A Guide to Improving Customer Service in Your Manufacturing Business

In manufacturing, delivering a great product is no longer enough. Today’s buyers, from plant managers to procurement heads, expect fast, transparent, and personalized support at every step. If they don’t get it, they won’t hesitate to switch suppliers.

At the same time, manufacturing itself has transformed. With automation, AI, IoT, and Big Data reshaping operations, customer expectations are higher than ever. The line between a product and the service surrounding it has blurred, making customer service in manufacturing a critical business driver, not just a support function.

In this guide, we’ll explore why customer service matters more than ever in manufacturing in 2025, the biggest challenges teams face, actionable best practices to follow, and real-world examples of companies doing it right.

Table of Contents

• Why Customer Service Is Critical in Manufacturing
• Top Challenges in Delivering Customer Service in Manufacturing
• 7 Customer Service Best Practices For Manufacturing Industries
• Real-Life Manufacturing Customer Service Success Stories
• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Why Customer Service Is Critical in Manufacturing

Manufacturing companies have long excelled at building quality products. But in today’s market, that’s only half the battle. The other half is delivering fast, reliable, and personalized customer service.

Modern buyers — whether consumers or business clients — expect seamless support alongside the product itself. In fact, 84% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products or services. Even a top-notch product can lose its shine if it’s not backed by equally excellent service.

Here’s why customer service in manufacturing has become a business-critical function:

1. Service Directly Impacts the Bottom Line

Customer service isn’t just a support function anymore, it’s a revenue driver. According to Knack Systems, 72% of manufacturing executives believe that strong service directly improves financial performance.

This notion that service improves performance is true if you consider the fact that:

• 60% of customers have stopped doing business with a brand due to a poor service experience.
• 43% of customers are more likely to repurchase after a positive service interaction.

In manufacturing, where contracts are significant and partnerships are long-term, customer service can be the deciding factor between a renewal and losing a key account.

2. B2B Buyers Now Expect B2C-Level Support

Digital transformation has shifted expectations. Today’s B2B buyers are just as informed and demanding as consumers. 

Whether it’s a delayed shipment or a machine malfunction, your customers expect immediate, helpful solutions. Slow or opaque service processes simply won’t cut it anymore.

3. Service Is Becoming a Strategic Revenue Lever

Modern manufacturers aren’t just selling machines — they’re selling outcomes. With servitization on the rise, offerings like maintenance contracts, uptime guarantees, and consulting packages are becoming the norm.

In performance-based contracts, customers aren’t paying for equipment — they’re paying for results. That puts extraordinary pressure on the quality, speed, and transparency of your support operations.

A missed SLA or sluggish crisis response can lead to lost trust and lost revenue. But when customer service in manufacturing is done right, it becomes a growth engine, opening doors to:

• Higher contract renewal rates
• Upsell opportunities
• Deeper, more profitable customer relationships

Next, let’s look at the most common challenges manufacturers face when delivering customer service.

Top Challenges in Delivering Customer Service in Manufacturing

Manufacturing companies face some unique challenges when it comes to delivering great customer support. Here are some of the most common ones:

1. Fragmented Systems and Disjointed Experiences

Many manufacturers still juggle disconnected tools such as email, phone, chat, and even legacy CRM systems. The biggest problem is that these tools don’t talk to each other. The result?

• Agents waste time switching between platforms.
• Customer information gets lost or duplicated.
• The customer experience feels inconsistent and frustrating.

2. Complex Products Mean Complex Support

Industrial and technical products aren’t easy to troubleshoot. When customers call about a complex machine or a specialized part, frontline agents often need:

• Inputs from engineering teams
• Deep-dive manuals or tech documentation

This complexity drags out troubleshooting and can stall customer operations for hours — or even days. The more technical the product, the harder it is to deliver fast, high-quality support.

3. Long Resolution Times Erode Trust

With fragmented systems and highly technical issues, it’s no surprise that resolution times in manufacturing tend to stretch out. Customers might wait days – sometimes weeks – for a fix if parts need to be sourced, diagnostics are delayed, or cross-team coordination breaks down.

