Putting services back at the heart of the customer experienceA major challenge for construction industry brands

Do you have a sense of service ? Too often relegated to the back of the catalogue "because there are a few pages left over", services are in fact a genuine communication and marketing topic, creating value for your brand and your audiences ! While the products manufactured and distributed by construction market players are broadly aligned - in terms of both performance and price - it is truly the services that make the difference, build customer loyalty, grow margins and strengthen brand preference. 

As pillars of a successful customer experience, it is high time to take a hard look at them and put them back at the heart of your communication strategy !

What if we focused the service offering on what customers really expect ? How do you give them (back) the place they deserve in your communication? Structure, market, communicate or innovate: everyone has their own winning recipe !

Your services deserve as much attention as your products !

Service marketing that meets audiences' needs

For too long, services were treated as an afterthought - the "5^th wheel", so to speak: they rounded out the product offering but were not seen as drivers of communication, and therefore of business. Services were thus barely integrated into the sacrosanct "offer marketing".

One of the major obstacles to promoting services (and therefore to their commercial performance) often lies in their lack of structure and organisation - sometimes a lack of clarity, often a lack of visibility. 

Unlike products, the services offered by a manufacturer or distributor are, indeed, rarely marketed to answer the question : what does my customer expect ? How can I make their life easier, help them progress ? How can I save them time (and money) at THIS precise stage of their journey, of their project ?

The good news is that whenever a serious need comes up from the field, a service is generally created to meet it ! An app to guide product selection, an FDES datasheet configurator, sizing software, a specification support service, an assistance hotline… There is no shortage of ideas - and so much the better: that is what gives housing and construction brands their agility and limitless capacity for innovation !

To ensure their success, the task now is to position and organise them properly within your audiences' customer journey so that they respond precisely to their needs, pain points and constraints. 

In short, your services deserve as much attention as your products ! Well marketed, they create value and build customer loyalty, they grow your margin and contribute to your brand's influence.

Communicating effectively about services

Your services are positioned and organised to meet your customers' needs: they are legible ! Now it is a matter of making them visible.

For your services to become a pillar of your communication strategy, they must be fully integrated into the customer experience and thus occupy a privileged place in your marketing activities.

An inspiring example is the brand Atlantic, which the agency has had the pleasure of supporting for several years now. With "La Semaine des Services" (Services Week), the brand devotes an entire week of the year to presenting its services to industry professionals (installers, distributors, specifiers, housebuilders). A wide range of formats accompanies this special week: social media content, technical morning sessions in points of sale, webinars, content, customer testimonials and more. This spotlight allows the manufacturer to nurture brand preference by putting its services back at the heart of the conversation.

For its part, door manufacturer JELD-WEN opts for a different approach: integrating its services as an essential component of its product communication campaigns. The mantra is : "when we talk about a product, we must talk about a service!". The manufacturer champions a "solution" approach delivered through the combination of a high-performing product and a useful service.

Schneider Electric also places service at the heart of its communication with one clear idea : a service is not necessarily a tool or a document - it is above all a state of mind. It is simply about being of service to professionals, helping them progress and making their daily lives easier ! With the agency, the brand offers, for example, awareness and training cycles to meet the needs of electricians : we identified the "hot" topics of their daily lives (running their business, recruitment, digitalisation…) and proposed content, training courses and webinars around these themes to help them upskill. That is what a sense of service means !

Finally, some manufacturers go further still and innovate through services. Innovating through service means recognising your customers' needs and pain points and addressing them, before your competitors do, with a disruptive or creative approach.

For example, ISOVER Saint-Gobain does not merely offer high-performing, sustainable insulation - the brand also provides solutions to support tradespeople with the administrative procedures around energy savings certificates (CEE), thereby accepting to step outside its core manufacturing business. The Rénov’aides platform has enabled professionals to work more efficiently while cementing the brand's leadership.

In conclusion : high-performing product + useful services = a global value-added solution = loyalty and brand preference