The Siveco China Customer Support Organization
Maybe you already contacted our support team and had the pleasure to be served by Mirley, Sophia, Sunny or more recently Peter, who joined the team few months ago. But how much do the readers of “Maintenance in China” know about the daily life of our Customer Support team? Since the Support organization was established several years ago, constant efforts have been spent in order to give the best possible support to our customers in China and Asia. Those continuous improvement activities have even been accelerated since we initiated our ISO 9001 certification program, as we see the Support organization as a key player to ensure customer’ satisfaction. Finally, based on the feedback collected through 2013 Customer Satisfactory Survey, an impressive number of improvement actions have been achieved by the Support team this year and we are very excited to share these results with you!
As of today, around 450 sites are enjoying Siveco China’s Support services, under two formulas: Standard Support or Enhanced Maintenance Service. Most of our customers chose the “Enhanced Maintenance Service” option, as it helps them to improve their maintenance practices on a daily basis, using the system as a framework… and it works! Our customers under Enhanced Maintenance Services contracts usually witness a reduction in their downtime ratio and a strong increase in the Preventive maintenance plan execution ratio, while they constantly improve their utilization and knowledge of the system, thus getting more and more value from it each year. We also found it very efficient to let our Customer Support team plan and follow-up the results of the yearly maintenance assessments, as it enables them to answer customers’ request in a more relevant fashion.
When a customer is under support contract, a dedicated Support engineer is assigned, in order to ensure there is always somebody in our organization who is knowledgeable about each customer’s situation, industry and specific constraints. All our Support engineers receive a 2 weeks on-board training, to ensure they acquire all the necessary basic knowledge in both maintenance management, maintenance best practices and system administration and configuration (Coswin and bluebee®). Depending on the background of each engineer (more IT or more maintenance oriented), the actual content of the training is adjusted to ensure that each and every Support engineer masters this unique blend of skills that makes Siveco China’ services so useful to our customers. Additionally, our team leader Sunny Wang is a certified ISO9001 internal auditor.
In order to support their daily work, our Support team is using the well-known CRM Salesforce.com, which allow them to record all the cases, including its type, reasons and solution, and the time needed to solve the case. This is pretty much the same principle we are promoting to our customer when we advise them to record all their technical failures trough WOs, and to record carefully the related Symptoms, Defects, Causes and Actions (“SDCA”).
Additionally, several organizational improvement have been implemented, such as:
— Weekly support reviews are organized so that the whole Support department work as a team and that each team member can learn from the cases solved by other colleagues.
— A very strict internal hand-over process between Project and Support teams for project successfully closed: it is crucial that the knowledge is correctly retained during this step, while in the same time, the project will be assessed by the management team to ensure it has been delivered satisfactorily, according to the commitment taken in the contract and Siveco China’s SOP (Standard Operating Procedures) based on ISO9001.
— A stronger Human resources and Bonus management system taking in account the customer’s satisfaction.
— A complete re-edition of our Standard End-user manuals, in order to ensure all our customer can access to a rich information about our product.
All these measures already yield tangible results: according to our on-going KPI, 100% of our customers agreed to renew their Support contract as of September 2014. Our “MTTR” has been reduced by 50% (linear regression) over the last 12 months. If you already contacted our Support team, we hope you noticed and enjoyed these continuous improvement efforts.
However, we know that there are always new improvements opportunities ahead, and we are more than willing to seize them! In order to help us to provide the best possible Support services in China and Asia, we welcome any suggestions! So, please do not hesitate to contact support@sivecochina.com and to send us your ideas!
Also, we would like to take the opportunity of this newsletter to thank all our customers and customers-to-be for their constant trust in our services and products!
