Article
Improving service quality with networked information
It sounds paradoxical: industrial companies are using innovative machines and digital technologies to increase their productivity and efficiency. Production processes are being continuously optimized and automation solutions are being promoted. However, in the service department, where customers expect quick responses, precise solutions, and personal support, digital progress all too often comes to a halt. Instead of customer satisfaction, there is frustration among overworked service staff.
The problem with service departments
According to the State of Service 2024 study, employees spend an average of only 39% of their time in direct contact with customers. The rest is spent on documentation, internal coordination, or searching for information. In the latter case, technical service often struggles with complex products and product segments, increasing cost pressure, an acute shortage of skilled workers, and a flood of product information spread across various systems, from CRM to spare parts catalogs. This can only have a negative impact on service-related KPIs such as troubleshooting time or first-time fix rate. And from the customer’s perspective, an optimal service experience looks different. For companies, this means wasted resources, high turnover, and jeopardized customer loyalty. All in all, a lot of missed potential.
Common cause behind poor service quality
The reason for poor service quality is often not a lack of motivation or insufficiently trained staff, but rather that crucial information is scattered across different and unconnected data silos. This means that employees have to laboriously search for it.
A lack of standards and transparency in processes is another hurdle for the service team. If knowledge is gathered in individual minds or departments, it is not available to everyone. This results in duplicate coordination, long waiting times, and errors in customer contact. Instead of focusing on the most important task, customer care, the valuable time of highly qualified service teams is spent on administration and endless research.
Until now, inefficient customer service has been a nuisance for both the company and those seeking help. In the future, however, the problem will be exacerbated by various factors: The shortage of skilled workers will further increase the pressure to perform in service, as will rising customer expectations in terms of speed, personalization, and availability. Only those who offer excellent support for their complex or maintenance-intensive products will be able to gain an advantage in this highly competitive market.
Networked information in service
How satisfactorily service technicians can solve problems remotely or in the field depends on one key factor: information—and how it is provided. Ideally, there are no data silos and the relevant sources of information are connected. All relevant content, such as manuals, troubleshooting guides, maintenance instructions, even up-to-date information and spare parts catalogs with ordering functions, are seamlessly available. Then the service department can access a world of information without media discontinuity, in which the company’s product knowledge is networked and usable.
Intelligently networking information and making it available digitally, thereby ultimately optimizing service processes, is not a vision of the future. It is a strategic corporate task that can be solved thanks to modern IT solutions, semantic technologies, and the use of artificial intelligence. An intelligent knowledge platform that uses a knowledge graph as a single source of truth can be such a solution for better providing product information.
Improving service quality through networked information: Practical solution in white paper
Learn how the digital provision of information can be achieved in an intelligent knowledge platform based on two practical use cases.
The white paper reveals how typical challenges are solved, what advantages this offers users and decision-makers, and why it is worthwhile to strategically address the topic of information networking in your company now.
Sandy Hedig
Marketing Manager
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