We are starting a best practice series so we can share how our peers across the OEM industry are dealing with the situation. Hope you will find this useful.
Here is a quick tip for customer segmentation from the front-line.
One of the recurring themes from my conversations with everyone in the Industrial OEMs is focused on “helping our customers through this crisis”. Not that different from what we’ve been doing at Entytle, but when you are a large industrial OEM with over 100,000 customers, it becomes a real challenge. There is a diversity of customer size, application, operating practices, etc. So how do you help?
A pro-tip from one of our customers:
“ Triage your customer base into those needing the most help vs. those whose operations are paused”
For example, one of our customers sells packaging equipment. Their “phones ringing off the hook” with customers calling for spare parts, service, etc. This is driven by an overwhelming surge of e-commerce orders for *most* goods due to social distancing requirements in the country. So they urgently want to contact those in their installed base that fit this profile so they can have parts available on the shelf to ensure their packaging lines run as smoothly as possible.
Thanks to the investment they had made in unifying, organizing and analyzing their customer data in an Installed Base Data Platform, this triage was a cinch and done in minutes. They now have operationalized this by type of customer and are conducting very targeted outreach with their customer base.