For years, many industrial companies have considered After Sales as a secondary function: necessary, of course, but essentially reactive. An area called upon to intervene when something is not working, to manage spare parts, requests for assistance, tickets, and emergencies. Today, this view is no longer sufficient. In a scenario characterized by competitive pressure, increasing technical complexity, high customer expectations, and the need to generate more stable and recurring revenue, the after-sales service has become one of the most decisive areas for a company’s competitiveness.
The key point is simple: the market no longer purchases just a product, but a promise of results. The customer assesses not only the quality of the machine, the system or the solution purchased, but also the supplier’s ability to guarantee uptime, operational continuity, support, updates and maintenance over time. In other words, value shifts progressively from the product to the performance. And it is precisely service management that makes this promise credible.
This change represents a cultural shift, even before it is organizational. In many industrial sectors, the product tends to “commoditize”: basic performance tends to be similar, competitors converge on similar technological standards, and the difference is no longer played only on technical characteristics. This is where industrial technical support becomes a distinctive element. Response times, availability of spare parts, quality of support, people’s expertise, and digital tools become determining factors in customer choice and loyalty.
This is complemented by another decisive element: after-sales is often one of the areas with the highest margins. Service contracts, scheduled maintenance, spare parts, retrofits, upgrades, and premium services can generate margins higher than those from the initial sale, helping to stabilize cash flow and make revenues more predictable. A quality service increases trust, protects the customer base, and creates a positive lock-in that favors renewals, range expansion, and new business opportunities.
And the data confirm this: according to the biennial Benchmarking Study “What’s next in Operations?”, which involved more than 100 cross-industry companies, only 48% of the sample have a structured and continuously improving After Sales function, while more than 31% have not yet implemented it organically. This is a significant gap — but also a concrete opportunity for differentiation for those who decide to invest seriously in this area.
| Size | After Sales Service | After Sales Excellence |
|---|---|---|
| Approach | Intervenes when a problem arises | It anticipates needs and prevents problems |
| Revenue | Spotty and unpredictable | Recurring, planned and structural |
| Relationship with the customer | Transactional and discontinuous | Consultative and continuous |
| Data | Not collected or not utilized | Strategic asset for decisions and opportunities |
| KPI | Absences or partial absences | Structured, shared and monitored |
| Installed base | Set of assets to support | A treasure trove of business opportunities |
| Marginalization | Low and difficult to measure | High and measurable for contract or asset |
| Organization | Informal and responsive | Structured with defined governance and roles |
| Processes | Not standardized | End-to-end, traceable and improveable |
| Learning | Unutilized experiences | Know-how transformed into organizational intelligence |
To transform after-sales service into a platform of value, it is not enough to introduce a few KPIs or digitize ticketing. What is needed is a true operational model of excellence. In the framework proposed by the Bonfiglioli Consulting Knowledge Office, After Sales Excellence is developed as an integrated system on multiple levels.
At the top is the organization, which defines governance, roles, responsibilities, and coordination mechanisms. Underneath are three major areas — Sales Operations, Service Operations, and Marketing Operations — tasked with working in a coherent way to align business development, service delivery, and customer relationship. Below are the key activities: product management, business opportunities, accounts, and service. Finally, there are enablers: process digitalization, asset management, connection with the installed base, data availability and quality.
It is precisely these elements that enable the transition from a reactive logic to a predictive, proactive and value-oriented model throughout the customer lifecycle. In this perspective, service management is no longer just an operational function, but an ecosystem that integrates execution, knowledge, marginality and customer experience.
An After Sales Excellence model is based on three closely interconnected macro-processes.
The first is the Request to Resolution (RTR), the process that governs the management of assistance from the initial request to the final resolution. Proper collection of information, standardized classification of the need, planning of the intervention, technical quality of the response, end-to-end traceability. Without a robust RTR, the risk is to chase urgency, multiply inefficiencies and compromise the customer’s perception.
The second is the Opportunity to Cash (OTC), the real economic engine of the post-sales phase. It is the process that allows the installed base to be read not only as a set of machines to support, but also as a wealth of opportunities to be developed. Spare parts, maintenance, contracts, premium services, upgrades and retrofits become the subject of a structured commercial approach, capable of transforming service management into a concrete lever for growth and marginalization.
The third is the Inquiry to Learning (ITL), which closes the cycle by transforming field experience into organizational learning. Tickets, feedback, intervention data, and recurring anomalies become valuable material for improving product, processes, and internal know-how. This is where the after-sales service stops being just a ’response" and becomes industrial intelligence.
The real breakthrough occurs when RTR, OTC and ITL are not managed separately but integrated end-to-end. Only then can service management evolve from a reactive function into a structured platform for competitiveness and revenue generation.
