It's another year of home improvement season. With the sound of the autumn dress horn of "Golden Nine Silver Ten", the home improvement market ushered in another wave of enthusiasm. How to choose reassuring products and services among home furnishing manufacturers with many brands has become the first step for consumers to move towards a better home life.
Needless to say, the bigger the brand, the more word-of-mouth it pays. In the era of consumption where brand is king, home furnishing leaders in various segments are sparing no effort to increase the quality of products and services, hoping to capture the consumption needs of more home users. A.O. Smith, a leading enterprise in the field of comfortable home in China, is one of the leaders.
From the total quality management model on the product side, to the comprehensive service strategy, and the innovation of talent training model, this industry giant with a splendid history of 149 years has played a big game in the Chinese home furnishing market. With the dual accumulation of product quality and service reputation, A.O. Smith's core category ranked first in the market share of sales in 2022, and continued to lead the industry in many tracks such as water purifiers, gas water heaters, and electric water heaters.
Quality-based, consolidate the service base
If good performance is the realization of product and service reputation, then product quality must be the basis of service quality. In A.O. Smith's corporate culture, "quality management" has become a topic for all employees.
A.O. Smith's values are integrity, innovation, and commitment to customer satisfaction. This has also become the cultural driving force behind its total quality management model. For example, A.O. Smith has established a one-to-one communication mechanism based on "integrity", using one-on-one and pairing methods of superiors and subordinates to do in-depth training for employees around values, business, quality, etc. From the president to the front-line workers, the six levels are connected, and the integrity connotation of attaching importance to quality is truly transmitted to every corner.
Further, the connotation of the "total quality management model" is not only reflected in the full participation of all employees within the company, but also in A.O. Smith's ultimate pursuit of quality continues into the industrial cooperation ecology.
AO Smith's products and systems have high technical requirements and strong on-site installation service attributes, and in the process of serving customers, problems in any link may directly affect the user experience. Based on this, on the basis of ensuring the quality of self-operated products, A.O. Smith insists on expanding the ecosystem of comrades, peers and alliances in quality benchmarking, builds a quality assurance ecological chain, and ensures that the quality of every link in the terminal delivery process meets the standard.
In addition, A.O. Smith also empowers agents, suppliers and other partners to build a digital platform for iDistribution, achieving efficiency, transparency and compliance in manufacturing and distribution links. And sign long-term warranty contracts with core suppliers to assist in real-time online control of key points of process control; At the same time, it provides agents with professional training, talent recruitment, IT transformation, etc., and comprehensively helps the alliance to provide consumers with high-quality product experience.
The excellence in quality management has enabled A.O. Smith to win Nanjing's highest quality honor - Nanjing Mayor Quality Award. While it has been widely recognized by the industry market, it also provides a solid foundation for service upgrades in the delivery of A.O. Smith products.
Take multiple measures to improve the service model
Relying on a strong product quality foundation, A.O. Smith has also been continuously upgraded on the service side, and in recent years, it has launched a "comprehensive service" strategy, and a series of innovative service initiatives have emerged.
For example, in the user market, the well-received "President Direct Channel", the project refers to A.O. Smith President Qiu Bu as the "first customer service", the first to receive, read, deploy user information, and in response to the complaints one by one, the company's multi-department linkage from a small point to explore the deep reasons behind it, formulate inferences to implement improvements, and continuously upgrade the user-centered agile organization, fundamentally solve user problems, and improve service experience.
By the end of 2022, the proportion of praise for the "President's Direct Channel" increased from 46% to 92%. In the process of constantly reflecting problems and solving problems, A.O. Smith's service system and service model have been accelerated and improved, and its service reputation has been further upgraded, and it has been named the "Best User Experience Award" by the 2022 Jingdong Home Appliance Partner Conference, and won the Golden Tone Award China's Best Customer Contact Center Award for 7 consecutive years.
With the in-depth application of digital technology in enterprise management and operation, efficient and convenient digital tools have also become a powerful tool for A.O. Smith to improve service quality.
For example, in the face of the new demand for personalized and younger market, A.O. Smith launched a digital service service to comprehensively improve the online appointment experience of user service account; in order to quickly solve urgent problems encountered in front-line services, A.O. Smith created an "online raise hand platform", which can raise hands with one click to generate a questionnaire, and the professional team will follow up and solve it in the first time, greatly improving the timeliness of services; In terms of spare parts delivery, A.O. Smith also set up a regional parts center to create a new parts order platform, covering order logistics, warehousing, call platform and other modules, and provide users with faster and better delivery experience with advanced parts warehouse mode; In addition, relying on the powerful service data platform command center, A.O. Smith also realized the early warning of work order service capabilities, deployed responses in real time, and further improved service performance capabilities.
Layout talents, cultivate service heritage
In the home improvement industry, there has always been a saying of "three products, seven installations". Among them, the quality of service of the installer largely determines the end-user experience. In terms of service team training, A.O. Smith has already laid out a layout.
Based on the value of "committed to customer satisfaction", A.O. Smith implements GPS (smile culture) in the service system, 1on1 to negotiate punishment, increase income, empower service technicians to self-drive management, happy work, and form a "integrity, professionalism, smile" 3S code of conduct, to create a smile service team based on trust.
The overall improvement of the service face is reflected in the "president's direct channel" that the number of complaints is getting smaller and smaller, the number of thank you letters is increasing, and the motivation of service technicians after being recognized is becoming more and more sufficient. This also validates the corporate cultural value and business wisdom of A.O. Smith: to achieve customer satisfaction, you must first satisfy employees, so that cultural power can be truly transformed into productivity.
In 2022, A.O. Smith will continue to increase its talent empowerment layout and join hands with Hongze Technical High School to establish "A.O. Smith Industrial College", aiming to cultivate intelligent integrated system design, construction, and mechatronics service talents through the combination of theory and practice based on the college's strong faculty, professional ace courses and immersive teaching and practical environment, and provide a steady stream of talent power for the development of A.O. Smith's high-end smart comfortable home business.
In the longer run, this will further consolidate A.O. Smith's service heritage and provide a powerful engine for its transformation into a high-end smart connected brand.
From the market share of water purification, heat burning, electric heating and other products to entering the smart comfort home track, A.O. Smith has not only created industry-leading excellent items in various product segments, but also looked at a broader market territory in the process of brand transformation. Today, A.O. Smith has taken a solid step in the fields of "good wind" and "good water" set of solutions, and as scenarios such as "smart integrated system" and "smart interconnection set" continue to land, the supporting role of its product service base will continue to be amplified, and then show higher value on the road of A.O. Smith brand growth.
Good products and good services can achieve a good brand. It is clear that A.O. Smith is drawing a more imaginative blueprint for its comrades, fellow believers, and allies.