Recently Simplus VP, Manufacturing Center of Excellence, Tom Lovell, had the privilege to join OwnBackup, as well as Mauser Packaging Solutions to discuss the ripple effects of COVID-19 on the manufacturing industry and how manufacturers can protect their investments and build resilient customer relationships today. The team focused on the importance of business continuity in providing a strong foundation for building and delivering the coveted frictionless customer experience. In this blog post, you’ll learn why customer experience is at the forefront of digital transformation in manufacturing, how to build resilient customer relationships, as well as the role data protection and redundancies play in the overall experience you provide customers internally and externally.

Changing customer experience expectations

Although we still can’t say we are in a post-COVID world, we’ve seen several trends accelerate for the manufacturing industry coming out of 2020. You can read more about these digital-first trends in our recent blog post, Digital-first trends put into context for leading manufacturers. Ultimately, each of these trends—from data harmonization and connected information flows to eCommerce—points back to the ultimate ripple effect (really a tidal wave) that the global pandemic has had on customer expectations, not just in manufacturing, but across all industries — the expectation of a frictionless customer experience. 

Customers now expect an Amazon-like experience in all facets of life. To deliver that experience you’ll need to have the right foundation in place. Tom Lovell outlines four steps to get started on your path to an optimized customer experience:

1. Choose a single platform  

If you want to deliver a seamless experience for your customers, that starts on the backend. Customers do not see fragmented or siloed or disparate business units within a company – they see the experience they want to have – and it is one integrated experience. To deliver this experience you have to ensure your systems and processes are integrated, as well as your data. 

2. Minimize revenue leakage 

When we talk about choosing a single platform it’s to build a foundation for success first internally where your employees have a complete view of operations. This leads to our second point—have you insulated your organization from revenue leakage? This isn’t just a question of margin leakage but also of lost time and effort by your teams supporting any initiative. Delivering a frictionless experience to your customers means you must be set up for connectivity, know how to leverage your dynamic data, be proactive v. reactive and have redundancies in place. The focus here is resiliency across the organization: Have you addressed…

Want to keep reading? Download the complete ebook—A New Way of Work: Post-Pandemic Planning for Manufacturers.