Business entities: Organization, Partner.
The Service Manager is responsible for overseeing and optimizing the after-sales service operations, managing service technicians (see the Service Technician persona), ensuring timely equipment repairs and maximizing customer satisfaction and retention.
In case service operations are outsourced, the Service Manager is also responsible for managing service partners, ensuring partners’ effectiveness to meet customers’ expectations or service level agreements and maintaining partners’ loyalty.
Tasks and objectives
The tasks and objectives of the Service Manager impacted by the DPS system are:
Customer satisfaction and retention
- Prioritize and coordinate the timely resolution of equipment-related issues affecting customers’ expectations or service level agreements to minimize downtime and impact on customers’ business.
- Ensure that customers' equipment-related needs and outcome expectations, such as uptime, productivity, efficiency, longevity, output quality, are met or exceeded.
Operational efficiency
- Efficiently allocate resources, including human resources, tools and spare parts, to ensure timely service delivery, while balancing service quality and operational costs.
- Streamline and optimize service processes to reduce operational costs and meet budgetary goals.
- Provide resources and support to team members to enhance their skills, effectiveness and efficiency.
Service strategy planning
- Establish preventive maintenance plans (such as calendar-based, time-based, usage-based, condition-based, predictive) to maintain equipment health and performance over time.
- Develop and refine the company's service strategy and service contract offerings to align with customer needs and market trends and to generate additional revenue.
- Identify opportunities for innovation in service offerings and present recommendations for product improvements.
Service partners management
- Collaborate with partners to resolve complex equipment-related issues that require escalation.
- Ensure that partners comply with company policies and best-practices.
- Provide resources and support to partners to enhance their skills, effectiveness and efficiency.
- Foster positive and strong relationships with partners to ensure their loyalty.
Needs
Needs addressed by interacting with the DPS
Need to get up-to-date, reliable, synthetic and relevant information
- to set priorities on a daily or weekly basis
- always have a clear overview of the current situations requiring attention and/or work and their severity
- to understand situations and make decisions
- about customers
- get information about health and all other relevant equipment-related topics (Topics to focus on) as a statistical distribution and for each customer
- benchmark a customer against others, recognize if there are trends
- about partners
- get information about health and all other relevant equipment-related topics (Topics to focus on) for each partner
- benchmark a partner against others, recognize if there are trends
- about service operations
- have a clear view of key performance indicators (KPIs) to evaluate and improve the effectiveness of service operations
Needs addressed by letting the DPS work in the background
Need to automate monitoring of products and triggering of processes
- detect in real-time events impacting customers business, such as failures or major anomalies and trigger the correct process to resolve them, according to their severity
- constantly monitor and process health-related data and detect signals, trends, patterns that anticipate or predict a failure and trigger the correct process to address such cases
Needs addressed by configuring the DPS
Need to define a system of common rules to guide maintenance works and take decisions
- define what actions to take following failures or anomalies for their resolution
- define preventive maintenance plans
- calendar-based, time-based, usage-based, condition-based, predictive
- determine how to distribute responsibility for actions among customer, partner and organization