Today I wanted to talk about the maintenance plans. At first glance, the maintenance plan is more of a feature than a benefit. Now in marketing 101, I’ve had it beaten into my head, benefits not features… Well, the concept of the maintenance plan actually fits both concepts… at least if you look at it the right way. The maintenance plan becomes a huge time saver if your business does any sort of repetitive service. Let’s go with an example everyone can relate to, oil changes…
In the auto service industry, everyone is familiar with the idea that you should change your oil every 3000 miles or 3 months. Well, using a maintenance plan, you could have a notification generated every 6 weeks. The notification would be for someone to send an email or a coupon to remind the person they have an oil change coming up soon. Now the amount of automation you build into this is up to you. But I’d be willing to bet that if you look at your industry there is at least some repetitive tasks that you could schedule.
Now, creating a notification or service order doesn’t really take that long, neither does sending an email. What does take time is monitoring a list, running a report, or checking a database to see who is who should be contacted, or who should be receiving a notification of upcoming service. If you set a plan one time, then you get to “set it and forget it”. This has multiple benefits, you get the obvious benefit of not having to babysit your marketing. But far more important, you move into the automated marketing world of keeping yourself in your customer’s minds. You get the chance to remind them of the value of “regular oil changes”, you get to offer them a discount if you choose, and you build a stronger relationship with your existing customers. The stronger the relationship, the more likely your customers will talk about you to their friends… giving you that perfect opportunity to get new customers and take care of them just as well as your existing customers.
Pretty solid ROI in my mind.
As always, thanks for reading and don't forget to check out our SAP Service Management Products at my other company JaveLLin Solutions,Mike