Digitally Transforming Every Customer’s Experience To Excellence

By    |    October 16th, 2018

Recognizing that customers are co-creators in the creation of new products and want the freedom to define custom configurations at a competitive price, manufacturers are quickly adopting digital transformation. Defining and excelling at a digital transformation strategy needs to start with the following:

  • Product configurators need to reflect how customers prefer to buy
  • Encouraging customers who want to co-create by providing control over options
  • Perfect consistency across all selling channels wins customer loyalty
  • Customers think regarding product lifecycles, so systems need to reflect that
  • Re-think product quality metrics and put the customer-centric ones first

Every manufacturer is in a race to gain greater market share, improve product quality, hold onto the customers they have and win new ones. Manufacturers whose core DNA is based on product configuration strategies and who can flex from assemble-to-order to engineer-to-order are ideally positioned to grow in this era of smart, connected products.

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#Customer Experience, #Digital Transformation, #Internet of Things, #IoT, #Manufacturing,

Excelling At Customer Experiences In This Era Of Smart, Connected Products

With the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, products can provide real-time updates on their health, usage, and success in meeting customer needs. For the first time, manufacturers can create a real-time, rich data stream of the customer feedback they can act on immediately to improve the customer experience.

There are millions of opportunities to enrich products, services, next-generation products, and re-architect selling and services channels too. With the wealth of real-time data streaming in from smart, connected products including vehicles, manufacturers are in an ideal position to consistently deliver excellent customer experiences.

IoT’s market potential reflects it’s potential to revolutionize customer experiences and with it, the manufacturers and service providers delivering value to them daily. According to Statista, the North American market is projected to be worth $540B by 2022, with manufacturing being worth $75B that year. The majority of IoT growth will be from smart, connected consumer electronics products, providing manufacturers with a rich, real-time data stream to build excellent customer experiences on.

CLM’s Greatest Strength Is Digitally Transforming Customer Experiences

Personalizing products and services is the essence of digital transformation for manufacturing today. And Configuration Lifecycle Management (CLM) is purpose-built to deliver the most precise levels of product customization and personalization possible. Stripping away any system or process that doesn’t improve customer experiences and deliver overwhelming value is how to excel at digitally transforming any business. Getting to the essence of serving customers and delighting them with customized products, while attaining new levels of manufacturing scale, speed, and quality – that’s what a true digitally transformed business is doing today.

CLM is the framework that scales and directs the energy, intensity, and intelligence manufacturers are applying to transform themselves digitally. Consider the following facts about customer’s experiences today from Gartner’s recent survey on customer experience (client accessed reqd.):

  • Personalizing products and services is the highest customer experience priority today. Gartner’s survey found that the truest test of digital transformation succeeding is in how well the customer experiences and products meet customer preferences and exceed their expectations. CLM’s orchestration of CRM, PLM, CAD and ERP systems gives manufacturers a scalable platform to excel on this dimension of digital transformation. When all four systems are synchronized, not a single customer request is missed, and products produced to meet and exceed expectations. The following graphic illustrates how effective CLM is at orchestrating PLM, CAD, ERP and CRM systems to deliver exactly the vehicle a customer wants on the date they’ve asked for it to be delivered. CLM takes a product lifecycle approach to manage product configurations, making it easy for manufacturers to integrate IoT and future technologies into their product lines.
  • Collect and analyzing customer feedback and communicating actions to employees and customers. Gartner found that those manufacturers who excel at customer experience are capable of quickly capturing and acting on customer insights. They’ve turned this into a competitive strength by relying on CLM to keep every system that interacts with customers in product configurations in sync.
  • Implementing and measuring customer experience metrics. It’s impressive to walk a production floor and see customer-based metrics on the flat screens in work centers. Customer-centric metrics redefine a company culture over time, and it’s the best-kept secret of manufacturers who are excelling at digital transformation.
  • Acting as one organization to ensure multichannel consistency. A must-have to make any digital transformation succeed, stripping away any roadblock to making this happen is worth it for the customer loyalty and lifetime customer value alone.

Bottom Line: Digitally transforming every customer’s experience to excellence starts with the bold step of thinking about product configuration from their perspective first and removing every delay, roadblock, or system that stands in the way of attaining that goal.