Faster customer service and improved customer experience in a life science company

This company has been using a global medical information system to handle product-related queries (questions, complaints, side effects, and so on) for over ten years. The tool serves all distribution markets (90 countries) and its main task is to improve communication between the company and its customers. In this case, the customer is anyone who wants to provide feedback on the drug or medical device – a doctor, nurse, patient, and so on. The tool is used in the company by three groups of users, who, depending on their role, are responsible for verifying queries and responding to them. Currently, the team consists of 1,000 people and handles up to 100,000 queries per year.

The system is built on Salesforce Service Cloud. Craftware has been responsible for its maintenance (operations) in the Managed Service formula since 2016. In simple terms, maintaining the system means ensuring continuity of operations (one of the conditions for efficient handling of medical queries). Continuous reduction of service time has been one of the customer’s goals since the launch of the system in 2013. Thanks to ongoing, regular improvements to the system (for example, a uniform service standard for all countries, quality control of the responses, and knowledge base), the average call handling time was reduced to 2 hours. It is a very good result considering the specific nature of the calls. Questions about the use of drugs, course of treatment, interactions with other drugs, clinical trials, and so on are not easy to answer quickly. Therefore, the idea was to provide service staff with suitable sources of knowledge, allowing them to react to the customer’s queries as quickly as possible. Quality control ensures that all responses meet the company’s standards.

Solution

Our task was to propose actions that would, at least, allow the customer to maintain the current standard of service. It was our minimum plan but from the very beginning, we wanted to adopt an approach different from those typically followed by IT service providers. In short, the standard approach in the area of operations is reactive and focuses on SLAs, KPIs, and contract terms, and the impulse to act is always external (service ticket, customer email).

In our opinion, it might be difficult to build business value for the customer when working in such a “from-to” mode. Additionally, the value in operations is hard to define or capture as it consists of many small tasks – often not spectacular enough for users to notice.

Therefore, we proposed a proactive approach, where compliance with KPIs and contract terms is only the necessary basis. At the heart of our activities, instead of SLA, we put XLA, that is, Experience Level Agreement, characteristic for DevOps. We focused on optimizing processes but not only those on the customer’s side. “Let’s do something to make our job easier, let’s not focus only on IT solutions for the customer. We should also take care of IT solutions for ourselves and this will help us build value for the customer” – this is how we can briefly summarize our approach. We started with the analysis of current activities to determine where we waste time and what we can do better and faster. We also prepared a forecast for the service for the next few years and identified areas where we see the most room for improvement.

The extensions we implemented allow savings in operations of up to 240 working hours per month – on average from 8 to 80 hours per month, depending on the tool. We received very positive feedback from the customer (not only in terms of financial benefits as the most measurable – reducing maintenance expenses, while maintaining the quality of operation of the supported system). The impact of our improvements on the customer experience has been noticed, and the users of the system (on the company’s side) mention the following points as the most important benefits:

• faster query processing,
• better communication with our team,
• increased security in the use of the system.

The customer appreciated our proactive approach – the fact that it went beyond “taking orders from the queue blindly”. Improving the comfort of our work was not a goal in itself. It was supposed to improve the daily functioning of the business in the long run. Our project shows that operations can initiate and create new business needs.