We’ve all heard someone, at some point, tell us, ‘It’s easier to keep a current customer happy than it is to find a new customer.’ There is a giant truth to this statement. You certainly want your customers to be with you for years and years – you’ve built relationships with them, know their kids’ names, gone above and beyond to get their challenges solved, have had many laughs with them, and helped them in every possible way you are able. But, then one day; Johnny Slick walks through the door with a new start-up company that is offering a much lower price, tons of empty and unproven promises, and loads of fluffy-meaningless words of what the new Johnny Slick product offers that yours may not; and just as fast as a movie theater clearing out when someone screams ‘fire’ – your long-standing customer is gone.
Customer loyalty is everything to your ultimate OEM business sustainability and success. Their loyalty can literally make or break your entire business. But attracting and retaining your end customers isn’t always as easy or something you feel like you have control over because in the market today, competition is tough, options are plenty, and people simply expect more from your business than ever before.
They want better service, more return and higher impact on their business – just like you expect from the companies you choose to partner with and the vendors you decide to purchase from. The market is always evolving and it makes it that much more important to create several layers of value for your customers.
But how do you get there?
There are many steps you can take to present stronger gains and enable your customers with more true return and overall value than you may have ever thought, and the great news is that they don’t have to be painful for you and your staff to implement. But, try to keep your eye on the prize and focus your attention on just your top game-changing priorities as you get started – putting too much on your plate at once will not only over-load you and your people but will muddy up your vision, potentially add more stress to your people, and diminish your end results by biting off too many projects at one time.
First quick tip to increase your OEM customer loyalty:
1. Ditch your white boards!
I’m betting many of you are asking yourselves ‘Wait, we LOVE our white boards!’ What it means is that if you are doing things like tracking inventory levels or production schedules or any other part of your business on a white board at the office, or in a conference room, or anywhere else it’s time to use technology to gain more visibility to your processes, inventories and overall business. If you and your team all know exactly where to find the right information at anytime (even if you’re not at the office) your customers will feel a positive impact with faster response times, better quality of communication with them, and it will enable your internal people to stay on top of what needs attention right away verses what can be scheduled; for all authorize people to ‘see’ it – even from there phone.
Emerson’s Zedi SaaS platform provides you with remote visibility to assets anywhere, at anytime. It can present you and your customers with easy to understand, actionable data analytics to make sure you are getting the most relevant information to the right people and that it’s positively making an impact you, and your customers bottom line. This is quick and easy to get set up and delivering you all the actionable data you’ve been missing; maybe it’s pump activity, or tank levels or compressor status you need to know – you’ll have exactly the information you need right at your fingertips in no time.
Of course white boards have their place in the office; but they were never meant to handle important data, show you trends, or send out alarms if your equipment is hitting a threshold or potentially putting people at risk.
Second quick tip to increase your OEM customer loyalty:
2. Gain mobility!
Today, more than ever before people are mobile, and your customers expect you to be as well. Gone are the days that you should ever hear anyone say ‘well I was out of the office, so I didn’t know until Monday’ – sorry, that just doesn’t fly anymore.
Having access to the right data and alarms set for select people or groups of people in your business to get sent a text message to their phones and/or email if anything goes wrong can make giant impacts on your OEM customer satisfaction. in addition, enabling your staff with the ability to check certain data sets (based on authorization and their role that you can determine) from anywhere, at anytime can mean the difference between a very happy end customer, and a very upset end customer.
Imagine you send your technician Jenny out to a location to perform scheduled maintenance on one of your pieces of equipment, and while Jenny is heading back to her truck an alarm goes off that another piece of equipment at a site nearby is having trouble of some sort – maybe it’s a tank about to overfill. Jenny gets the alarm notification, see’s that is just a mile down the road and comes to the rescue!
Now, Jenny, and your company just saved your end customer potentially tens, or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, legal issues and environmental problems for the community that would give them a negative reputation – Jenny is now like a rock star to that end customers, and so is your company for having the ability to react so quickly and have such great technology in place to have those insights.
Jenny probably had Zedi Go, the mobile app on her phone so while she was at that site she could quickly input data from your equipment and manage it while at the site. She would also use Zedi Go to better manage her work priorities and her day based off that data.
Third quick tip to increase your OEM customer loyalty:
3. Keep going!
Staying up to date with all that technology offers can make a giant impact on your end customer loyalty, because the more visibility you are able to offer, determines how quickly reactions can become, how increased safety gets and how their business sustainability becomes through actionable data.
Maybe you want to offer your end customers additional benefits or added features, or you simply want to drive some advances in how you can operate to create more value for your business, deliver smoother internal processes or remove some delays of the information access that can make or break a day; or a year for any company.
Not offering the right, most advanced tech can slow your growth or deliver poor results that could have easily been avoided.
The problem with staying on ‘top’ of tech is that you have a core business to focus on; that’s where finding the right tech partner, like Emerson can increase your ability to focus, while still reaping all the benefits of the latest and greatest technology to help you get way past the goal line.
You don’t want your staff to take their eyes off the ball and you also don’t want to hire additional people to take on these tech types of projects. So, when you think about your biggest challenges to your customers consider the opportunities that you have to improve. Look at every direction and see where things are a bit bumpy for both you and your customers.
What do your employees find as internal hurdles – is it inventory, or allocations? Maybe it’s scheduling shipments or delivery routes, or just not having enough skilled colleagues to help with the growing work load. It could be you, and they are both faced with a multitude of internal process or staffing problems that could be easily resolved by adopting some of the right technologies.
Your end customers have come to expect great things from you – so keep ’em coming!
Make digital strides in your day-to-day operations that can quickly, and significantly improve their end experience in several ways. Just be sure your partnering with a trusted company to be there for today, and for tomorrow to make sure you don’t get tripped up down the road. Because putting the effort into the right developments for your company and end customers is just the start – making sure those digital advances will remain strong for years to come is important to everyone they touch.
Starting out on the ‘wrong foot’ with a provider that may be here today, and gone tomorrow is only going to create more headaches for you later. And, making sure your provider is well versed in keeping up with the latest developments and willing to listen to what else you need that hasn’t been developed yet is far more important later on than you may realize today.
We keep our SaaS platform up to date and delivering the most actionable, secure connections and the best, most impactful reporting, control and monitoring, but we keep our eye on tomorrow and listen to what you may need, what the market needs and what your people need to improve your business for our software development roadmap. We don’t develop our platform based on what we ‘think’ might help you – we deliver tangible real-life improvements that matter to your business, and your customers.
Let’s get you started increasing your OEM customer loyalty today!
