Sony Professional Services Customer Story

Sony’s previous service system worked well for a one to one interaction. It was great for one customer with one product. If their customer’s Sony product were to break, Sony would step in and fix it. Yet, their previous system was very customized and was not designed to handle intricate products and accounts, which is what their customers needed. “These days we’re managing very complex contracts with customers with multiple types of equipment in multiple locations,” Cooper explains, “we really couldn’t manage that with our 15-year old Remedy service desk system.”

Beside their IT challenge, Sony also had a business challenge they needed to overcome. Many broadcasters let their engineers go, so Sony needed to sell into companies that did not have in-house expertise. “(It’s) No longer about a technical conversation. It’s about how are we delivering our services against expectations and having that conversation with someone who’s not necessarily technical at all,” Cooper shares.

The company knew they needed an updated solution that would allow them to manage complex cases, yet still be appealing to their customers that were not engineering experts.

“While selecting a service platform, there’re two obvious choices. One, you can do it yourself to meet your needs perfectly, or secondly, look to see what’s available on the open market,” Cooper said. “In the past, I was very skeptical (about the second option) because I didn’t feel like the practitioners understood our business well.” This changed when they were introduced to ServiceMax.

Sony Professional Services initially implemented ServiceMax onto laptops for over 100 engineers, and then after seeing the results, followed with mobile devices implementation. The seamless integration of ServiceMax with Salesforce enables Sony technicians to have a full view of customer relationships, including insight into products, contract management, past service history, as well as the ability to streamline customer interaction and standardize processes.

ServiceMax has brought a number of core benefits to Sony. The increased speed of resolution and streamlined end-to-end process has brought in £1 million in savings.

“One of the key things that we really liked about ServiceMax was the data, the information, we could get out of the system to help us drive improvements in our business,” Cooper explains. This new insight into data and customer information has improved customer satisfaction, as customers are informed and are always up-to-date.

With their new modern field service management platform, Sony is providing the service their customers want and need. “As a business, we’re finding that our customers are keen on a conversation about an offering that’s a combination of really cool technology, but also with a service wrapper.”