Most organizations recognize the importance of a ‘speedy response’ to a quality issue or a customer complaint.
In fact, faster service response time has been named as a top priority for many service lifecycle management efforts. The significant demand for manufacturers and service organizations to resolve customer issues promptly, and to quickly mitigate any product quality issues has become a challenge.
How do you overcome this challenge and implement a solution? The equation involves equipping service technicians and customer facing roles with the right information at the right time, along with aligning parts/inventory and service personnel.
For example, let’s look at a very realistic situation.
Imagine your dryer machine breaks down. You call the manufacturer and learn you have to wait three days for a service visit. Depending on your patience (and laundry needing to be done) this could be the beginning of a very unpleasant customer experience.
But what if that same manufacturer was able to pull up your model, and already knew they had visited you a year ago with a similar issue. How might your experience be impacted if they were to tell you there was a 90 percent first-time fix rate for your specific dryer and a technician would be able to show up with the specific parts needed to fix your issue?
This is the type of service that customers want and are starting to expect.
It is easy to see how putting the right information in a service technicians’ hands at the right time is so important.
Service technicians want to be able to see service information and technical service bulletins. They want to see information on the job and have access to just in time training. They have a desire for formal training, tech assist helpdesks and hotlines, and safety instructions.
So how do we enable and empower technicians to optimize service experiences and exceed customer expectations?
Here are some of the best practices that we have gathered:
- 1. Provide access to technical/service parts information when technicians need it
- 2. Make that information easy to search
- 3. Supply accurate product and configuration information including all parts and service history
- 4. Enable easy ways of ordering parts
- 5. Offer just in time training/help
‘Smart’ service management is your key to success.
Your service information needs to be managed at a network level. This ensures that all your players in the service web have access to the right information, at the moment they need it.
Adding a modern layer of accessibility to your information is a critical part of ensuring your service network can operate efficiently and effectively. This is what will help you drive positive customer experiences throughout your product lifecycle.
We offer the technology solutions and technical expertise to make real-time service information delivery a reality. Contact us to learn more about our Product Development Information Services group, PTC’s Arbortext and Service Lifecycle Management technologies, and the PLM solutions that can effectively link together your product data and service part information.
We are an Authorized Training Partner of PTC. Our training and mentoring group delivers and sells PTC University Training solutions. This helps ensure you not only get the technology you need to dramatically improve the way you design, manufacture, and service your products and enterprise, but the knowledge to fully take advantage of your software investment.
EAC was one of the first authorized training partners. Why should you care? We have more experience mapping organization’s needs to the perfect PTC Training Course. We have more experienced instructors ready to deliver PTC Training Class content and customized training to create additional value for students and organizations. It also means we know a lot about what people want from a training experience, and what they should ask of their provider.
Many people see professional development, or continuing education, to somehow be exempt from the due diligence one would apply to…say, selecting a college. The truth is, it is important to carefully choose the company and people your organization uses to deliver a comprehensive PTC training course schedule or a single PTC training class.
Here are some questions you should ask a potential training provider:
- Do they have real-world experience using the products?
- Do they understand how various solutions work together?
- Do they offer training on multiple PTC training course segments (PLM, PDM, CAD, AR, IoT, etc.)?
- What delivery methods to they offer? (in center, onsite)
- Do they offer extended access to Instructors for questions after a course ends?
- Do they offer the ability to audit a PTC training class for a year, in case a student needs a refresher?
- What is their cancellation policy? (Things come up, sometime a plan doesn’t work out. Here’s ours)
- Do they offer volume pricing discounts?
- Are there any current promotions?
We are here to help you know all the picks, clicks, and technology tricks to make sure everyone on your team is a power user. You need to complete projects as fast as possible – good training makes that possible. Here is our current training calendar. It displays all of the currently scheduled Creo training, Windchill training, and Arbortext training. Please contact us if you don’t see a specific training course. We may be able to add it to the existing calendar or deliver the training class specifically to your organization.
The EAC Product Development Academy can help you advance your career, improve department performance, and transform the way you design your products. Our training options (shown below) can turn a great designer or administrator into an expert!
