SKF Customer Service Improvement Research

In recent years, as affected by economic downturn, the manufacturing industry declined obviously. Facing severe competition, traditional marketing strategies such as pricing strategy and high-tech strategy, cannot support companies growth. Companies in manufacturing industries start to transform into service business in order to break development bottleneck, manufacturing servitization became the inevitable trend.Customer service team is the key function of SKF demand chain, as frontline team, works as bridge communicating customer and SKF’s function teams. Professional and timely service directly affect customer satisfaction level, consequently affect company’s profit level and competitiveness.In order to reverse sales volume decline, keep advance in competition, SKF changed its annual bonus scheme in 2013, added regional profit and finance target in to the parameters. North-east customer service team completed only 20% of the scheme. The paper analyzed the affecting factors of bonus scheme, includes internal and outer factors, sales teams factors and customer service team’s own reason. Used fishbone diagram to analyze causes, figure out main causes:①Key customer’s demand declined. ②Target too high and failed to adjust in time. ③Sales team overlooked profit target, didn’t pay attention to financial target. ④Employee’s satisfaction level not high in customer service team, not enough support to Sales team. Use SWOT analysis to concluded current status of customer service team. Clarified customer service team’s main tasks and improvement targets:achieve company’s profit target via improved customer’s satisfaction level, control operation cost at meantime.Based on theory of service profit chain, the employee satisfaction cycle, value equation and customer satisfaction cycle, provided improvement plan from three aspects: ①Focus on customers. ② Focus on working procedure, tools and cross-function team co-operation.③ Focus on employees. Clarified frontline employee satisfaction level will affect profit.Analyzed the obstacles may meet during improvement implementation process and measures to solve problems and ensure the smooth implementation.The study provided solutions to solve current problems of customer service team, point out directions for the teams actively transforming to service.