By proactively eliminating potential customer problems and proactively fixing those that arise, customer success gives your business a better chance at retaining customers and driving revenue. To do this, it’s vital first to understand what customer success actually looks like.

Rajat Kakar, Managing Director, AEP Holding spoke about the importance of understanding the motivation of customers, “How do I balance between a partnership landscape . In order for us to be able to get into the Servitization model, you also have to understand what the motivation of the vendors, the OEMs, and to understand where their business model is and where they see the strengths. And then once you have understood that now you can start discussing how to maximise potential.

“If I’m making water pumps, I’m charging for the amount of water that’s going through, rather than for the pump itself. So that’s, that’s effectively now we can start dwelling into what are the different models that you can go into for my for my cost recovery or from a revenue generation perspective.”

Sam Klaidman, Founder and Principal Advisor, Middlesex Consulting added, “The right answer is, it all depends on the situation and the terrain. How we approach delivering the services that we offer will depend not only on us and our capabilities, but on the customer and what their needs and wants are. And, unfortunately, the combination is pretty generic and general.”

In agreement Kris Oldland, Editor in Chief, Field Service News, “Having spent a lot of time with service organisations across the continent and also having been a regular attendee of the academic servitization conferences since 2014 I would say that the key drivers are customer pull and a streak of innovation within the corporate DNA of the service provider, rather than geographical location.”

All members of the Field Service Think Tanks are speaking from their own personal opinions which are not necessarily reflective of the organisations they work for.