every element must function perfectly for the process to go smoothly.

This interdependence creates room for errors and inefficiencies, which can have severe consequences. For instance, if one piece of equipment on an assembly line malfunctions, the entire production line may need to be stopped. As our research shows, this can slow down the decision-making process and negatively affect morale, productivity, and innovation.

Downtime costs

It’s common for manufacturing businesses to keep their production lines running around the clock. Every minute a machine is idle costs money — especially if downtime wasn’t planned.

And we’re not just talking about monetary costs (nearly USD 1 trillion a year for leading global industrial firms, to be exact). The non-financial impact can be just as severe. From a damaged brand image and loss of customer trust to increased employee churn, the cost of downtime puts immense pressure on customer service teams to solve issues immediately.

How to tackle after-sales challenges in the manufacturing sector

Clearly, providing effective after-sales service isn’t easy. Many service teams lack the resources to travel to customer sites immediately when an issue occurs. Thankfully, remote technology such as remote machine access and extended reality empowers them to solve problems remotely, boosting efficiency and satisfaction.

Serve customers remotely

Helping customers solve issues remotely is a great way to increase service efficiency without compromising on customer experience.

If your company manufactures connected machines, you can embed a remote access solution into the machines’ software. That way, when a customer raises an issue, your service team can take control of the machine and troubleshoot remotely.

This reduces travel costs and frees up your technicians’ schedules, so they have more time to help customers. Plus, you avoid the greenhouse gas emissions related to driving or even flying to customer sites.

In addition, a remote service model can help you streamline the issue resolution process. This enables a quicker and more structured response to service requests which, in turn, boosts customer satisfaction.

Enhance your services with extended reality

For problems that would typically require hands-on intervention, extended reality (XR) offers additional remote capabilities. Encompassing augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR), and virtual reality (VR), these technologies are great for visualizing procedures and providing support.

For instance, with AR-enhanced video calls, you can see what your customer sees and guide them through repair processes step by step. In addition, digital twins act as 1:1 digital representations of your products and allow you to create interactive 3D instructions your customers can follow on their own time.

Some businesses are even working with the latest spatial computing technology, like the new Apple Vision Pro goggles, which enable technicians to virtually step into a 3D model of a machine to analyze the smallest details, even if the machine is thousands of miles away.

With the help of XR, you can deliver even more advanced remote customer service, helping customers solve problems in real time. That means less machine downtime and higher customer satisfaction. In addition, you can use XR solutions internally to improve training and onboarding experiences and enhance knowledge transfer within your service team.