Leveraging Technology to Build a Proactive, Amazing Customer Experience: A Customer Interview Highlighting a Strategic Service Vision

 "Our ultimate goal is a future where we knock on the customers door 15 minutes before the machine fails, with that part in hand. We're here to fix it before they know it needs to be fixed. That's our true north, to use tools like technology and IoT to support those goals."

I LOVED my recent discussion with Todd Bigger, a service leader at Eastman Kodak Company with excellent vision for service, sales and marketing team. His strategic initiative around service will absolutely transform their business. 

Watch Todd's interview now!

Customer Interviews

Customer interviews are a great tool to highlight the best customer advocates a technology company has. Ideally, before implementing technology, a lot fo work and strategic thinking has gone into the investment, the deployment, the phases and the business goals the business has in mind. What are their success metrics? Why now? What did the status quo look like? 

Eastman Kodak has an excellent vision for their service team and beyond. Their project has wide reaching implementation and goals that will touch their service, sales, marketing, and back office teams. It all plays into their broader 'One Kodak' CEO-driven project.

It was a pleasure to interview Todd and help highlight the important work they've already done as they built their business case and started the digital transformation journey. 

Key Take Aways

Here are some of the key take aways I heard in this interview:

 Eastman Kodak Goals: 

• Enhancing the way they are delivering print service activities with ServiceMax and Salesforce. 
• Advance back-office activities, create a more customer centric working environment? 
• Make it easier for customers to do business with us.  
• Connect sales, service, marketing, back-office functions (customer service and support) in a seamless way.  
• One Kodak - helping our customers connect with us, all the processes are the same

What did you need? 

• Integration is key: Connected out of the box functionality. 
• Salesforce integration is key: ServiceMax's partnership with SFDC was crucial to their decision. 
• We need a system that provides actionable data and proactive data for daily decision making, identifying areas of concern, getting to a proactive maintenance state, improving costs, driving a culture of continuous improvement. 

 

What are your goals for your service organization down the line? 

•  Appropriately level our inventories - reduction in inventory levels through efficiencies 
• Efficiencies and improvements in field techs. Tools so they can recommend upgrades, sales tools. 
• Dispatching improvements - engaging remote support more effectively. 35 - 40% of calls are resolved in remote. We want that up to 60-65%. Technology to get eyes on site faster than boots on site.  

Advice for Others: 

• Partnership is key, rely on technology experts like ServiceMax and Salesforce for continuous support and their experiences with other companies with business-critical field service organizations. 
• Look at total ROI, not just what this is going to cost you, but what benefits are your customers  

 

IoT 

1. 5-year plan, our business will be run holistically by our machines, identifying where there are errors or concerns. Ultimate goal is a future where we knock on the customers door 15 minutes before the machine fails, with that part in hand. We're here to fix it before they know it needs to be fixed. That's our true north, to use tools like technology and IoT to support those goals. 

Accelerated Transformation during the Pandemic 

• The Pandemic has accelerated the need for improvements in remote technologies and capabilities. We started using virtual and mixed reality environments during the pandemic to do installs when we couldn't be on site. We successfully installed very large press equipment, with our expert sitting in a room in the UK while it was installed in Malaysia over a virtual reality connection, with our team member remotely leading the people through that.  

 

Depot Repair 

• We are deploying 'track and trace' ServiceMax and Salesforce give us capabilities in the system to enter data through our Nexpress system.  They aren't purchasing these, that's part of the service component. In a nutshell - as they use it, we replace it. This helps us maintain the local inventory levels to support them when they need it and make their experience seamless. We're also looking at using ServiceMax to offer 'uptime kits'. So, when an FE goes on site, we don't have to rely on a next day air shipment, it’s already on site. That will improve inventory levels and help accelerate resolutions for our customers.  

 

Why Asset 360 instead of competitors? 

• SFDC has a connected environment with Asset 360, which we saw could fix some of the key issues we wanted to solve with data collection and inventory management. SFDC showed us how it connected in with the SFDC environment and showed us how that would help accelerate our deployment. The out of the box connectivity is already built with the solution here.