The transformation of after-sales service does not happen in isolated interventions. It requires a structured, progressive and coherent process divided into three phases.
1. Discovery — A rigorous understanding of the current state: analysis of the competitive context, evaluation of end-to-end processes, observation of critical subprocesses (from requests to offers, from spare parts to contracts, to field management), reading of the organizational structure, available tools, skills, and corporate culture. For companies with international presence, it is essential to examine the geographic footprint as a multi-level delivery network, evaluating its responsiveness, flexibility, cost to serve, and scalability.
2. Envisioning — Designing the future model: target organization, governance, KPIs, roadmap and quick wins. The goal is not to imagine an abstract ideal system, but to design a TO-BE model that is sustainable and consistent with the business. The key levers to work on are four: organization, processes, tools, people and culture. No transformation is truly effective if one of these dimensions is left behind.
3. Execution and Change Management — The often most delicate phase: program management, cross-functional involvement, targeted training, continuous monitoring of KPIs, and a strong focus on cultural change. Because a new process, without new behaviors and without widespread accountability, risks remaining just on paper.
When after-sales service is integrated in a holistic way, the benefits are distributed over four complementary levels:
An advanced model of After Sales Excellence not only improves internal efficiency: it strengthens the company’s positioning, qualifies the product offering and consolidates the relationship with the customer.
The experiences gathered in the Bonfiglioli Consulting white paper show how this transformation generates concrete impacts in very different contexts.
Case 1 — Italian industrial group with an international network: it has rethought its geographic footprint, consolidated fragmented after-sales service structures and built clear processes between headquarters and subsidiaries, making the model more effective, efficient and scalable, also in view of new acquisitions.
Case 2 — Italian chemical group with offices in Europe: it worked to seize new growth opportunities for the Global Service Department. The project led to the definition of Service Level Agreements, the parameterization of the spare parts warehouse, the construction of shared KPIs, and the requirements for an integrated CRM with Sales Automation, Ticketing, and Field Management, as well as a skills development plan and the launch of a structured asset management process.
Case 3 — Italian B2C company with over 50 years of history: it has optimized its technical support activities, reduced response times and introduced KPIs to govern the area, focusing on workload mapping, reviewing tools and technical documentation, and launching specific initiatives to increase the efficiency of technical support.
For many industrial companies, after-sales service is still perceived as the "next step" after the sale. In reality, it is the place where the value of the company is consolidated every day: here, reliability, the quality of the relationship with the customer, the ability to generate recurring revenue and the strength of the competitive positioning are measured.
After Sales Excellence is therefore much more than a support function: it is a strategic industrial platform, the lever that enables the transition from a reactive model to a predictive, consultative, data-driven and growth-oriented system. Organizations that know how to structure it with method, governance and distributed responsibility will build a stronger relationship with the market and more lasting competitiveness.
Because today, it is not just those who sell a good product that win. It is those who know how to guarantee, over time, the value of that choice that win.
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After Sales Excellence is a structured operating model that transforms after-sales from a reactive function into a strategic growth platform. It integrates processes (RTR, OTC, ITL), organization, digital tools, and skills. Compared to the reactive model, which intervenes when a problem occurs and generates one-time revenues, it anticipates needs and generates recurring, measurable, and planned revenues.
Only 48% of the sample has a structured and continuously improving After Sales function. This data comes from the biennial Benchmarking Study "What’s next in Operations?", conducted by Bonfiglioli Consulting on over 100 cross-industry companies. More than 31% have not yet implemented it organically: a gap that represents an opportunity for differentiation for those investing.
The three macro-processes are Request to Resolution (RTR), Opportunity to Cash (OTC), and Inquiry to Learning (ITL). The first governs assistance from request to resolution; the second transforms the installed base into commercial opportunities for spare parts, contracts, upgrades, and retrofits; the third converts tickets and intervention data into organizational learning. They really work if they are managed in an integrated, end-to-end manner.
After-sales can generate margins higher than those of the initial sale. Service contracts, scheduled maintenance, spare parts, retrofits, upgrades, and premium services make revenues more predictable and stabilize cash flow. Moreover, a quality service creates a positive lock-in that favors renewals, range expansions, and new business opportunities with the same customer.
The transformation is divided into three phases. Discovery analyzes the current state of processes, organization, tools, skills, and geographic footprint. Envisioning designs the TO-BE model with governance, KPIs, roadmap, and quick wins. Execution and Change Management implements the change through program management, targeted training, and continuous monitoring of KPIs, to also modify behaviors.
The main KPIs include the average response and resolution time (MTTR), the First Time Fix Rate, the renewal rate of service contracts, the margin per contract or asset, the Net Promoter Score (NPS) of the service, and the cost to serve per customer. They must be structured, shared, and monitored.
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