For businesses the Internet of Things (IoT) presents a new frontier where nothing is new, but everything is different. Connected technology extends customer’s expectations, increasing the level of sophistication required to fully serve them.
IoT is poised to be a revolution because it allows businesses to do things that couldn’t be done before. IoT affects the way customers interact with companies and can drive demand for new paid services layered on or embedded into products. IoT is truly a massive new business opportunity.
Read on how companies have an opportunity to use service as a way to enhance the customer experience, generate new revenue and differentiate themselves in a world of increasingly similar products.
Devices, smart and not so, need an attachment to something that looks like a software platform, and the most built-out and robust customer-centric platforms today focus on CRM Service Management.
For example, IoT alerts must be refined then fed to a secure, user-friendly and accessible service management system with an entirely separate set of business processes focused on providing a informed, contextual and holistic customer experience.
CRM Service Management solutions are evolving to take customer service to the next level by enabling businesses to better understand their customers and offer proactive support by integrating IoT creating improved, automated customer support experiences.
With IoT there is much more data about the customer available. When customer service teams have access to this information in context they may already know what the problem is, understand the customer better and solve problems quickly.
Opportunities to self-serve also become more interesting, as businesses detect a possible malfunction in their products via IoT before the customer notices it. They can tailor the self-service experience to reach out and cater to the customer’s immediate problem. Providing personalized self-service choices avoids the legendary and dreaded “phone-tree” culture, reduces staff cost and gives customers the control and information they need to help themselves.
Customers prefer to self-serve and with IoT support, businesses can tailor the interaction with customers according to what they like best. Understanding customer behavior also helps teams design and deploy highly targeted campaigns that will lead to even more ROI. IoT gives businesses almost real-time access to customer’s data that can be used to run quick-campaigns to influence their decisions.
Field service may be the one area of service that will reinvent itself with endless offshoots of opportunity - consider that no other function gets this close to the customer!
Field service is evolving from basic scheduling and work order management to proactive engagement and informed consultation providing opportunities to upsell, cross-sell, make the customer smile and get referrals!
Soon 40% of all data generated will come from machines. This will accelerate the existing trend of companies competing more so on the quality of their service experience and creating opportunities to add billable service layers to generate interesting long term recurring revenue per customer. It’s obvious that service will become an increasingly important revenue driver.
Customer service and specifically field service is becoming much more strategic in nature. Coordinating those touchpoints with technology and contextual information that can rapidly be deployed across a spectrum of roles is essential to create a more seamless customer experience resulting in tangible benefits.
Building useful software that people enjoy using is hard, and supporting multiple mobile platforms is even harder. It takes years of iterating user feedback and evolution of best practices, innovation and refinement. Solve™ Monitoring Management is a proven platform for IoT that can maximize the competitive opportunity and revenue IoT presents by surfacing real time monitoring insights in context with client-centered business workflows.
— Steve Ireland