Increase service margins. It is a simple concept that is extraordinarily complicated in practice. Should you cut your own costs or increase prices for your customers? Invest in technology that retains customers, or stick with what works? Luckily, there’s an easy way to increase your margins with Help Lightning’s remote assistance software.
Dan Turner is the Global Business Manager of Customer Support at Oxford Instruments, and he loves Help Lightning from a customer service perspective. But as a business manager, the most important thing for him is the monetization of it.
Here’s an example of how Turner is using remote assistance to optimize Oxford’s installations (providing rough numbers.)
“If we charged $5000 for an install before, we now charge only $1000 a day to do a remote install. But that tech can do that 5 days a week, rather than one large block with 5 days of travel. If you look at our margins, we are making the same kind of revenue, but our travel costs are now zero.“
Turner’s techs are doing the same work, at the same price. But with Help Lightning’s remote assistance software, there are no travel expenses or travel time!
“We are actually 16% ahead of where we were last year, and our margins have doubled,” Turner said. “Help Lightning has really moved us into a new normal.” Those numbers are being compared to a pre-pandemic world, by the way!
Line Inspections as a Profit Driver
According to Help Lightning COO Marc Guthrie, this isn’t an edge case. Performing line inspections with virtual expertise has been a major cost saving use of Help Lightning. “A line inspection before may have taken five people flying to a country in Asia for three weeks to insure that line is right,” says Guthrie. That’s flights, hotels, and travel time that has to be paid for your techs.
Now, Help Lightning takes care of that. “These were $90,000 expenses that are now $15,000-$20,000, so there’s great opportunities to drive margins and increase service by using these tools.”
If your techs are on the road or in a plane, they aren’t working, but you still have to pay them. With virtual expertise from Help Lightning, your techs can spend more time doing what you pay them for, instead of driving to where you need them. Imagine how much more you could accomplish with the same amount of service employees!
How Help Lightning Works
When someone encounters a complex issue, they need an expert onsite immediately. With Help Lightning’s virtual expertise software, two video streams become merged into one. Therefore, users can collaborate and resolve an issue together. The remote expert can actually insert their hand, use tools, and share documents. This simplifies the problem-solving process. Easy, right?
Using mobile devices, experts can now work with a partner as though they were side-by-side. You can annotate, or write across the screen. It’s easy to freeze images and use hand gestures. You can even import documents and add real objects into the merged reality environment. So, using Help Lightning, experts can solve any problem, even from thousands of miles away.
To learn how Help Lightning can help increase service margins, schedule a free demo here.
