Trak-Suite: Enhancing Customer Service with Optimized Organizational WhiteSpace™
The Role of Customer Service in Manufacturing
Your customer service representatives have the important job of forming and maintaining strong relationships with your customers. While the back office deals with internal issues, front office teams act as the face of your company.
Manufacturing enterprises are becoming increasingly complex and customer demands have grown more precise. Leveraging real-time data from a variety of departments including purchasing, shipping, inventory, and the production floor itself has become essential for customer service representatives to improve customer communication and the post-sale experience.
Impact of Noise on Customer Service
Operational noise creates situations where customer service teams are left with no-win responses as they scramble to find accurate information. This can lead to wasted time and resources, mistakes and misunderstandings, and a frustrating experience for both customers and employees.
Trak-Suite minimizes operational noise by enhancing communication, providing transparency, and delivering value-added services. This allows customer service representatives to enhance productivity and focus on exceeding customer expectations.
Exceeding Customer Expectations
Achieving customer satisfaction in manufacturing requires exceptional interactions at every stage of the customer post-sale experience, including delivery timing, the quality of the product upon delivery, and after-sales support.
Customer service in manufacturing is fraught with challenges that can impede the delivery of exceptional customer experiences. Each challenge demands a proactive solution. Reducing operational noise and leveraging Organizational WhiteSpace™ gives customer service representatives the opportunity to exceed customer expectations.
Trak-Suite and Organizational WhiteSpace™
The benefits provided by Trak-Suite’s comprehensive suite of applications create Organizational WhiteSpace™ using highly innovative technology to eliminate costly, non-value-added (NVA) functions within workflows.
WhiteSpace™ grows as NVA functions decrease. When WhiteSpace™ is put in the hands of customer service, they can dedicate more time to providing outstanding service, fostering more durable customer relationships.
The Power of Trak-Suite for Customer Service
One of the most significant aspects of the customer service role in manufacturing is the utilization of information. Trak-Suite supplies customer service representatives with real-time information, leaving them well-prepared for any customer interaction.
Speed
Faster information means a more streamlined customer experience. When your customer service representatives can anticipate customer needs, proactively offering salient information before the customer asks for it, not only will the customer come away more satisfied, but your employees have opened up even more productive WhiteSpace™ for themselves.
Accuracy
Trak-Suite’s APS Made Easier process provides the technology, tools, education, coaching, and assistance to create a gradual, continuous, and results-oriented growth model. This model enhances accuracy for manufacturing routings, schedules, bills-of-material, and inventories. When purchasing, inventory control, and manufacturing can execute to a plan and ship on time, customer service can provide accurate delivery dates and set meetable expectations for your customers.
Optimization
Creating Organizational WhiteSpace™ with Trak-Suite streamlines internal processes, lowers stress, increases throughput, and encourages back-office and shop floor efficiencies. Making resources available from across your enterprise allows the customer service representative to do alone what would otherwise have taken the assistance of many other people and departments.
The Customer Service Challenge
The time for manufacturers to show their metal and perform is when business volume is at its highest. However, the majority of manufacturers are hampered at this level because high volumes expose weaknesses of the company’s process and protocols. When manufacturers are in a reactive position and customer loyalty is on the line, customer service representatives are constantly putting out fires to appease unhappy customers.
Trak-Suite ameliorates these issues by creating efficiencies within your manufacturing company’s workflows by opening up lines of communication, organizing data, and making information readily available when it’s needed most. The time otherwise lost to organizational firefighting can be repurposed to more productive ends, markedly improving both your products and your customer relationships.
Eliminate Operational Noise for Greater Reliability
Trak-Suite eliminates operational noise as well as the noise from the market by helping you set and achieve better delivery dates. When customers gain confidence in your delivery dates, the noise goes away along with the barrage of calls that come when shipments are late.
When customer service is not constantly reacting to frustrated customers, they can do more analytical work such as monitoring on-time shipping performance, observing customer ordering trends, and watching customer scorecards. This data can be used to increase customer loyalty.
Create Simplicity
Complexity fosters noise, which often leads to your customer service representatives needing to perform too many steps to accomplish a task, especially when they already have too many tasks to get done. Oftentimes, technology can be the culprit rather than the solution, especially when your systems aren’t aligned.
Trak-Suite was purposely designed to simplify tasks in several innovative ways:
Doc-Trak (Document Automation and Paperless Operations):
Doc-Trak dramatically reduces the time employees spend on routine tasks, allowing them to focus more on customer interactions. Doc-Trak brings the required information to customer service with a single click, reducing time spent hunting down information from various departments.
Fact-Trak (Business Intelligence):
Fact-Trak provides intelligence to resolve customer issues quickly and responsively. All the information associated with orders, shipments, invoices, job status and more are brought forward in Fact-Trak’s pre-designed dashboard and FlexReports, making customer service fast, easy, and reliable.
APS Made Easier
Trak-Suite works together with APS Made Easier to provide timely and accurate input for APS to generate attainable production schedules and material sourcing plans. At the same time, APS Made Easier has built-in BPSOPs (Best Practice Standard Operating Procedures) that streamline input to APS, and leverage the output, using the simplicity of Trak-Suite’s user-specific user experience. The results are optimized workflows, faster execution, minimal inventories and increased throughput, with less noise, making it easier to ship on-time, everytime.
Conclusion
When your customer service team has the resources to take a proactive and informed approach, they can build customer trust and loyalty and establish a competitive edge in the manufacturing industry.
By addressing key challenges faced by customer service professionals, the multifaceted functionality of Trak-Suite enhances their efficiency to significantly boost customer satisfaction. Trak-Suite's suite of applications and services foster a manufacturing environment where customer satisfaction is not just a goal, but a consistent reality.
In our next article, we’ll look at how Trak-Suite helps manufacturers deliver on the promises they make to their customers and ensure that order deliveries are punctual, accurate, and of the highest quality every time.
We invite manufacturers to learn more about Trak-Suite and to witness firsthand the transformative power it can bring to your operations. Contact us to request a free demo and discover how Trak-Suite can elevate your customer service performance.
