Taking a Comprehensive Approach to Customer Satisfaction

For over 40 consecutive quarters—from the mid-2000s to 2016—Konica Minolta Healthcare Americas has been ranked as the  #1 Computed Radiography (CR) manufacturer for customer satisfaction by MD Buyline, an independent organization that provides hospitals and health systems with evidence-based research and consulting services to advise hospitals on critical purchasing decisions.

And now, the company has done it again in Digital Radiography (DR). In MD Buyline’s 3rd quarter 2016 report for Radiographic Units, Digital and Conventional, Konica Minolta earned the No. 1 overall DR User Satisfaction rating.

The priority of the customer experience is interwoven into our company culture and the MD Buyline top ranking clearly supports that. This success doesn’t start with service; it begins with our professional sales force that takes a consultative approach to managing the customer’s needs. It’s that total customer service approach—from R&D to sales to implementation to service—that has kept us top-ranked in CR for so long and has led to our swift rise in DR.

Starting with product development

System design and performance are critical to user satisfaction. We’ve seen service as one of the primary inputs in product design and improvement. They take our data—the improvements and feature requests that we receive over time—and embed that into the product.

R&D also focuses on product design for reliability and serviceability. The goal is to make it easier for customers to avoid any downtime. Konica Minolta’s service engineers are well-trained and empowered to resolve most technical issues.

Our service team truly believes we have the luxury to install and support the highest quality Digital Radiography systems in the world.

Taking a consultative approach to sales

Whether it’s done by one of Konica Minolta’s sales team members or a business partner, listening to a customer’s needs is the most important first step. Konica Minolta’s sales representatives can then take a consultative approach to recommending the best solutions for their customers.

The point-of-system purchase is where our service team takes over and truly drives the customer experience and our customer satisfaction focus pushes Konica Minolta to take service to the next level.  Once the sale is made, the site is assigned a project manager who becomes a single point of contact for the customer. The project manager oversees the complete installation, from room design to power and networking requirements to scheduling resources.

Having one point of contact takes the burden of this coordination off the end user and puts it on Konica Minolta. The end result is a great experience for the customer.  That project manager remains with the site until there is complete customer satisfaction.

Asking questions up front

DR implementations utilizing wireless communications are inherently more complicated than CR installations. Our focus is to move all the technical and workflow questions up front, to mitigate any surprises by essentially pulling off the blindfold. We start with all the site implementation requirements and integrate these specifics into the installation plan so the system operates perfectly in the customer’s environment. 

The focus is to ensure the field service and implementation teams can prepare in a complete manner, so when the site goes live there are minimal issues. 

Innovating the customer experience

Konica Minolta’s Customer Care Center embraces a culture where everyone takes ownership. We make it personal. Our Customer Care Center employees provide our customers with a telephone extension and an email where they, personally, can be reached.  There’s no passing any follow-up from a service call to the “next available agent.”

The team is proactive in enhancing customer satisfaction. Each month, thousands of calls are made to customers who experienced recent installations or service events. We make sure every customer is satisfied. If not—and that rarely happens—the event is escalated back through our Customer Care Center so we can make it right. We simply don’t take great service for granted.

It’s all about leaving the customer with a smile. Service often begins as a negative experience in this industry, and Konica Minolta’s team is determined to turn each call around. To get the customer to smile means going that extra distance to ensure their issue is resolved and they are completely satisfied with the end result.

Let me share a recent experience with a customer whom I knew personally. Prior to the down event, the customer challenged Konica Minolta’s service provision. He said to me, “You won’t wow me with service events, Konica Minolta doesn’t do anything differently than other manufacturers,” but I told him I would change that.

The customer’s equipment was connected to Konica Minolta’s remote monitoring solution, Aero Remote, and the Customer Care Center received electronic notification from the device at 9 am. A replacement device was put on a plane and scheduled to arrive at the site by mid-afternoon that same day. When the customer called me at 1 pm to alert us to the down event, I told the customer that the call center had received the notice and arranged for a replacement to be shipped immediately.

When I explained the service engineer should arrive in approximately 10 minutes with the replacement device, he couldn’t believe it. This customer was impressed, commenting, “This is where the future of service needs to go.”

Konica Minolta can differentiate our service from others in the industry; it’s more than just being proactive. We want to address events in real time and that’s a key differentiator for Konica Minolta. We are constantly looking for ways to make our customers’ lives easier… it may seem rudimentary but that is embedded in our culture, our employees, and our partners.

Kevin Chlopecki is the Vice President of Service Operations at Konica Minolta Healthcare Americas, Inc.

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