Digital machine health solutions for the Industrial Internet of Things(IIoT) are transformative. They immediately change the day-to-day operations of facility leaders — and successful programs can influence executive leadership priorities. So there’s a clear need for both facilities and their technology vendors to be on the same page from the initial rollout all the way through program expansion. The key to ensuring that new technology is adopted at the site level, used properly, supported, and delivers the results you’re looking for is a Customer Success program.
Customer Success is not just a department, but a prerogative—-a new paradigm. It’s a way to help customers simultaneously learn new technology while unlocking and delivering value across their entire organization. This is especially important in the IIoT space where simple decisions around scale and compatibility can have massive consequences both positive and negative.
In order for a digital IIoT solution’s customers to thrive, an advanced Customer Success program is essential—one that ensures customers are educated, empowered, and fully supported throughout the customer lifecycle.
The Three Pillars of Augury’s Customer Success Program
Augury’s Customer Success team is based on a customer-first, company-wide approach. Whether it’s building new processes, strategically consulting on reliability practices, or uncovering insights to optimize maintenance operations—all of our efforts are directed at increasing customer value.
The core function of Customer Success is to ensure that customers have the right knowledge, support, and tools to make impactful decisions and fully capitalize on their investment as fast and completely as possible. We approach this by staying true to our three pillars: Reliability, Training/Education and Support.
1) Reliability
Reliability is both an art and science. Augury provides the sensors, software, platform, training, actionable alerts, and ongoing support—but we need our partners’ in-depth knowledge of their assets to truly be effective. There is a lot of value in partnering with our customers to augment our “science” data with their real-life knowledge of their machines. These folks are truly intimate with the context and history of the assets they are responsible for. Together with Augury’s diagnostics, we combine the best of both worlds to enable our customers to make more impactful and data-driven decisions.
The professionals that perform repairs and ensure asset integrity are the final step to delivering the full value of a machine health solution. Without their diligence in performing the recommended corrective actions, informed and detailed alerts cannot deliver their promised value.
Our machine learning algorithms utilize vibration, surface temperature, and magnetic data to deliver insightful diagnostics for site teams to act upon. However, it’s also very important for Augury to understand machine context (historical repairs, operational modes, failure history) to get a more holistic picture that will augment our analysis.
Augury has a team of Customer Success Managers (CSMs) that are trained in the importance of machine context and communicating with on-site reliability teams to make sure they’re getting the most out of their machines. In short, a machine health solution needs input from the professionals who know the assets on the shop floor—and maintenance teams know their machines best.
The key to our value delivery is that our approach is 100% customer-centric. By determining the goals of the program in the beginning we can guide the program to quickly achieve them. Whether their goals are reducing PMs, decreasing downtime or to create a roadmap towards digital transformation — CSMs are there to leverage our product and industry knowledge to help them achieve their goals.
2) Training/Education
This pillar is about enablement. In order to effectively train and educate, you must first listen and learn to become an expert. Our CSMs go through a thorough training and certification program that requires reliability training and extreme product knowledge in order to train and empower Augury’s customers. This is to guarantee that our CSMs have the skills to be the go-to person for any questions, updates, or advanced platform feature inquires our partners may have.
The core offering of a CSM is leveraging product knowledge and reliability expertise to apply the Augury solution to solve the customer’s challenges and objectives. Listening is the key component here. In order for a machine health program to be successful, our Customer Success team must understand the unique objectives that our partners are looking to achieve and the current state of their operations. This allows us to make sure our partner’s maintenance/reliability teams are trained and prepared to utilize the data and insights from our platform. It also helps them understand how to get the most out of Augury’s tools to achieve reliable machine health.
Initial training and ongoing education empowers our partners in the art of early detection and data-enhanced maintenance. This allows site maintenance and reliability teams to become proactive and demonstrate tangible value to the back office through increased uptime and reduced repair costs.
3) Support
Things don’t always go as planned—so it’s important to have the peace of mind that you have a dedicated staff to help you with any issues. Within customer success, we have a dedicated technical support team that is trained in addressing a wide range of issues/questions ranging from account specific inquiries to hardware and IoT troubleshooting.
There are various ways to get in touch with Augury’s customer support, it doesn’t matter how they reach out, we will make sure to go above and beyond to help our customers resolve issues.
Things don’t always go as planned—so it’s important to have the peace of mind that you have a dedicated staff to help you with any issues. And when you’re in a bind, it’s best to have a subject matter expert, someone you know by their first name, not a call center.
Augury’s CSMs are actively involved with the accounts they are paired with. They are familiar with their site operations and the general health of their machines. CSMs are another line of defense to protect your operations as they are able to see alerts and changing machine health statuses. They are also familiar with site and corporate level contacts so they know who to reach out to if any critical machine health alert requires immediate attention.
The New Paradigm
The days of transactional relationships between B2B technology vendors and their customers are gone. Customer success teams create and support business relationships creating true partnerships aligned with the same goals and success metrics. Speaking for the entire customer success team at Augury, we’re ecstatic to help you learn our technology, support your team, and to exceed your expectations when it comes to delivering the value of digital machine health.
Learn more about Augury’s Machine Health solutions here.
