Improving the efficiency and profitability of industrial customer service

With the development of today’s market, customer’s demand is becoming more and more complicated. They are not only require well-manufactured products but also high level of satisfaction in the offered service. It is no doubt that aside from the race of technology development and innovation to make better products, there is another race that is even more active and competitive which includes customer service business. In industrial environment, the word-of mouth marketing based on customer service result might make the big difference between winning or losing millions USD orders. Hence most of manufacturing firms are turning their focus to customer service business. However, not all of them succeed in this transformation, actually due to the challenges in servitization process, many of the big organizations are struggling in doing their service efficiently and profitably. This paper studies the customer service in industrial firms to understand the strategy and transformation process – the servitization, as well as the benefit and challenges of this process that organizations need to overcome. It will be the basement for further research on the main purpose of this thesis which is improving service efficiency and profitability of manufacturing company. Outcome of this study are the suggesting frameworks for manufacturers to better organizing and developing their customer service. For academic purpose, this paper presents a systematic review of research on customer service and servitization in industrial world. For the case company, detailed analysis and suggestions based on actual working experience and developed framework from literature part will provide company’s managers an overview of their service business and how to improve it