Improving service quality with linked information

03. September 2025

It sounds paradoxical: industrial companies are using innovative machines and digital technologies to boost their productivity and increase efficiency. Production processes are constantly being optimized and automation solutions driven forward. Surely service quality should also improve!

However, in the service department, where customers expect a quick response, precise solutions and personal support, digital progress all too often comes to an end. Instead of customer satisfaction, the result is frustration among overworked service staff.

The problem of the service department

According to the State of Service 2024 study, employees only spend an average of 39% of their time in direct contact with customers. The rest is spent on documentation, internal coordination or searching for information. When it comes to the latter, 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-relevant KPIs such as troubleshooting time or the first-time fix rate. And an optimal service experience also looks different on the customer side. For companies, this means wasted resources, high staff 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 that the crucial information is scattered across different and unconnected data silos. Employees have to laboriously search for it.

A lack of standards and a lack of transparency in processes are another hurdle for the service team. If knowledge is collected in individual heads or departments, it is not available to everyone. Duplicate coordination, long waiting times and errors in customer contact are the consequences. 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, both for the company and for those seeking help. In 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 also offer excellent support for their complex or maintenance-intensive products will be able to gain an advantage in the face of tough competition.

Linked information in service

How satisfactorily service technicians can solve problems remotely or in the field depends on one key factor: Information – and the way it is provided. Ideally, there are no data silos and the relevant information sources are connected. All relevant content such as manuals, troubleshooting, maintenance instructions, even up-to-date information and spare parts catalogs with ordering functions are seamlessly available. The service department then has access to an information world in which the company’s product knowledge is linked and usable without media discontinuity.

Intelligently linked and digitally providing information and 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 one such solution to improve the provision of product information.

You can find out what a service-supporting application could look like in our success story about the Service Copilot for ZEISS. The intelligent assistant has made the service processes more efficient overall – from faster problem solving and improved information availability to a reduced need for on-site visits. This has improved service quality and made the day-to-day work of technicians much easier.

Improving service quality through linked information: Practical solution in the whitepaper

Learn from two practical use cases what the digital provision of information in an intelligent knowledge platform can look like.

The white paper reveals how typical challenges are solved, what benefits result for users and decision-makers – and why it is worth taking a strategic approach to the topic of information networking in your company now.