How to Better Serve Your Customers Every Step of the Way

Don’t let value creation for customers go by the wayside.

Customers should be a top priority in every aspect of the manufacturing process, from end to end. Here, we explain the importance of value creation and give you some ideas for better serving your customers.

The Importance of Customer Value

Customer value is a simple concept: it’s how a customer perceives your product as compared to the possible alternatives. Building customer value means creating quality products that meet and exceed your customers’ expectations in terms of monetary value, usefulness, and so on.

When you’re focused on improving production within your factories, sometimes customer focus goes by the wayside. However, it’s more beneficial for everyone when you build your strategies around the goal of improving customer experience—not just in the marketing department, but in the factory, too.

How Digitalization Helps Create Customer Value

Processes and systems can create value just as much as mindset and culture can. If everything is aligned around the customer, all the way through the supply chain, your company will be more competitive because it will be creating exactly what the customers want and need.

Digitalization, especially the Internet of Things, can help you maintain that customer focus by making it easier to sift through the data and analytics (both internal and external) and gain insights that will help you drive action and further improve customer experience. It’s a cycle that will only continue to improve over time. The more data collected, the more ammunition you have to help you improve customer experience for the long run.

Since price is one of the biggest determining factors of customer value, digitalization can also improve customer value by lowering the costs of manufacturing through various technologies and smart systems.

How to Better Serve Your Customers from the Factory

Since Industry 4.0 does bring with it unknown challenges and a highly unpredictable environment, you will need to remain flexible and understand that not every plan will work out exactly as you’d expect it to. With the rate at which materials and technologies are changing, it’s imperative to put adaptable technologies into place.

Though your factory may feel completely disconnected from your customers, that simply isn’t the case. It’s true that your customers may never see your factory face to face, but the operations and manufacturing processes that happen in your factory will impact your customer’s experience in more ways than one. Here are some ways you can better serve your customers even in the factory:

• Know what your customers perceive as valuable (use feedback to gain this knowledge).
• Share this knowledge with management and employees.
• Make sure everyone, down to the last employee, is on board with customer focus—even if they never see a customer face to face.
• Keep costs competitive by streamlining the manufacturing process as much as possible.
• However, don’t sacrifice quality and image while seeking cost reduction.
• Offer consistently high-quality products that work as they’re supposed to.
• Continually update your processes and operations to stay ahead.
  
  

How Bossard Can Help

Bossard’s Smart Factory Logistics can help improve customer value through digitalization, helping you to manufacture the products your customers are looking for at a cost that works for both you and the customer.

Get your free E-Book now in order to get familiar with the 7 easy steps to get ready for Industry 4.0!