Boost Your Customer Service by Going Paperless
Using a paperless ERP/MES/QMS system that can be accessed in a web browser results in much more positive customer perceptions, as well as higher efficiency for a machine shop.
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It is important to your customers that when they decide to work with your shop, that it is the least risky thing for them to do. So, when you can provide concrete examples of how you can reduce risk and make their lives easier, they will keep coming back and doing business with you.
The following is a real-world example of how being paperless helped a customer provide great customer service.
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Bryan, the owner, was driving home from work. He got a panicked call from a customer who realized they had sent conflicting information on its 3D model and 2D drawing. There was a precision hole that was modeled one size on the 3D model, but the 2D drawing showed it with a different size. They needed to know if they had machined the parts yet and, if so, which size the hole had been machined to.
In the past when Bryan’s shop was run on a legacy job-type shop management system with paper travelers and zero ability to natively manage inspection records, he would have had to either turn around and drive back to the shop or, more likely, wait until the next day to provide an answer.
He would have needed to find the job on the shop floor and leaf through the pages of the job traveler packet — assuming there was a paper first article
Bryan’s shop has eliminated all paper off the shop floor. Therefore, it’s easy for him to answer a customer’s call while driving and find an answer about his work order without hanging up the phone and it only takes a matter of minutes. After pulling off to the side of the road, Bryan opened a web browser on his phone and logged into ProShop and quickly found the work order in question. Photo Credit: Getty Images
inspection (FAI) or in-process inspection sheet with handwritten results — and figure out what size they had machined the parts. It would have been a few business hours later and Bryan would have spent some of his morning figuring this out so he can call his customer back to provide adequate customer service.
Thankfully, in the current day, Bryan’s shop has eliminated all paper off the shop floor. There are no paper job travelers and no paper inspection sheets. Instead, Bryan pulled over to the side of the road, opened the web browser on his phone and logged into ProShop, a web-based and paperless ERP/MES/QMS system specifically designed for the metalworking industry.
He quickly found the work order in question, clicked onto the FAI results page and found the actual measured size of the hole in question. He was able to give the customer the answer he needed within a couple of minutes, all without hanging up the phone.
“Bryan was able to give them exactly what they needed from the side of the road in just a couple of minutes.”
Imagine the difference from the customer’s perspective on the results of the two scenarios outlined here. In the first scenario, the customer would be getting average customer service depending on how soon the next day they got their answer. Nothing special or notable. But, with the second scenario, Bryan was able to give them exactly what they needed from the side of the road in just a couple of minutes.
I never actually learned if the hole was made to the size the customer actually needed, but if it wasn’t, and needed rework or remake, the process in ProShop would have been to literally drag and drop a rework operation into the right spot, or possibly issue a new line item to the vendor for more material and issue a new work order. In either case, the clerical side of the work would literally take seconds, and they could have been helping the customer recover quickly.
It is these small details that can make a huge difference in how a customer perceives your company. What might seem like the easy and least cost option in the near term (less capable software or do-it-yourself spreadsheets) can often be the most expensive way to manage things when you consider the longer term benefits of choosing to implement a paperless, web-based system such as ProShop.
About the Author
Paul Van Metre is the president of ProShop USA and founder of Adion Systems which develops ProShop. The company partners with shops that go completely paperless, combining all the shop software into one system.
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