Take Our On-Site or In-Center Courses
Our Certified Instructors can come to you, or your students can come to us. We’re flexible! Let us sweat the small stuff. Our training coordinators will arrange for all the necessary tools including laptops, course material(s), and software.
Sign Up for eLearning
Are you a self-starter that prefers online training on your time? Then eLearning® a solution from PTC might be perfect for you. Students can access full course material on PTC’s subscription based learning management system. Every subscription includes up to 6,000 hours of customizable self-paced training content, including training exercises and skill checks. It is a great option for customers to track the progress of their employees as they go through onboarding or training.
Mentoring
We also offer this unique training option. Students can also choose to mentor with one of our Certified Instructors. This allows students to address specific topics in which assistance is needed and develop specific skill sets in the context of their job.
Configured or Customized Training
If you feel like “out-of-the-box training” doesn’t quite fit your needs you can utilize the EAC Training Department to help create a unique training path. We will work with you to accommodate your time and knowledge through configured or customized training.
Configured Training allows the student to subtract or add modules from an out-of-the-box certified PTC Academic Program Course; combining or shortening current curriculum.
This training type gives the student access to:
Add and Subtract Module(s) from a Course
Access Customized Printed Training Manual
Customized Training allows the student to build their own training course specific to their needs and their environment.
This training type gives the student access to:
- Add and Subtract Module(s) from Course
- Custom Course Content Development
- Custom Training Delivery
- Custom Documentation
- Integrate Images from Customer Environment
- Recorded Training Videos
Interested in training around Windchill or Creo? Explore our offerings today!
Today’s post is a blog entry we swiped from Bettina Giemsa and the PTC Community blog. Not only is it a great topic, she also references our good friend and customer Doug Hippe from Extreme Tool and Engineering.
—–
“Vacation? No, thanks. I am too busy.”
Sounds familiar?
Certainly not. Nobody would EVER voluntarily drop their vacation.
But let’s not talk about your next trip to a sunny beach, but about training. Following my most recent blog Training? No thanks. I am too busy., our customer Doug Hippe sent me a private message here on PTC Community with his comments and this conversation is the reason I am writing a follow-up post now…
Doug wrote: “I’d like to add to your post on training. I too hear this same response from people when I suggest training. I routinely respond that we find time to remake or re-do something and we find time for employees to go on vacation, how is it we are too busy to train? While this doesn’t work with everybody, it makes them pause and think.”
I absolutely like this comparison! I sometimes find it hard to find time for training myself (yes, Marketers have busy schedules, too) and I am under massive pressure every time I go on vacation – delegate things, finish up open projects, etc. Then, when I come back I am facing a flood of emails to work through and that immediately throws me back to real life…
Despite the mess before and after, however, nobody would ever say “no, I won’t go on vacation because I need to focus on my work”.
Vacation is immediate personal benefit — you need to recharge your batteries and nobody would doubt the necessity. The issue with training is that people do not see it as a personal benefit right away – for most, it is “just” work-related. People see it rather as an additional task than a merit and this is where I believe we need to change our thinking.
For us as employees, an official training course is also a personal benefit in many ways:
- It is an opportunity to grow and become a more valuable employee for the current or even future employers.
- It will allow us to do our work more easily and make it more enjoyable. Most of you will agree that being able to do something well and getting recognized for this is really a great feeling.
- Last but not least, by being able to complete your work in a more efficient way and without re-work, workarounds or error-fixing, you can save yourself many fire-drills and have an overall more relaxed work atmosphere.
I have had employers in the past who didn’t offer much training — and thus no real growth perspectives. It ended with me quitting the job and looking for new perspectives. This changed when starting with ITEDO where workforce development was taken very seriously and when we were acquired by PTC in 2006, I got access to even more development options that I am still enjoying today. So basically, I have seen both sides and absolutely see the personal benefit of being trained on a regular basis.
I would even be willing to complement a good training opportunity with some of my spare time — such as travel early on a Sunday afternoon to a seminar or do some homework for a class in the evening when the kids are in bed. Would you agree?
Why don’t you talk to a Training Advisor to get an overview of the training options that are available from PTC University today. We look forward to hearing from you!
Bettina
PS: I also like going on vacation, but haven’t finalized plans for this summer yet — simply had no time — yet.