Continuing on in the series of how you can use Service management to improve your bottom line. One of the best ways I can think of is making your products better. Everyone who uses quality notifications knows the value of this, but for some reason, service notifications are often overlooked for this purposes.
The whole key to this is collecting enough data to categorize each notification. The best way, in my opinion is using the many different catalogs to classify what is going on. Just as a recap, depending on what fields you have available, you can have as many as 5 different catalogs available within a single notification. You can even use the same catalog multiple times for things like causes. Why do you care?
Because you can do reporting against these values to find trends in your products. If you notice that 20 notifications come in a week for the same product, all stating that the product was damaged in transit, well, that should be a pretty big flag to review your packaging and your carrier to review what the hell is going on. Maybe you got a bad batch of packaging materials, maybe you recently made a “cost saving” change to a different vendor… regardless, you have an obvious set of data that you should be reviewing.
You may also simply find a pattern in your customers “mis-using” your products. This might give your marketing/legal group something to include your literature stating in certain terms, product not to be used in the rain, or product should not be used for longer than 3 hours without shut down. Doesn’t matter, but the data is there if you can collect. This should be reason enough to train your call center to collect this every time.
Now, there is another way to capture information that is very valuable, and often more flexible. You can use classification, along with multiple value characteristics allowing you to select as many options as apply. This has the potential to give your organization ALL the data they could use. SAP provides standard reporting using CL30N. But if you’d like even more data, check out our out of the box service management dashboard.
Thanks for reading,
Mike