Maximizing Customer Productivity

As 3D Systems’ manufacturing solutions evolve to address growing demands for production workflows, we are keenly aware that everything we do in Technical Support needs to enable faster issue resolution for our customers. With this in mind, we’ve reshaped our global technical support teams into new, regionally-focused teams. The combination of local expertise aligned with enhanced technology creates an unparalleled combination to meet customer needs.

At 3D Systems, we are holding ourselves to a standard of excellence in technical customer services that efficiently solves or prevents issues at customer sites by leveraging people, parts and technology. To achieve this standard, we are building on these three pillars:

Focused on people: As we work to become more responsive to customer needs, we reorganized our regional technical support teams to include dedicated field service teams that cover all 3D printer technologies. This makes the teams much more customer-focused and alert to their needs. Our self-service portal has expanded a lot over the last 18 months to deliver much more value in technical instructions, how-to guides, best practices and safety information.

New technologies to enable response: Across the last 18 months we have actively enhanced a variety of technologies to make technical support more proactive and accountable to customers. This includes improved case management platforms, new software that enables remote monitoring of our 3D printers at customer sites and new Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools for initial customer support processes. The 3D Connect software allows our technical support teams to receive intelligence on a customer’s 3D printer if a part failure is imminent, or for predicting when regular service is required. The new Aquant AI technology allows faster, more informed response rates to technical support queries and enables service technicians to be properly prepared for a site visit. ServiceMax helps us manage processes and resources and have a better view of what is happening at our customers.

Better parts service: We have focused on getting better data to and from our supply chain to enable greater readiness of parts, and opened four distribution centers globally. These steps, along with extended hours for service, are resulting in faster parts delivery and noticeably happier customers.

I’m truly excited about how we have progressed and will continue to evolve using new technologies and by building our expert teams worldwide. We still have tremendous opportunity in front of us, and I look forward to keeping you updated as we progress on this journey.