How a Customer-Centric Approach is Key to GroundProbe’s Success
GroundProbe’s Commercial & Global Account Analyst, Noelia Eguillor
When many people think of GroundProbe, they think about the most trusted, most reliable Slope Stability Radar technology in the mining industry. But having the most proven technology – one that has never failed to detect a collapse – is not just luck. It’s the result of a systematic approach to market priorities, people and systems; an approach that sees the whole organisation working in synergy to deliver exceptional value to every customer.
The approach is one of customer-centricity; one that is hinged on providing innovative and invaluable services alongside our products to ensure our customers get what they need.
For our customers, the outcome we are trying to achieve is a strong, long-term partnership built on understanding their unique needs, including them in our innovation process and delivering on our promises. Our local technical support teams and our Geotechnical Support Services (GSS) help set us apart in this sense.
In financial terms, management theory considers recurring revenue as the ideal business model. However, this theory is lacking a key fact – that it also drives innovation, continuous improvement, and customer intimacy. For GroundProbe, our support and services teams are often the channel of communication with our customers and our means to be close to them. It is through these channels that we have a continuous, virtuous circle of feedback and improvement.
By providing valuable services to our customers, we get the insights needed to improve our technologies direct from the users of the technology. With our technical support services, we can ensure our customers get the most value from our technologies while we get to know our customers’ needs. Our GSS allows us to continuously learn from the largest library database of wall folders in the world, in turn helping us to continually improve our hardware, software and services.
But being close to customers is not enough to say we are customer-centric. Being customer-centric is about adding customer feedback into our processes and monitoring our performance against this feedback.
Our local teams are essential in this process. They are continuously liaising with our customers, both on-site and off, tracking KPIs and addressing any concerns identified in our feedback mechanisms. They take our customer needs and wants and ensure a continuous feedback loop back to our Product Development and Reliability teams. To sum up, our local teams in every Business Unit are key for the continuous process, quality and technology improvements that we push for here at GroundProbe. This enables us to maintain a global network, with local expertise supporting our customer-centric culture.
If we think about the service-product continuum, GroundProbe is positioned in the middle – our geotechnical monitoring solutions are not complete without our technical and engineering support. This is not only a business decision but the key to our success.