Most equipment manufacturers invariably want to benchmark themselves against peers within every aspect of their business and remote service is no exception. They often are not trying to determine how much catching up they have to make but really want to confirm a suspicion that they are no further along than anyone else even after one to three years of trying. It is an unfortunate but comforting feeling when they report amongst the managers that everyone else is struggling too and no is really living up to what they have led the world to believe.

This implies a couple of important things. First of all, most are having difficulty implementing remote service. And, industries are getting to the point where companies see the need to benchmark themselves on their remote service capabilities and extent of deployment. This is a good sign as it indicates a maturity turning point.

Buy why do so many struggle?

One might be first inclined to scrutinize the technology. The remote technology vendors are relatively young as far as industry goes. Those manufacturers who choose to build their own systems usually don’t have enterprise software systems as part of their core competency.

I don’t believe technology is major contributor to the struggles with deployment. I have been witness to too many manufacturers attempting to implement remote service with very simple and straightforward technical requirements only to struggle in the same manner as their peers.

What about those end-customers? Are they rejecting remote service offerings and causing slow deployment? Since the extent of deployment by the manufacturer is directly dependent on the acceptance by the end-customer, they could certainly be the culprit to these troubles.

Not so. In fact, in almost every case, the end-customer was more than enthusiastic about anything the vendor could do to improve equipment uptime. I need to qualify this however. I said “almost” because there are some instances of end-user rejection across segments but they are the exception and not the norm.

It turns out, when you look at these organizations implementing remote services as a whole, the real cause of the struggle is self-inflicted.

They throw the project over wall to the product support group and expect them to succeed at a global deployment of a new service offering. After all, it is a support tool, right?

Well…implementing remote service from within a manufacturer is very much like launching a new product. What skills and experience does a support group have with new product introduction?

Most service and support groups within product OEM’s have very little experience introducing a service the customer has not asked for. Luckily, customers are beginning to ask for it. In fact, in several industries, we are seeing remote support listed as a requirement when customers are purchasing new equipment.

Nevertheless, creating and launching a new service program is still foreign to most service groups. To set them up for success really requires the support of marketing, product management, product engineering, and the head honcho.

There is so much “gravity” associated with launching remote service; it really takes the person at the top to understand the opportunity the business has. Once that happens, then real transformation can occur and all this talk about “becoming solutions focused” will actually mean something to customers.