For a long time, our service support focus on distributor support, and we didn’t have enough understanding about the situation in end-user. With more and more products breakthrough in higher customer group, especially more and IVD products installed in high end laboratories, we realize that some changes should be there from service to satisfy the customers which has different demanding in products and service.
Change first comes from mindset, besides service support to customer, customer management is also required, and including not only device management but also customer needs management. From 2019, we initiated the IVD key accounts management (KAM) program, aiming to escalate our service by integrating resource from customer service team, application support team, sales and marketing team, starting from identified few key accounts.
Firstly we establish archive for each customer. Daily our engineer will interact with end-user to update the status of machine. Weekly internal communication meeting organized to inform to all stakeholders the situation and analyze the suggestions or demands from each account. Monthly service team or joint with application visit each customer to collect their voice and response to their requirement.
Soon we found that duet to high workload the regular time-based preventive maintenance plan is no more suitable. As a result, a new maintenance plan based on workload for each customer was set up. To ensure any hardware problem could be sorted out at the first visit, we established particular spare parts mini-stock for each account for fast response. Even in epidemic period, our engineers still visit customers in field, in spite of the lockdown and different challenge.
Moreover, gradually we have a sight into the higher requirement from these customers on quality management and other aspects. Accordingly, we worked out customized installation report, performance verification report and maintenance/visit report. All these help us to record each field service and meanwhile provide better documentation support to laboratory in their quality management. And our application team is working more and more close to end-user, to provide immediate support whenever there is concern about test result, which greatly enhanced the clinical confidence of operators.
One year after the KAM launched, now more than 10 customers involved in this project. For each customer, we have detailed archive. All the machines are running smoothly with minimum downtime. What’s most important is we are having in-depth interaction with these end-users and establish mutual trust. Now, with the introducing of remote connection system and IOT, KAM keeps escalating our service to these important customers.