Strengthening customer relationships to create lasting partnerships
When we think about the manufacturing industry, we often picture assembly lines and piles of carbon copy paperwork. However, this field is undergoing a shift, thanks to technological advancements that not only increase efficiency but also improve relationships between businesses, their customers, and their suppliers.
To remain competitive with major manufacturing companies that are already well into their digital transformation, choosing to develop an app to simplify business operations is becoming essential. A strong digital experience can connect the production chain to order managers, customer service, and customers themselves, all at a single point of contact.
«It has become essential in the manufacturing industry to have a self-service app to facilitate planning and purchasing. It allows you to transfer tasks to customers that they can do themselves so that your teams can focus on value-added actions and transform into heroes.»
Charles-Olivier Levasseur, Director of Customer Experience
Innovation ensures you a competitive edge. Don’t risk losing a request for proposal or a sales opportunity to a company that can guarantee a shorter production time with digital tools that are within your reach. Your customers expect to:
- Feel confident, supported, and heard by your team throughout the process.
- Have visibility at every step of the order with precise tracking and easy modifications.
- Clearly recognize the benefits of their investment in your company.
By digitizing your business operations, you unlock self-service features that optimize your customers' ordering process, enhancing their satisfaction with your services and fostering even stronger partnerships while ultimately reducing sales costs.
To start, our experts will work with you to determine the best course of action to achieve your business goals. They will take into account the context and your services to align the most appropriate technological environment with the experience you wish to offer. “A mobile app and a web app are not the same product. The web is more universal to encompass various purchasing functionalities, whereas mobile supports a simpler user journey for a very specific need,” explains Philippe Nadeau, Manager of the Solution Architects team at nventive.
More autonomy for greater confidence
Although your customers want to feel supported, they also hope to have a certain autonomy to feel in control of their investment by completing their transaction at the most convenient time for them. This autonomy also gives you increased visibility into their needs, by directly tracking the changes they make to their orders or the tools they use most often, allowing you to actively follow the customer lifecycle and segment it.
This visibility provides the opportunity to implement a plethora of features over time to increase the fluidity of the sales process, particularly through artificial intelligence (AI). For a customer who regularly orders certain parts or products, the app’s AI could suggest pre-ordering recurring purchases or offer targeted promotions on these items. In addition to simplifying their purchasing process, this reinforces the impression that your company understands and anticipates their needs.
What will enable a potential customer to specifically choose your service is recognizing at a glance the value of their investment with you. A self-service platform is an excellent way to make this clear quickly by providing all the necessary information at their fingertips. By easily accessing information about your products or the real-time stock status, they have everything they need to immediately meet the need that brought them to you in the first place.
Whether it’s placing an order themselves, tracking it in real time, or being able to make a modification in their customer profile, you demonstrate transparency and free up customer service phone lines for complex or problematic cases.
A more fluid communication channel
Centralizing communications with your clientele within an app also allows for proactive problem resolution. With integrated forms to collect customer feedback, your business can quickly identify and address quality or service issues. You demonstrate not only that you are listening to your customers but also that you are reacting quickly to correct the situation.
And if a product were to experience production delays, you could deploy regular notifications to inform your customer of the production status or expected delivery times via the app to encourage more effective and transparent communication. This transparency can eliminate a lot of uncertainties and frustrations, contributing to a more positive customer experience.
Adopting an app can also simplify the warranty and return process, often complicated in the manufacturing sector. With features allowing customers to manage returns or post-sales service requests directly through the app, the process becomes less cumbersome and more reassuring for the customer, which can greatly influence their decision to continue doing business with you.
Hadrian: A differentiator in a highly competitive market
Hadrian, a North American leader in the manufacture of toilet partitions and locker room lockers, entrusted nventive with redesigning its app to transition to a more accessible platform for its users. The result, Project Center Next, is a web app capable of managing a vast catalog of materials and a large volume of local business rules to design plans that comply with construction standards in Canada and the United States.
The user-friendly platform allows for quick and customized project design. It offers a multitude of real-time templates and incorporates advanced augmented reality modeling features, as well as detailed plan drawings from available product catalogs.
By synchronizing the platform with their existing enterprise resource planning (ERP), online orders placed on the app are sent directly to one of the group's factories, and the billing process is then automated.
These improvements save users a significant amount of time when designing projects, obtaining detailed quotes, or placing orders, encouraging engagement, quick decision-making, and recurring purchases. “The numbers speak for themselves: 90% of orders are placed on a self-service basis on the platform. Hadrian's clients welcome the digital shift, and the adoption rate is expanding,” supports Charles-Olivier Levasseur, Director of Customer Experience at nventive.
→ Read also: Custom Web Application for Manufacturers
This project perfectly illustrates the commercial advantage that a well-designed digital experience can bring to a manufacturing company. To stay ahead of the wave sweeping over the manufacturing industry, your company has everything to gain by investing in technology and innovation to remain competitive in a constantly evolving market.