Customer Service 

Definition

The Customer Service enterprise process area includes the business processes for providing services to customers, which is an increasingly important criterion for decision-making in product and vendor selection within the framework of increasing global competition.

In Customer Service, you provide your customers with certain services, either linked with a specific product manufactured by you, or as an independent service without reference to a product.

Rapid corporate growth can lead to customers having too few resources to meet all preventive maintenance and service requirements internally. Internal staff are often not qualified to maintain complex, modern plants. Many customers recognize that it can be more cost-effective to outsource at least some services.

This EPA is characterized by its links to others, in particular to Procurement, Sales, and Asset Management. Customer Service also has links to external accounting, revenue and cost controlling and human resources.

Use

Customer Service is divided into:

Service agreements consist of functions for finalizing and processing service contracts. These are used for billing, cancellation, and control of follow-up actions on the one hand, and warranty processing on the other. Warranties can cover either all the equipment or individual maintenance assemblies. The warranty scope is defined in a master warranty category.

Installed base management deals with equipment installed at the customer site and functional locations in the broadest sense. To create a customer reference, the entries for customer, end customer, operator, contact person, and the serial number are entered in the functional location master record and in the equipment master record. Equipment exchange at the customer site can then be easily portrayed using the installation/dismantling functions.

Service processing is divided into service notifications and service orders. Service notifications hold customer malfunction reports and essentially contain data on functional location and equipment numbers, requested repair dates, damage and the contact person at the customer site. Service order processing can be done in many different ways depending on accompanying circumstances.

Relevant factors are: