If your business objective is to implement an efficient and successful condition monitoring program, gone are the days of “set it and forget it.” Today’s savvy enterprise leaders have identified the problems they want to solve. They want to be proactive. They want to drive efficiencies. Most of all, they want to protect the safety and health of their customers and patients.
That’s why integrated, IoT-enabled Sensing-as-a-Service solutions are your best choice for customer success — especially in industries such as healthcare, pharmaceuticals, pharmacy, food service, warehouse, and supply chain management. A combination of hardware, software, and ongoing consultative guidance enables clients to automate processes and make more informed business decisions. In addition, the synergy of data, analytics, and modeling drives targeted actions to avoid costly errors and make continuous improvements.
In particular, Sensing-as-a-Service enables a powerful customer success approach to your condition monitoring program. Customer success helps program users maximize the value of their monitoring systems from initial setup to ongoing optimization.
In this post, we take a look at the benefits of a customer success approach to condition monitoring, the positive impacts of Sensing-as-a-Service on customer success, and key pitfalls when a customer success approach is lacking or underdeveloped.
A strong customer success approach helps users maximize the value of their monitoring systems to optimize potential value.
The positive impacts of Sensing-as-a-Service on customer success include automated processes, proactive issue resolution, personalized onboarding and training, and optimized performance reviews.
A Sensing-as-a-Service solution allows companies to digitize monitoring procedures and quickly resolve issues related to environmental conditions. It eliminates the need for manual check-ins, thereby allowing staff to focus on activities more directly related to improving the customer experience.
IoT-enabled systems automatically trigger confirmations when certain metrics are met to ensure task completion and regulatory compliance. Perhaps more critically, real-time alerts quickly diagnose and address problems, thus encouraging faster resolution times. By integrating alerts into a prescriptive workflow, staff are guided by an established process for deciding who should respond to a problem and what corrective actions must be taken.
A Sensing-as-a-Service solution also ensures that staff effectively use the system's advanced features. Users are guided to set appropriate temperature thresholds and alert mechanisms tailored to their specific needs and products (e.g., food safety, hospital room temperature, vaccine efficacy). By selecting only relevant, critical alerts, users avoid the inefficiencies of false alarms and alert fatigue.
A Sensing-as-a-Service solution creates a more personalized, efficient, and responsive onboarding experience. It tracks how customers interact with a product or service and identifies when a customer is struggling or not using a feature effectively.
IoT-based training also frees up managers to focus on strategic guidance. Rather than reactive after-the-fact criticism, a customer success approach allows for proactive intervention to get users back on track before they make a critical error.
An onboarding experience that is positive and supportive leads to greater confidence and knowledge. Both are key drivers of an employee’s overall success. By ensuring staff get value from their investment early on, a strong onboarding process leads to higher retention rates and reduced churn.
By analyzing key metrics such as productivity and retention rates, companies can continuously measure and improve the effectiveness of performance reviews. Unlike purely subjective feedback, objective, real-time data provides continuous insights into performance and customer satisfaction, thus allowing for more objective evaluations.
Linking quantifiable monitoring data to tangible business outcomes is a more proactive approach to identifying risks and opportunities. A Sensing-as-a-Service solution transforms generic, impersonal performance reviews into strategic conversations. It enables a deeper dialogue that focuses on maximizing value and ensuring that employees meet both business objectives and their own career goals.
An IoT-enabled performance review also allows for a more targeted approach that flags employees who may be at risk of churning or those who are highly engaged. It focuses on support for at-risk employees and growth opportunities for those with high value.
Organizations lacking a good customer success approach often must compensate for an ineffective onboarding and training program, low employee adoption and morale, and high churn.
Many onboarding and training sessions can feel like a generic, “one-size-fits-all” experience. If the learning process is not relevant to the users in attendance, onboarding may be boring or confusing, perhaps influencing employees to form a negative opinion of the condition monitoring program early on.
Users of a new system often learn only the basic functionality required to get started or about features unconnected to their individual responsibilities. Basic training also overlooks more advanced features that could provide greater value. The result is that employees don’t receive the proactive training and support necessary to realize the condition monitoring program’s full potential.
When users encounter confusion or boredom during onboarding, they are less willing to adopt new system features, especially if they are complex. Instead, they revert to simpler, less efficient workarounds rather than overcoming the learning curve. New features are then often overlooked.
Onboarding and training staff must actively communicate the existence, value, and usage scenarios of each key feature to ensure they will be adopted. Otherwise, the condition program will be underutilized and a poor return on investment.
Users who fail to see the value of IoT-enabled condition monitoring features are more likely to underperform or resign. These labor problems tend to create more customer issues, for which front-line employees bear the brunt of customer frustration.
These issues can lead to a hostile atmosphere, reduced job satisfaction, and high employee turnover — which in turn requires training for replacement staff, thereby generating a vicious cycle.
SmartSense provides an IoT-enabled Sensing-as-a-Service solution for condition monitoring that unites all the essential pillars required for customer success, including installation, training, onboarding, results, and ongoing partnership.
Learn more about the SmartSense customer success playbook.