OEM&Lieferant Ausgabe 2/2021

98 Engineering Partner Intuitive and smart: The new Miele Service Documentation By Sven Drews, Project Manager in the account IT system development portals at ServiceXpert, Munich Owners of premium domestic appliances also expect efficient and targeted services with added value in the field of after-sales services over the entire life of their appliance. One success factor is, among other things, the worldwide availability of service information with high data quality in terms of completeness, accuracy and currentness. This ser- vice information is to be made available via smart tools in order to simplify and, above all, speed up necessary repairs. For this reason, the world-famous company Miele & Cie. KG has ordered the engineering service provider ServiceXpert to develop the new web-based Miele service documentation application “Miele Service Documentation”. ServiceXpert was ordered to develop this innovative integrated service tool to re- place existing Miele Service Applications that had been in use for up to fifteen years. The challenge was to provide the increas- ing amount of data and the ever-increasing complexity of the products in a user-friend- ly application that is characterised by in- tuitive operation and a high degree of ef- ficiency, while serving the target group of end customers as well as contact centres and internal and external service techni- cians. To achieve this, the engineers at Ser- viceXpert implemented a comprehensive role concept for the Miele Service Docu- mentation. Access to the service data and the range of functions can be controlled via different roles. User experience was the focus of the Miele Service Documentation. The development was preceded by a comprehensive design phase accompanied by user experience workshops lasting several days. In this pro- cess, the concept for a new user interface and the associated functions were agreed in detail in close cooperation with contact centre agents, service technicians, user experience specialists and application ex- perts from Miele as well as the software en- gineers from ServiceXpert. A central result of the user experience workshops was to integrate all service documentation informa- tion into one application – previously there were three. The user interface subsequently implemented by the after-sales system pro- fessionals at ServiceXpert is characterised by optimised user-friendliness. The usage of the new application will save many clicks and therefore a lot of time thanks to the im- proved process orientation and prioritised presentation of information. Miele publishes spare parts lists for domes- tic appliances via the Miele Service Docu- mentation and the ordering process is inte- grated into the B2C shop. The guided search helps end users and service technicians alike to quickly find the relevant information. Miele expects several million search queries a year via the Miele Service Documentation, which requires good system performance. ServiceXpert engineers have been contrib- uting the know-how and in-depth experi- ence required for the development, opera- tion and provision of such after-sales portal applications to Miele applications for over 20 years, in order to provide users at Miele with optimal tools. In the guided search, additional search terms can be added to primary search terms such as unit types, e.g. error codes, spare part numbers or function group names. The most important search terms are completed automatically. According to estimates based on assumed search workflows, this proce- dure will halve the search time in some use cases compared to the Miele Service Appli- cations currently in use. However, since the best functions are only perceived as adding value with correspondingly sufficient sys- tem performance, clear performance tar- gets were defined during the development of the main functions such as the guided search. Another focuswas the development of a start page to each unit type: the dashboard. Over 80 percent of the service information used is only one click away from the dashboard, a clear prioritisation of the content enables a clear and user-friendly presentation. The Miele Service Documentation is op- erated on a central server and accessed via a browser. An offline version was de- veloped for use on the mobile devices of Miele service technicians. This of fline version is distributed via the Internet. The service information is stored centrally in several databases and updated data is imported daily via a publication interface. Image: © Adobe Stock/Lightfield Studios