Product specific services: Continuous revenue beyond the sale

Most products exist in an ecosystem of value adding services, consumables or accessories. Some need to be accessed daily, others only once a year or in case of failure. Some are optional, others are a mandatory part of the product design.

Think about:

• Coffee beans for the coffee machine.
• Training for operators of new machines.
• Spare parts for the process industry were unplanned failure cost millions.
• Yearly inspection for a heat pump.
• Replacement blade for your lawn mower.

These services are often sold on a website where the user must search through a broad range of offers, including studying the product manual or searching for serial numbers. Calling a support manager or writing an e-mail to a ticket system usually suffers from lack of information. All of that takes time, can frustrate the user and may lead to the loss of customers to cheap third-party competitors, whose services may have a negative impact on the overall product experience.

A powerful service strategy reflects in customer benefits and convenience, low operational costs and resource requirements and its flexibility and expandability for the future.

Flexibility and Customer Retention

Time to market can be crucial. Setting up a complete portfolio of services including third-party partners can be time-consuming. Flexibility is the key. Shipping a product and being able to extend or exchange services that are offered for this specific product is essential.

To keep control over the service ecosystem while strengthening customer loyality, consider:

• Accessibility. Provide all but only the specific services of each product in one place accessible with a single click.
• Know your customer. Allow your customers to pay with a single click on the button. Know their location, where to send items or service personnel. Do not let them fill out the same form for every request.
• Know your product. The Robot Vacuum Cleaner should know the correct size of the vacuum cleaner bag. Do not ask your customer for this information.
• Reminders and communication. Give your customers peace of mind and remind them about anything important or new without their need to look up on their own. Provide a direct link to the booking of the service in the reminder.
• Location. Offer service fulfillment from local providers. Consider that the location of a static product can change. A machine can be relocated to another plant, and a customer might take their favorite product to their vacation home.
• Extend, exchange and retire. You want to add more services, exchange existing partner companies or retire offerings you no longer want to sell. Prepare for dynamic updates of your service portfolio for already shipped products.

If your company is not called Apple or represents a similar sized business, it is unlikely to be able to dictate a individual software solutions upon your partner companies. Especially when you are only one of many of their partners. A unified platform that allows adaption and market growth is a key for scalability.

With the next step in IoT development we will reach a point where products will be able to request, order and book services on their own. A well-planned service strategy can build upon experience with manual offerings and combine them into a single sales strategy instead of employing multiple platforms at the same time.

Starting with Component4

The Component4 platform provides you with the necessary tools and functionalities to build a robust and future-proof service strategy that evolves around the individual product and individual approach to your customer. Extend services or add third party providers to your products while in development or years after you have shipped them. Link a single QR-code or URL, integrate a link in your software or app or print a code in the customers manual and you are good to go.

Component4 will make sure that the very same services can be addressed by IoT devices and can be offered to partner corporations or the whole market.

Getting started with Component4 does not require any software expertise, is setup and ready to go within minutes. All without upfront cost.