An aftermarket expert writes the book on mastering the after-sales experience
Nigel Woodall has helped countless customers in the aerospace industry find replacement parts, deal with maintenance issues and plan complex overhauls. He’s done the same thing in other sectors. What he hadn’t done, until now, is provide the kind of resource his peers could use to offer the kind of aftermarket experience that keeps customers coming back and drives business growth.
Earlier this month Woodall – whose career includes stints at Lufthansa Technik and Honeywell – published After-sales Excellence: Driving Improvement, Customer Satisfaction and Growth. Based on lessons learned over more than 45 years, Woodall aims to offer practical strategies to boost loyalty and address the kinds of problems he said have been pervasive across multiple industries.
“I think there’s a frustration with the inability of aftermarket organizations to do the best for their customers, whether that’s external customers who are buying or whether it’s supplier customers,” Woodall told 360 Magazine. “There’s the unpredictability of forecasting. There’s high variance in the products you repair. “It’s always a people failure at the end of day, whether it’s comes from the top (management) or in the middle. That’s the common denominator.”
A poor after-sales experience doesn’t always mean losing customers, Woodall, said. It can also make it difficult to sell more to customers, because they’ll say no to new products and services until existing issues are fixed.
“They’re not stupid customers. They use it as leverage,” he said. “Unfortunately, to fix this is often very deep seated problems which the organization may or may not have been actively trying to fix for years.”
Woodall said it often takes buy-in from a board of directors to provide the necessary support to make transformative change, but it’s rare that a customer experience (CX) professional will connect with the organization at that level.
“Yes, they can do things locally and downwards, and they put in place recording systems and reporting and all of those great things,” he said. “But that just shows what the problem is and how bad you are. It doesn’t actually get the solution or the permission for the solution.”
Some of those solutions may now include artificial intelligence (AI) but Woodall warns that those in the after-sales arena need to be mindful they fully utilize the tools they already have. He pointed to customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, which can have vast capabilities but risk being deployed as little more than a glorified rolodex.
“They say we use something like one per cent of their brain. It’s a bit like that with CRM,” he said. “(Organizations) want to use them, but they need to take the time to fully understand them.”
Time is a scarce commodity in many aftermarket organizations of course, but Woodall said another major pitfall is a failure to understand the impact of a transformative CX change on everyday processes. He recalled a transformation he was involved in as a case in point.
“Zero thought was given to the day to day workload. Zero relief was given to the organization in terms of the sales and margin expectations,” he said. “People were plucked out, were given the job of delivering the change, and the people that were left were just left to cope with a sudden 50 per cent reduction in workforce. Just absolute craziness.”
After-sales Excellence is intended to help more organizations reduce or avoid that kind of craziness, and in many respects Woodall said the key takeaway is a simple one.
“It’s all about preparation,” he said. “Don’t do these things off the cuff. Think about it, understand it before you start. You get much, much better outcomes if you plan and improve your thinking.”
After-sales Excellence is available through Amazon and other major booksellers.
