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Universal Receives Award for Customer Service
February 16, 2005 |Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
PALO ALTO, Calif. — Frost & Sullivan's recent analysis program, "Growth Opportunities in the SMT Placement Equipment Markets," selected Universal Instruments as the recipient of the 2004 Award for Customer Service Leadership. Universal received this award for its proactive service partnership approach that meets both the stated and unstated requirements of its customers globally.
Every year, Frost & Sullivan presents this award to the company that has demonstrated excellence in customer-service leadership within the industry. Universal has shown tremendous responsiveness to customer needs and has continually focused on long- and short-term customer profitability goals. The company has also exhibited flexibility in tailoring its product offerings to suit customer businesses.
Universal uses a network of over 200 service personnel distributed across the globe to respond to customer installation, training and servicing needs. The company has a global service headquarters at Binghamton, N.Y., and regional hubs in Budapest, Hungary and Shekou and Suzhou, China, where skilled engineers facilitate the design and implementation of locally demanded services.
New service offerings, such as support continuance and a focus on service partnership initiatives, have gained a differentiation advantage for Universal in its markets. Support continuance focuses on extending the relationship beyond that forged during the warranty period. Following current lean manufacturing trends, Universal offers highly interactive Web-based training to placement equipment operators, enabling customers to maintain planned productivity levels.
Universal has also strategically realigned its pre-owned equipment business to generate an alternative revenue stream. The company offers a pre-purchase machine assessment service that is popular among buyers of used equipment, as it acts as a quality assurance approval.
The current proactive model followed by Universal includes being part of customers' production planning meetings to identify process, capability or quality deficiencies. Recommendations by the company's on-site engineers have resulted in significant line productivity improvements, as testified by end users. This model is now being developed using intelligent device management (IDM), which will analyze the customer's production schedule, actively predict maintenance cycles and recommend line efficiency measures to improve overall productivity.
Universal also has a well-designed and intuitive Web-based support interface. Going beyond the conventional FAQ guidance offered by most Internet-based technical support functions, Universal's Website delivers dynamic knowledge-based content, allowing customers in any global time zone to enter a keyword, symptom or an error code indicated on the machine, and retrieve an intelligent real time solution.
The company has also worked on building a skilled and efficient team of human resources, headed by a separate functional entity called Global Services. This operation ensures uniformity and consistency in the services provided by the company globally.