The programme is headed up by Karl Lowe, who joined Panasonic earlier this year as Head of Service at Panasonic Heating & Cooling Solutions Europe. An experienced global service leader, Karl has spent the last 22 years in the HVAC industry. With this company-wide, strategic shift that emphasises the importance of customer service, Panasonic has also invested in a central software solution to ensure a consistently excellent experience for its clients. As Karl Lowe explains: “This new approach is designed to enable installers, field technicians, engineers and customers to share real-life situational context with remote product experts so that hands-on service and repair instructions can be visually demonstrated and acted upon.”
IFS Remote Assistance has supplied the software solution which is to be deployed Europe-wide. This new solution allows Panasonic Heating & Cooling Solutions to remotely diagnose issues, ensure real-time knowledge sharing, and significantly speed up repair rates. In this way, highly skilled engineers’ time can be focussed on providing world-class technical support by reducing, or even eliminating, the need to make site visits, which also helps lower the environmental impact.
Expectations are that by standardising service operations on IFS Remote Assistance, Panasonic Heating & Cooling Solutions will improve response times, increase remote diagnostics and resolution, reduce on-site visits and save costs, improve speed of repair, and achieve higher customer satisfaction.
“Our investment in the IFS solution is part of a larger strategy to transform our business mindset from product-centric to service-centric and to develop the maturity of our service organisation,” adds Karl Lowe. “With IFS Remote Assistance, we are leveraging state-of-the-art technology to unleash the full potential of our highly skilled workforce, regardless of where they are based. Not only are we able to navigate constraints, we are actually able to improve repair rates and access real-time performance data to help us gauge and improve our service.”
The new system has been trialled in Germany and the UK and initial feedback has been extremely positive. Using the new system, when a customer contacts the Service Department, service sessions can be initiated immediately via the IFS Remote Assistance to determine what the issue is and whether it requires a physical site intervention by a service engineer. “We need to speed up our repairs, and with this new approach, we expect to accomplish that goal,” notes Karl.
Related tags: HVAC