The right service - whenever, wherever
Technology
Lars Elkjær Andersen
Senior Director, Digital Customer Channels at Vestas
Published on 18th of March 2020
At Vestas, in the service business, we offer digital services that create efficiency gains for our customers: We do this primarily by providing easy and efficient access to various types of data and documentation for their assets. They already have access to a lot of this information, but it’s not always readily accessible and sometimes offline. We make it simpler to get and use the right data quickly by improving accessibility and providing new options to utilize this data. We reckon it is an important way of adding value to whatever Vestas does.
We strive to meet our customers’ expectations and demand for digital services that are on a par with those they are accustomed to in their everyday lives: These can include high-end interfaces like those found on Apple products. The benchmark is high, and we fully support our customers’ expectations of elegant, easy-to-use digital interactions - we know how it feels ourselves when dealing with data on a daily basis – it’s a genuine need. This is what has driven us over the last few years to create digital solutions that are intuitive and easy to use.
But there are major differences between a B2C solution and a B2B solution on which major business decisions are made: B2B needs to show customers a customized view based on their own specific and relevant data; data precision is really the key success factor here. Also, our digital self-service solutions do not just have to look good; they have to be accurate and relevant - and this is where we believe we excel.
We’ve been providing digital self-service online for 7 years now, always adding new digital services into our digital universe. Based on feedback we’re in a continuous process of becoming more customer-centric in catering for our growing user base - which now stands at over 3,500 users. Today around 70% of our contract customers are enabled and we expect this to grow to 90% by the end of 2020. Although not everyone is using it yet, the number of monthly logins to services has grown by 35% every year.
But one size doesn’t fit all: Our customer’s business comprises all the people who are actually working in that company – a wide variety of people in roles that require different data and services. It’s important then, that we can customize our offering, catering to anything from on-demand access to invoices, status on scheduled turbine visits to a visual representation of tens of thousands of spare parts to expedite turbine repairs. Delivering value is very much based on delivering differentiated access to our services. Our success is based on our ability to design for specific user types, rather than companies. This is important, because our users are different from company to company, from region to region and country to country.
We truly believe in great customer experience: We want to be more efficient. Anything that can make everyday life easier for our customers is important. And to do this, we must have best-in-class products. Digital services are a way of differentiating Vestas in the market.
Many of our services are a way of taking mundane tasks and non-value adding service calls away from customer support, so that customer service can focus more on doing what they do best. We still want to be in dialogue with our customers though, and now we find we are engaging in more qualified dialogue - for example, by offering a wide range of spare parts online, our customer now contacts us to ask for the final recommendation based on our field experience. It’s this customer intimacy that allows us to deliver increasingly better service. It’s great to combine digital service with human interaction.
In the future, we will be more holistic in our view of what self-service data can be and we’ll be going for covering self-services for the full value chain. Also, by collecting analytics data and prescriptive data and then connecting it by relevance we can increase the level of service. Essentially, we’re looking for services we can digitalize and then making them accessible to our customers wherever they need it, when they need it, in the context they need it.