Every extra hour of downtime costs your customers money, operational efficiency, and trust. 

4. Siloed Teams Hurt Responsiveness

Support, engineering, production, and sales often operate in silos. When these teams don’t share information in real-time:

• Customer queries bounce between departments.
• Agents give incomplete or inconsistent answers.
• Production delays or product defects catch support teams off guard.

5. Inconsistent Service Across Distributors

Unlike direct-to-consumer brands, most manufacturers rely on third-party distributors, dealers, or resellers for frontline customer support. This creates a major consistency challenge:

• Distributors vary in training, tools, and service quality.
• Smaller resellers often stick to outdated processes.
• Customers receive vastly different support experiences based on where they bought from.

Scaling consistent, high-quality customer service in manufacturing requires closing these gaps across your entire partner network — not just within your company.

7 Customer Service Best Practices For Manufacturing Industries

Implementing excellent customer support in manufacturing requires well-thought-out strategies and the right tools. Here are seven actionable best practices that manufacturers can adopt to elevate their customer service:

1. Break Down Silos and Build Cross-Team Collaboration

Customer service teams in manufacturing can’t solve complex issues alone, especially when problems involve production delays, supply chain issues, or product failures. Yet, in most setups, departments still operate in silos, slowing down response times and frustrating customers.

In fact, only 16% of customer service agents in manufacturing feel empowered enough to do their jobs well. To fix this, manufacturers need to build tighter cross-functional collaboration. Here’s how:

• Implement a shared inbox or help desk where sales, support, and production teams can track customer conversations together.
• Simplify escalation workflows so frontline agents can easily pull in engineering, quality assurance, or logistics experts.
• Give agents full context — including order history, product specs, and delivery delays — to resolve issues without back-and-forth.
• Host regular cross-functional syncs focused on service bottlenecks and known customer pain points.

2. Deliver Seamless, Omnichannel Support (Without Losing Context)

Support interactions in manufacturing don’t always follow a single channel. A customer might email on Monday, call on Tuesday, and DM on Friday. As they switch channels, they’d expect you to remember the full context. 

But most companies fall short here. In fact, 53% of customers say their support experiences feel fragmented across channels.

To fix this, you need to provide unified, context-rich customer service. Here’s how to get it right:

• Use a unified, omnichannel helpdesk like Hiver to centralize customer history, and all conversations — email, live chat, WhatsApp, phone — into one shared view.
• Automatically log interaction history by customer so agents can pick up where the last person left off — no repeats or confusion.
• Track SLA compliance and response times per channel to identify blind spots and high-friction moments.
• Integrate your helpdesk with CRMs or ERPs to surface customer history and order data instantly.
  

3. Build Self-Service That’s Actually Useful — Not Frustrating

In manufacturing, self-service isn’t just a nice-to-have, it’s essential. Your customers might be production managers troubleshooting an issue at 2 a.m., and they can’t afford to wait until business hours for help.

Done right, self-service can reduce ticket volumes, shorten resolution times, and empower your customers to get answers faster. Here are some tips that can help:

• Create a structured knowledge base with installation guides, maintenance checklists, troubleshooting flows, and common error-code explanations.
• Organize content by product, use case, and user role (e.g., plant technician vs. distributor) so users don’t get lost.
• Add a contextual search bar or chatbot that surfaces relevant articles instantly, without forcing users to dig.
• Create community forums or moderated discussion boards where experienced customers can help each other — with your team stepping in as needed.

4. Use Automation to Scale Efficiency — Not Replace the Human Touch

In manufacturing support, speed is critical but context is everything. When a production line is stalled or a key component fails, customers need fast answers. These moments call for empathy, clarity, and real-time decision making, which are things only a well-informed human can deliver. 

That’s why the most effective customer service teams in manufacturing blend automation (for efficiency) with human insight (for high-impact resolution).

