Aftermarket Services Strategies

Aftermarket Services Strategies research practice examines key trends, technologies, and best practices in optimizing the customer and service life cycles for manufacturers and service organizations across a wide variety of industries, leveraging 3rd Platform technologies to deliver customer support and strategic differentiation, transforming field service operations, managing warranty processes, and providing the customer with a unified brand experience for the life of the relationship. Aftermarket service organizations are looking to enhance service offerings with technology capabilities such as artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive learning, 3D printing for service spare parts, augmented and mixed reality for field service and customer support, and remote monitoring and predictive maintenance to support the assets, equipment, or products that are on their customers' sites to increase visibility and quality, improve service delivery, expand customer centricity, create new business models, and optimize the service workforce.

• Best practices in customer experience, service execution, and remote service to improve service readiness, increase responsiveness and resolution, differentiate from competitors, contain costs, and increase revenue
• IoT ecosystem for connected products, connected services, product service systems, product service networks, and servitization
• Reliability-centric, condition-based, and predictive maintenance technologies and capability maturity models
• Governance models, performance metrics, and technology adoption of field service, customer support, service spare parts, warranty, and service contracts
• Field service and workforce management approaches to enhance the productivity of field service resources and support geographically diverse operations

• IDC PeerScape: Best Practices in Building a Service DNA
• IDC TechBrief: Service Fleet Management
• Rethinking Servitization as Value Is a Moving Target
• IDC TechBrief: Service Analytics
• IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Service Life-Cycle Management Platforms 2023 Vendor Assessment
• IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Warranty Service Applications 2023 Vendor Assessment
• IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Field Service Management Applications 2023 Vendor Assessment
• IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Service Parts Planning Applications 2023 Vendor Assessment

In addition to the insight provided in this service, IDC may conduct research on specific topics or emerging market segments via research offerings that require additional IDC funding and client investment.

1. What are the best practices adopted by leading companies to identify new service revenue opportunities to enhance the aftermarket and customer value and to mitigate risk associated with service and product margin erosion or commoditization?
2. How do enterprises adopt new technologies such as IoT, mobility, artificial intelligence, augmented and mixed reality, social collaborative tools, and 3D printing in their service operations, and how are they leveraging data analytics to create actionable insights and on-demand recommendations for customers, partners, and the service team?
3. How can service organizations assess their capabilities' maturity level, and what tools are available to develop a road map for improvement?
4. How do service organizations articulate a business case to justify investments in technologies that enable service differentiation and new delivery models to move from proof of concept (POC) and pilot to production at scale?