About
This manufacturer makes industrial lubricants and metalworking fluids for steel mills, cement plants and automotive parts makers. Its technical support team sits between the lab and the sales force. Every technical question a rep picks up in the field ends up with this team.
"The questions we get aren't hard because nobody knows the answer," says the Technical Support Manager. "They're hard because the answer is spread across data sheets, approval lists, test reports and emails from years ago."
Opportunity
The questions from sales never stopped. Each one meant finding the right data sheet and its latest version, pulling the test results, digging for a similar past case, then rewriting all of it as something a customer would accept.
"We all know what a good answer looks like. Getting there just took the whole day," the manager says. The writing was a burden of its own. "A right answer with a weak argument doesn't move a customer. We had to write that argument from scratch every time."
Solution
Delegating instead of searching
Today the team hands each question to Lubinpla first, the way they would hand it to a capable junior colleague. Lubinpla reads the team's documents and past records, works out what applies to this customer and this application, and sets out the answer step by step, with a source on every point.
“It explains a huge amount of material logically. Every point says where it came from, so I only open what I want to check.”
Only the judgment is left
The engineer's job has moved from producing the answer to judging it. They read the reasoning, check the points that matter, change anything they would put differently, and approve it. Nothing goes to sales or to the customer before they do.
“We still make the decision. We just don't do everything that comes before it anymore.”
A reply that already makes the case
Earlier this year a cement plant wanted to change the gear oil in its kiln drive and asked whether the company's product could replace the competitor's oil it was running. Lubinpla compared the two oils' viscosity, additive chemistry and the gearbox maker's requirements, checked whether they could mix during the changeover or the system needed flushing, and pulled up earlier changeovers at similar plants. The reply set out the recommendation, the reasons for it, the conditions it depended on, and what to watch in the first weeks.
The engineer added one line on seal compatibility and approved it. "The argument was already there, so there was almost nothing to fix. It makes the job so much easier."
The rep who passed the question on remembers it the same way. "I walked the customer through the reply as it was. It answered their questions before they asked them," says the company's Technical Sales Representative.
Impact
The team still owns every answer. What changed is that it no longer spends the day on work that doesn't need an expert. The engineers now put that time into difficult complaints and site visits.
“Most of the job used to be finding things. Now it's deciding. That's the job we were supposed to be doing all along.”