Just trying to keep the customer satisfied
By Peter Sims
07 Dec 2010
What is the key to good customer care? We ask Nick Lianakis, one of the most successful sales engineers on Brüel & Kjær’s staff, what makes the PULSE™ Multi-year Software Maintenance Agreement so attractive
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Konsumgüter | Neuigkeiten
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| Nick says good customer care is about delivering what the customer wants in a tangible way - like helping them with a problem |
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“Well, the bottom line is that my goal is to help my customers find a solution to their problem, whatever that may be,” says Nick. “Customers have to trust their sales engineer, and be able to look to them for guidance,” he said. “My motto is “Be more, serve more.”
According to Nick, as a sales engineer selling technical solutions, you basically have two choices. One is to be an engineer with sales experience. The other is to be a technical salesman with engineering experience that leverages a team of experts to create solutions that the customer wants.
Nick puts himself firmly in the latter camp, and says that the secret to his success is by creating bridges – or strategic relationships – with Brüel & Kjær’s experts, ensuring that the right people with the right skill-sets are on hand to give the customer what they want. Another vital asset of the M1 maintenance package is the software updates that help customers in their everyday tasks using PULSE by ensuring their software is operating as optimally as possible.
Explaining and facilitating
But for Nick, this is a rather traditional view of maintenance that has been instilled into customers by years of tradition in the industry. He says, “customers are trained that they should pay the maintenance and subsequently get the latest and greatest software, but I don’t buy into this philosophy 100%.”
Instead, Nick prefers to break the contract down into its component parts, to explain just what exactly it is that customers will be getting for their money – and it’s a strategy that evidently impresses customers around the world.
“I explain to customers that 15% of the M1’s cost goes towards development of our software, providing an average of three software enhancements throughout the year, and one major update per year. I continue to explain that the remaining 85% goes towards supporting their testing efforts via unlimited online and phone support. This may include having our experts look at data that doesn’t quite look right or is confusing to the customer. Or it may include helping them with their test setup, or adding a new test sequence or filter to a PULSE project, or to a sound quality analysis.”
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The point, Nick says, is that he is keen to stress how different the M1 is from similar services offered by other companies. As he says, “At Brüel & Kjær we have over 70 years of experience that customers can tap into with the small investment of their M1."
"The key," he says, "is to help someone with their problem, by bridging them to one of our world-leading experts. That strategic relationship is consequently worth far more than the cost of the M1, and that is delivering what the customer wants, in a tangible and immediate way.”
M1 customers
As with any purchase, a bulk-buy is a good option, and so it is for M1 customers, according to Nick. “When you are dealing with firms seeking long-term investments, they also need long-term support, so naturally we are able to offer considerable cost savings over three and five-year contracts. It only makes sense to save money.”
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By taking on a longer-term deal, customers are able to lock-in today’s price for future support, avoiding any annual increases in Brüel & Kjær’s pricing. “Once you consider the clearly visible value for money, it makes excellent business sense,” said Nick.
What’s more, remaining flexible enough to invoice customers once a year is often the final deal-clincher. According to Nick, “I can invoice customers once per year so that their purchasing department doesn’t have to invest the entire 3-year or 5-year amount.”
“I even help them by putting together a spreadsheet that details each year and the overall savings … almost doing the work for them to justify to their management.”
Above all it seems, the secret is thinking about what the individual customer wants, and looking at things from their perspective. The old cliché about the customer always being right seems to deserve its prominence, in Nick’s case at least.
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