Here’s how to implement automation and AI in your systems:

• Auto-tag and route tickets by issue type, product line, geography, or urgency
• Trigger auto-escalations for key accounts or priority product failures — no manual chasing needed.
• Send smart auto-acknowledgments that set expectations clearly. Example: “We’ve received your request and will follow up within 2 hours. In the meantime, here’s a guide that may help.”
• Lean on AI for first-response suggestions, document retrieval, and sentiment detection, but let humans handle nuance

5. Personalize Based on Role, Product, and Lifecycle Stage

In manufacturing, personalization goes far beyond using first names. Your customers might be engineers, procurement heads, or distributors, and each group expects different kinds of support.

There’s a clear business case too: nearly 90% of manufacturing customers are willing to pay more for companies that offer tailored experiences. Here’s how to personalize your customer service efficiently:

• Integrate support tools with your CRM and ERP to surface key context like order history, equipment specs, and previous tickets.
• Tailor your responses based on the customer’s role. For example, offer pricing clarifications for purchasing managers, and installation help for operations teams..
• Proactively reach out during critical lifecycle stages such as onboarding, post-installation check-ins, or contract renewal periods.
• Track and act on customer preferences (such as preferred communication channels or urgency levels) to make every interaction feel intentional.

6. Turn Data Into a Feedback Loop – Not Just a Dashboard

Too many support teams track metrics, but never act on them. And that’s a missed opportunity. 

If you’re paying close attention, your support data can reveal systemic issues, training gaps, and even product flaws before they escalate. According to Salesforce, 74% of manufacturing managers believe data-driven customer service will be their primary revenue driver within the next 10 years.

Here’s how to effectively track (and act on) your support data:

• Track more than just FRT and CSAT. Include ticket categories, repeat queries, and behavioral patterns (e.g., spikes in tickets after firmware updates or seasonal product rollouts).
• Set a monthly cadence to review top recurring issues. Loop them back to product, QA, or ops teams with actionable insights.
• Create automated triggers for proactive outreach. For example, if a customer logs 3+ tickets in a month, flag them for a quick check-in or personalized support.
• Feed qualitative insights into product planning. Agent notes and customer comments often surface issues you won’t find in a chart. This is where hidden friction lives.

7. Standardize and Scale Support Across Geographies

Manufacturers often serve customers across multiple time zones, languages, and regions, with support teams just as distributed. To ensure a consistent customer experience, your support teams need to be aligned, and have processes that can scale globally.

This is to ensure no matter where the customer is or who they speak to, they get the same high-quality support.

Here’s how to work well with a geographically fragmented team:

• Use a cloud-based support platform so HQ, field reps, and regional teams all access a single, shared customer view.
• Document handoff procedures across time zones to enable smooth follow-the-sun support.
• Share internal playbooks, macros, and fix documentation across all teams to ensure consistency in how issues are resolved.
• Translate support content and knowledge base articles for local teams and partners.

Real-Life Manufacturing Customer Service Success Stories

Now that we’ve covered the best practices to set up your customer service engine as a manufacturing business, lets look at some success stories of companies in the industry that have transformed their support for the better:

Get It Made (UK)

Get It Made, a manufacturing-as-a-service company, transformed its customer support by adopting Hiver’s customer service software.

With Hiver, their project managers could easily assign and track incoming inquiries, eliminating confusion, missed threads, and duplicate replies.

The impact:

• 250% improvement in team efficiency
• 25% faster response times
• 33% increase in email handling capacity

Get It Made now replies within minutes — a major edge in an industry where some competitors take days.

“The UK manufacturing industry can sometimes have a reputation for being slow and difficult to communicate with. Hiver has allowed us to break this stereotype — customers now describe us as a ‘breath of fresh air’.”
— Fin Brown, Project Manager, Get It Made

Caterpillar (US)

Global heavy equipment leader Caterpillar redefined customer service in industrial manufacturing using IoT and real-time analytics. By equipping machines with sensors to monitor performance in the field, they could detect issues before they became failures — and act fast.

