Sony Professional Service Europe (PSE) has updated its service desk with ServiceMax and integrated it with Salesforce.com to improve customer interaction and standardise processes.
The integration will enable technicians to have a 360-degree, end-to-end view of customer relationships, including insight into products, contract management, past history, as well as the ability to streamline.
Sony PSE previously used Remedy to support a set of service products. Sony Professional Solutions Europe general manager of service and support, John Cooper, said: "In the professional business we worked on an engineer-to-engineer basis. Diagnosis of problems was about dealing with two like-minded people."
But with changes that have occurred at broadcasters in recent years and Sony selling products to non-broadcast users, he said: "We are now selling business solutions to a wider range of customers, such as corporate education or in healthcare for remote 3D surgery, and digital cinema. Engineering skills are no longer at the customer end."
Sony’s original Remedy service desk implementation was product-focused, but the company now provides complete digital workflow for the film industry, which requires a more customer-centric approach.
"Avatar was filmed on Sony cameras. We sell complex IT workflow for news broadcasters. It’s a complex ecosystem. We sell more service contracts instead of a break-fix-repair service, so we take more time to look after customer’s products," said Cooper.
ServiceMax is able to manage visibility of the customer’s products, he added: "We can look at how a contract has been setup and the individual service-level agreements to manage customers more effectively." Integration with Salesforce provides visibility from a sales perspective.
Business consulting firm Astadia led the implementation with support from ServiceMax. Cooper said an agile methodology was used to develop core components of the new service desk. These were tested in a sandbox system and then gradually rolled out.
The first phase of the project went live in May 2015. Sony PSE plans to deploy ServiceMax on mobile devices over the coming months.
Sony Professional Solutions Latin America is also planning to deploy ServiceMax and the company is currently reviewing potential for further global implementation.
