For more than 15 years, Mohamed Chemloul’s extensive career has focused on NXP’s global customer support network. In Mohamed’s current role as NXP’s VP of Digital Experience and Customer Application Support (CAS), the focus is on designing made easy. Our goal is to offer NXP support to every customer—no matter how big or how small, through direct and virtual channels such as online support and NXP.com. We asked Mohamed to share his insights on how NXP is building authentic relationships in a global and increasingly online world.
Mohamed Chemloul: Here at NXP, we foster a dynamic and collaborative environment. By leveraging our global teams, we break down silos and offer our customers the best functional expertise from around the world. This constitutes a differentiator when it comes to supporting our customers. Indeed, they tend to have a distributed footprint. Sometimes, this happens through their partners.
MC: For more than 15 years at NXP, I can say the key to my achievements in managing a global team is setting clear goals and focusing on them. As a technical support team, we make our customers our focus. What is important to note, beyond helping our customers design with NXP products, is the proactive actions we execute to win opportunities. Some proactiveness can be innovative and could even design a product, yet to be released. We are at the forefront with our customers’ R&D teams. Beyond that, communication and collaboration are drivers of problem solving. I look to be a manager that solicits feedback to drive innovation, build relationships, and create a connected environment.
MC: Sometimes, customers [engineers] select the chipset based on their confidence in NXP’s ability to deliver. Our recommendation requires the ability to interact with customers on the application and provide a technical proposal that helps them finalize their design. The best way to prepare for this is to have a deep knowledge of our products and customer applications. Hence, the knowledge management of the team is essential.
In the customer base of NXP, we also serve, through our distributors, smaller customers. For this, NXP seeks to create an effective customer journey in this new digital landscape. Here, the idea is to enable an easy design with NXP online. These last few years, the world saw a heavy focus and quick pivot to all things digital. We are fortunate that at NXP we have the channels and our online support team in place. We continue to build our virtual tools to support the full customer lifecycle and prioritize the journey.
MC: Our goal at NXP is to support all of our customers, regardless of their size and place, in their design cycle. We recognize that our customers have extensive product knowledge and they come to us looking for the total solution when building their applications. This is driven more and more by a short time-to-market window. To facilitate that need, we provide instant, digital access to all the resources engineers need to develop. We have evolved from product-centric to solution-centric. Tools such as Design Advisor boost time-to-market. These tools provide block diagram proposals, associated lists of components, software resources, and in some cases, existing boards that can be leveraged in the design-in phase. Beyond that, for customers with existing designs, we have a Cross Reference tool. This tool advises what NXP components are available based on a competitor part, so that a customer can either switch designs or build the next-generation design with NXP. It’s not just our products that help keep customers ahead of the competition, it is also the instant access to resources.
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MC: The demand for online access has accelerated; a trend that existed even before COVID. Engineers want instant and direct access to resources needed for development. The fact that a customer can access information directly creates less downtime and reduces cost, resulting in a shorter time-to-market. Beyond that, there is an additional need for technical training, webinars, and videos to support the design-in process upfront. As we look towards the future and how we can further support our customers with limited disruption to development flow, we believe artificial intelligence is needed to help source the right information, faster. With all our products and resources living on our website, it is a huge database to manage. To ensure limited disruption to our customers, we started using Al behind our website to manage data and support for our customers.
MC: NXP strives to be one step ahead of our customers' needs. Eighty-five percent of visitors coming to our online channels are engineers who are in need of products to develop applications. Today, our bouquet of tools helps customers find and select products with ease and speed.
Our goal, is to have the NXP Design Advisor, Product Advisor and Cross Reference tools include more data. The data should answer questions such as 'what is the best combination of products’ and 'based on historical experience, what was the best design.' To accomplish this, we will enhance our existing tools with AI to add value to these resources, giving our customers what we believe is a competitive advantage.
We also believe tools are only as effective as the support available. At NXP, we continue to look for ways to enhance online support. We want to leverage machine learning to help our customers receive instant advice and support – we plan on incorporating an advanced knowledge database to answer design questions. On top of this, we believe customization is a key contributor to engineers developing the next-generation design. Servicing a global customer base requires more than just offering products - it requires a complete package of online resources - coupled with customizable tools and support to create a seamless digital experience. We can summarize this as our commitment to designing made easy.
Nicole oversees digital communication and content strategy for NXP’s Digital Experience and CAS team. In this role, she is responsible for developing and executing digital communication programs that highlight the online tools that serve our customers.