The impact:

• $360,000 in maintenance costs saved for one customer by catching early engine oil dilution
• The proactive service model turned downtime into uptime, and support into a competitive advantage

In industries where every minute of failure is lost revenue, this approach builds deep customer loyalty.

Whirlpool (US)

Appliance giant Whirlpool built a nationwide network of independent service providers, carefully chosen for quality, local trust, and responsiveness.

Each partner is supported with:

• Consistent training
• Regional performance oversight
• Shared quality benchmarks

The result: A hybrid model that merges local presence with brand-level consistency, delivering a personalized, high-trust service experience across the country.

WS Display (US)

WS Display, a mid-sized trade show exhibit manufacturer, was buried under 1,000+ customer emails a day.

By switching to Hiver, they centralized support workflows, automated query assignments, and tracked every request from a single dashboard.

The impact:

• 495 work hours saved in one month
• No more missed or duplicated emails
• Faster response times and smoother order delivery

Hiver helped them go from inbox chaos to operational clarity — and gave their support team room to scale.

Each of these examples shows how manufacturing companies – big and small – can elevate customer service. Whether it’s through better tools, process improvements, or innovative tech like IoT, the payoff is clear: faster response times, higher efficiency, and more satisfied customers.

Rethinking customer service in manufacturing: From cost center to competitive edge

In a market where every minute of downtime matters and switching costs are shrinking, customer service has become a key differentiator. Companies still relying on outdated workflows risk more than just inefficiency, they risk losing customers.

To stay ahead, manufacturers need to:

• Audit existing support workflows
• Map customer pain points across the lifecycle
• Test scalable, tech-enabled service models

These shifts don’t need to be drastic. Start small, iterate, and build a support function that drives real business value.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

1. What is customer service in manufacturing?

Customer service in manufacturing refers to the support provided across the entire customer journey — from order placement to installation, maintenance, and after-sales troubleshooting. It’s not just about resolving issues. It also means ensuring timely delivery, clear communication, and minimal downtime, especially when dealing with complex machinery or mission-critical components.

2. What are the different types of customer service in manufacturing?

Manufacturing customer service varies by customer stage and complexity. The main types include:

• Pre-sales support: Assisting with product specs, customizations, and compatibility.
• Order and delivery support: Managing shipping updates, delays, and logistics.
• Post-sales technical support: Helping with setup, usage, and troubleshooting.
• Warranty and servicing: Handling repairs, claims, or routine maintenance.
• Field service: Sending technicians onsite to fix high-value or industrial equipment.

3. What metrics should manufacturers track for customer service?

Here are the most important support metrics for manufacturing teams:

• First Response Time (FRT): How quickly you acknowledge a customer’s query.
• Average Resolution Time (ART): How long it takes to fully resolve an issue.
• CSAT or NPS: What customers say about their experience post-interaction.
• Repeat Ticket Rate: How often the same issue resurfaces — a red flag.
• Ticket Volume by product/team/region: Reveals systemic or emerging issues.

4. How does AI and automation improve manufacturing customer support?

AI and automation help support teams work faster — without sacrificing quality.

• Automation handles repetitive tasks like ticket tagging, routing, and sending acknowledgments.
• AI suggests relevant solutions, analyzes sentiment, and highlights issue patterns.

5. What tools do manufacturers use for customer support?

Most manufacturing teams rely on a mix of:

• Helpdesk software: To manage queries across email, chat, and other channels.
• Self-service portals: So customers and technicians can find answers anytime.
• CRM and ERP integrations: To bring product history and account context into support.
• AI and automation tools: To speed up triage, response, and resolution.

6. Why is customer service important in the manufacturing industry?

In manufacturing, customer service directly impacts uptime, contract renewals, and revenue. It’s no longer just a support function — it’s a strategic growth lever. Great service helps retain key accounts, build long-term trust, and stand out in a competitive market.

7. How can manufacturers improve customer service?

To improve customer service in manufacturing, companies should:

• Use data to uncover and fix recurring issues
• Break down internal silos
• Offer omnichannel, context-rich support
• Build strong self-service systems
• Personalize by customer role and lifecycle stage