By Rob Michell, Director of Customer Services
When asked to write this newsletter article about how Bauer provides customer service on a global basis, the phrase "Global Customer Service" immediately held two different, but cohesive, meanings for me. The first, and more obvious, is that Bauer has customers in every corner of the globe. We consider ourselves very fortunate to have opportunities to work with excellent companies in a great many different countries. This has been very rewarding to members of the Bauer team that have experienced the variety of cultures through international travel. This wide-reaching customer base does present challenges that I'll touch on later.
The second meaning of Global Customer Services is that our services should be all encompassing. By this I do not mean that we can be all things to all people, or provide everything under the sun. Rather, it means that Bauer's customer service begins from the day we first start talking with a customer about a piece of equipment and continues through capability upgrades and supporting productive use of the equipment for many long years. Throughout this time, the Bauer customer service team has a great deal to offer.
Our customers are familiar with Bauer's more traditional core customer service functions such as responding to troubleshoot requests via phone and email, but this really just scratches the surface. Our customer service staff is made up of the company's top engineers and technicians who are routinely assigned as technical mentors in the design of new equipment. This ensures that their vast experience and hard-won knowledge about what works (and what doesn't!) will be applied to new equipment. Their experience continues to be applied during the production phase and includes their direct involvement in our factory checkout and acceptance process. This latter effort leverages their test component-specific experience to ensure the equipment is performing as required and it positions our customer service group to perform installation, start-up, and training for the equipment at the customer facility.
You are probably getting an idea of why I thought of Global Customer Service in the sense of "comprehensive" or "full-circle".
With such end-to-end involvement in our equipment design and build process, the Bauer customer service team is uniquely qualified to provide consulting to our customers on the best possible upgrade path when there is a need to expand equipment capability. Throughout Bauer, the drive to help customers best achieve maximum productivity is very strong. As a result, we have developed very collaborative relationships with our customers. This doesn't happen without a core value of absolute customer satisfaction.
Applying this level of service on a global scale does present a number of challenges that we continue to address. There are, of course, minor issues like time zone differences, and to a lesser extend, language-related communications difficulties. These are easily dealt with through our world-wide network of representatives. Much like our customer service team, Bauer's representatives do far more than provide a conduit for new equipment needs. They serve as our local presence to ensure that we fully understand the issues facing our customers and that the support Bauer provides helps address the issues completely.
Beyond our well-established network of respresentatives, we have formed strategic alliances with companies such as Avtron and Verolme [NEW NAMES HERE] to provide shared local technical support resources that can be at our customer's facilities much faster than if we dispatch a customer service representative from our Bristol, CT facility. We have also begun using Web conferencing tools to host interactive training and troubleshooting sessions with customers, proving repeatedly the old wisdome of a picture being worth a thousand words.
Bauer's commitment to Global Customer Service remains as strong as ever. It is the key to shared success with our valued customers.