With customer expectations increasing constantly, remaining competitive in the manufacturing industry has become more challenging than ever. Today, it is not enough for manufacturers to just create a high-quality product. To outshine competitors, manufacturing companies should also provide efficient and seamless customer service across all customer interaction channels.
In this context, implementing robust CRM solution such as Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud becomes essential. Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud extends generic CRM capabilities with industry-specific tools, helping businesses in the manufacturing sector provide highly personalized customer experiences.
This article highlights four considerations of how using Salesforce for manufacturing companies can help a business provide better customer service.
Providing a holistic customer view
To provide more personalized and meaningful customer experiences, service reps in a manufacturing company need to truly understand their customers, which is near to impossible without relevant and accurate customer data. Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud can facilitate access to all customer data for customer service reps by bringing it to a unified and convenient view.
Suppose a person makes a call center call or sends a message via live chat. Support agents can use Salesforce’s in-built service console to view data associated with this particular customer and immediately check all critical information, including the customer’s contact details, existing orders, warranties, and timeline of past interactions (be it purchases, service inquiries, conversations, or customer service feedback). By using all this data, agents can personalize communication with each person and provide more tailored service.
Streamlining warranty and claims management
Defects, malfunctions, or any other issues with purchased products can frustrate customers and ruin their overall impression of a company. Resolving customers’ warranty claims quickly and efficiently can be critical to ensuring a better customer experience, and Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud can be helpful in this regard.
Specifically, Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud allows manufacturers to assign warranties to their products or entire product groups and define warranty terms and rules by which warranties should be issued and resolved to standardize and streamline warranty-related activities.
When a customer or distributor submits a warranty claim, company employees can use Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud to process and investigate this claim efficiently. They can examine claim data in detail, review coverage of a related warranty, and validate the authenticity of the claimed expenses. Employees can then quickly reject the claim, approve it, or make other decisions based on predefined warranty management rules.
Enhancing product and part inventory management
A manufacturer’s inability to track and manage inventory efficiently can result in production disruption and delivery delays, which in turn can reduce overall customer satisfaction. Luckily, manufacturers can enhance inventory management with the help of Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud.
In particular, Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud can aggregate data related to locations, quantities, and characteristics of raw materials and products a manufacturer has from multiple sources and bring it to a unified view. This enables employees to track buffer, transit, and other types of inventory across different warehouses or distribution lots more efficiently. When there is a decrease in inventory, employees can also use purchase order (PO) templates to create single-use, planned, or contract POs and transmit them to suppliers and maintain the optimal inventory levels needed to meet customer demand.
Improving asset lifecycle management
Asset lifecycle management is another capability of Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud that can help a company streamline customer service. To be more specific, a manufacturer’s employees can use Salesforce to track and manage products customers have bought from the moment of sale until the maintenance subscription ends.
In practice, for each asset, employees can generate records containing critical asset-related data, such as purchase date, serial number, associated warranties and subscriptions, and maintenance history. Employees can use this data to make better asset management decisions and provide more proactive customer support. For example, customer service reps can inform a customer that his or her subscription is about to expire and that they should renew it.
Additionally, employees can manage and track maintenance requests related to specific assets, which includes recording these requests and routing them to the appropriate departments. Employees can also create maintenance and field service tasks (both planned and unplanned) for particular assets to ensure that customers’ assets are in good condition and work correctly.
Among all of these, employees can use in-built reporting tools and dashboards provided by Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud to analyze asset performance, track key maintenance service metrics, and predict the future potential health of assets. Based on asset analytics, employees can generate insights helping manage assets more efficiently and provide better customer service.
Final thoughts
Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud is a powerful CRM product tailored specifically for the manufacturing industry’s needs. Beyond industry-specific marketing and sales functionalities, it provides robust customer service capabilities to help manufacturers provide better experiences to their clients. These include a service console for manufacturing, as well as warranty, inventory, and asset lifecycle management tools, all helping employees provide better service.
To learn how your company can use Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud and where to start with its implementation, you can consult third-party Salesforce experts. Certified consultants will analyze your unique business requirements and help choose the most suitable Manufacturing Cloud edition. They will also provide the tailored implementation strategy and help you execute it to ensure cost-efficient and smooth Manufacturing Cloud adoption.
