Reduce Truck Rolls and Increase Savings:
How Spending Less Time on Service Boosts Uptime and Customer Satisfaction
The cost of customer downtime—planned or unplanned—far extends the cost of dispatching your service team. It affects customer production, quality, and schedules – which directly impacts service contract renewals. That’s why it’s in your best interest to prevent downtime and maintain high customer satisfaction whenever possible.
But keeping ahead of downtime and staying on top of customer needs is costly. Although most operations have evolved from the break/fix model, the time sunk into getting the right service information, costly truck rolls for even the slightest issue, and labor-intensive repairs still add up.
Today’s industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) solutions are creating new ways to reduce the costs associated with delivering high-quality service. And customers are noticing—80% of service decision-makers say emerging technology is changing customers’ expectations of service organizations, and 82% of service decision-makers say customer service must transform to stay competitive1. With today’s transformative IIoT technology, you can meet the new industry standards to stay competitive and exceed your customers’ high expectations—all while driving internal cost-savings.
80% of service decision-makers say emerging technology is changing customer’s expectations of service organizations.
82% of service decision-makers say customer service must transform to stay competitive.
1. Salesforce State of Customer Service Report, 2019
Save Time to Save Costs
The old adage that time equals money is especially true for service teams. Real-time, reliable service data access saves technicians time, which enables them to handle more issues and support more customers—freeing up resources for more robust service contracts and initiatives.
How to Save Time with IIoT
The IIoT reduces time-sunk costs by ensuring that technicians always have the information they need for maintenance insights, right at their fingertips. They can monitor field assets, regardless of location, through real-time, automated data streams. Technicians can focus on analyzing service data—trusting that it’s accurate and timely—instead of spending time collecting data from the field. Service teams always have the information they need to make timely decisions about increasing efficiency, performing repairs, and preventing customer downtime.
Lack of field service efficiency increases the amount of time the customer is stuck with a non-performing asset, thereby increasing the amount of time that the customer isn’t generating revenue from that asset, as well as increasing the amount of time that the customer has to appease his/her own customers. All this eventually leads to lower renewal rates and ultimately customer loss.
- “First-Time Fix: The Underappreciated Field Service Metric,” Field Technologies Magazine
Proven Cost-Saving Results
Heidelberg, a leading global printing press manufacturer, turned their time-savings to cost-savings with the ThingWorx IIoT platform.
50% reduced repair response time
1,000 to 2,000 hours of customer production time saved per project
40% of sales now based on service contracts2
2. Source: Heidelberg case study
Roll back Truck Rolls to Roll in Savings
Truck rolls are one of the costliest drains on a service budget. From technicians’ labor and travel time to all the truck operating costs, it adds up quickly—especially when imperfect and incomplete information causes multiple visits per call. Fewer truck rolls save internal costs while improving customers’ trust that your products are reliable.
How to Save Truck Rolls with IIoT
IIoT-based remote monitoring and analytics enable technicians to anticipate machine maintenance, improve planning for scheduled downtime, and prevent unplanned downtime as they can perform predictive, instead of reactive, service.
Using the IIoT, technicians can resolve more service issues remotely, which drastically decreases truck rolls and downtime. IIoT enables remote software maintenance updates without the need for on-site service, reducing the number of outages related to software. Remote data monitoring improves service teams’ ability to proactively address and prevent service issues before they require a truck roll—or worse, cause customer downtime
3. Source: Heidelberg ThingWorx case study 4. Source: Elekta ThingWorx Case Study 5. Source: Bell & Howell Case StudyProven Cost-saving Results
With the ThingWorx IIoT platform, service leaders are seeing the following results::
70% of maintenance problems> resolved remotely.
90% of software problems resolved remotely3
30% of maintenance problems resolved remotely
1,200 hours annually of customer downtime avoided with preventative maintenance4
63% of maintenance problems resolved remotely5
Minimize Labor to Maximize Profits
On-site equipment repairs traditionally require a lot of labor, as technicians work to diagnose issues and fully understand what’s needed to correct and prevent similar repairs. Enabling more effective and informed hands-on maintenance lowers internal costs while raising customer satisfaction.
The IIoT reduces time-sunk costs by ensuring that technicians always have the information they need for maintenance insights, right at their fingertips. They can monitor field assets, regardless of location, through real-time, automated data streams. Technicians can focus on analyzing service data—trusting that it’s accurate and timely—instead of spending time collecting data from the field. Service teams always have the information they need to make timely decisions about increasing efficiency, performing repairs, and preventing customer downtime.
"A commonly cited reason for not fixing a problem the first time is because the technician does not have the right equipment or skill set. In fact, parts unavailability was by far the most cited complaint by customers, as reported by 51% of field service executives."
3 Methods for Improving First-Time Fix Rate, Click Software Blog
Proven Cost-saving Results
With the ThingWorx IIoT platform, service leaders’ savings for on-site costs include:
60% reduction in on-site repair time6
30% reduction in service case duration
$20 million estimated in cost-savings over 3 years7
6. Source: Bell and Howell PTC Case Study 7. Source: Illumina customer results
Learn More About Reducing Service Costs While Improving Customer Service
The ThingWorx IIoT platform reduces the cost of delivering the best service to your customers. Learn how ThingWorx directly combats customer downtime, increases customer satisfaction, and drives impactful cost-savings.
1. Salesforce State of Customer Service Report, 2019 2. Source: Heidelberg case study 3. Source: Heidelberg ThingWorx case study 4. Source: Elekta ThingWorx Case Study 5. Source: Bell & Howell Case Study 6. Source: Bell and Howell PTC Case Study 7. Source: Illumina customer results