Many companies will tell you that they put their customers first. It’s natural for companies to think this way, and to project that image, but what does this mean? How does a company center its product, production, and values around their customers? How do we live the values of a customer-centric business? We spoke about the customer-centric approach in the IoT sector with our Senior Director of Customer Success Shawn Mohr, who brings over a decade of experience in project management in technology sector.
What makes the experience of Symboticware’s customers special?
Symboticware’s business is data. We sense, collect, aggregate, analyze, and disseminate data, and there is a vast world of data points and opportunities. Yet, not all data is equal, and not all customers share the same vision on which data drives the most value for their organization. We at Symboticware lead with listening. The stories our customers share about their experience identify the problems which can be solved, and very often show the path to solve those same problems.
How do you prioritize and ensure that the direction in which project goes creates a lot of impact for the customer?
In the case of a customer who has a high degree of uncertainty in their desire for data, our first, best step is a Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA). This is a systematic, proactive method to evaluate both products and processes for their potential points of failure and the impact those failure points have. The FMEA process places customers and their internal stakeholders at the heart of the matter; customers identify the failure modes, they rank the impacts occurrences, severity, and detectability to determine where the greatest opportunities for improvement are within their organization. Our objective is to help the customer to figure out the specifics of their values, which allows us to deliver impactful results and the fastest return of value on their investment with Symboticware.
I can’t over-emphasize the impact this has for customers stepping into the world of big data, IoT, and the power of machine learning. Our ability to provide consultation on the power of data to relieve pain points is transformative to our customers. Symboticware’s success is built on helping our customers better understand how to seize the opportunities before them.
Symboticware has a track record in the mining industry. How does it help you and your team to better understand the customers in the global natural resource space?
Of course, Symboticware has been deeply embedded with customers for over ten years, and we have learned a lot about what drives value. In one of the articles on our website (Top Five KPIs for Mining Maintenance) we detailed some of the learning we have done along the way, and provided a great jumping off point for deeper discussions about what will provide value to our customers. Naturally, maintenance is not the only operational area in which data is critically important, and Symboticware’s value opportunities can’t be put into a proscriptive box.
We have great successes outside the world of machine maintenance. By providing better insights on cycle-times, we’ve empowered customers to drive their production numbers. We’ve given customers the data-driven perspectives required to empower next generation automation in the field. And we’ve provided tools to monitor and improve the health and safety of vehicle operators, ensuring that our customers’ employees return home safely after a job well done.
Our IoT platform is a feature-packed tool, which allows for very different deployments – from geolocation to full-scope telemetry with failure analytics. What are the ways to navigate the customer to determine the functionality needed for their use case?
Having identified the customer’s values, Symboticware can keep the customer at the very heart of our production and implementation of solutions. The values of our customers dictate which features our powerful IoT platform, 4-Sight.ai, presents for each specific solution. The functionality of each feature details the data required to achieve the functionality, and the specifics on how that data is aggregated, collated, calculated, and presented. In short, there is no “right out of the box” solution, but a process to tailor each solution to the unique needs of our customers.