Four Who Know How

By: Alan M. Webber, Heath RowTue Dec 18, 2007 at 11:47 PM

Best-practice answers to the four key customer service questions.

3. Do you keep your customers?

Company: General Electric Medical Systems

Service Innovator: Jack Albertson, applications program manager

Customer Service Program: TiP-TV

Most people look at general electric Medical Systems (GEMS) and see a $4 billion global manufacturer of technologically advanced medical equipment: X-ray devices, magnetic resonance (MR) and computed tomography (CT) scanners, and other diagnostic imaging machines. Jack Albertson sees a company whose real business is service. "We need to be there for the entire life cycle of the product, to keep in touch with the customer on a regular basis," he says.

When Albertson became applications program manager at the Waukasha, Wisconsin-headquartered company in 1990, those customers -- mostly large hospitals and clinics -- told him that GEMS was out of touch. "They said, 'You don't touch us nearly enough. We like some of the training you do, but you're not communicating enough with us,'" says Albertson. In fact, when GEMS did customer surveys, it discovered that customer training was the highest "dis-satisfier."

Fast-forward to 1997. Thanks to a comprehensive program created by Albertson and dubbed Training in Partnership -- or TiP (a trademarked name) -- GEMS's customer education activities now rank as its highest customer "satisfier."

The most innovative and far-reaching element of the TiP program is a television network (TiP-TV) that carries live training broadcasts into subscribers' workplaces. TiP-TV now has 1,950 subscription commitments; for general interest programs, it has drawn as many as 18,000 viewers. Fast Company asked Albertson to describe TiP-TV's unique role in helping GEMS solidify its contact with its customers.

If you go out and ask your customers, they'll tell you what you're doing wrong and how to make it right. In our case, they made it clear that they wanted more "touches." They wanted someone to hold their hand, to see them as often as possible, and to walk them through the use of every product. We knew we couldn't do all that training in person -- it simply wasn't cost-effective. But we had a lot of technology available to us. We had interested customers who wanted to get information from us. The question was, What kinds of high-tech training could we develop?

We created a series of Training in Partnership, or TiP, products. TiP-TV is one of our best-known programs. From the beginning, the primary purpose was to train radiologists and other technologists to use the equipment more effectively. All the broadcasts are live and interactive, using physicians or trained GE technologists to demonstrate the correct procedures. Our customers can call in and get real-time answers to their questions.

It's simple for the customer to use --and it provides us with a ready-made feedback loop. Every site that's going to watch a program signs up in advance, telling us roughly how many people will be watching at the site. Then, about three weeks before the program airs, we send a syllabus - one for each person at each site. It could be as long as 60 or 70 pages, and it previews all the material in the program. With the syllabus they also get pre- and post-program tests and a survey. Now the only way they get their continuing-education credits is by sending all that information back to us.

There are a number of direct benefits to our customers from TiP-TV. First, we deliver information to them that reduces the number of retakes -- times when a physician decides that an image isn't right and orders that it be taken again. Those retakes are very expensive for hospitals. Second, we help our customers cut down on procedure time. Today procedures involving an MR or CT take an average of 20 minutes each. What if using the right protocols would let you cut that time down to 10 minutes? That would represent a huge savings to our customers. And third, we reduce the cost of continuing education for our customers.

Of course, it's also a win for us. We want to keep that ongoing "touch" with the customer. We estimate that the average number of "touches" per customer has gone from 9 days per year four years ago to 21 days per year today. That's how to develop loyal customers.

It turns out that, like any network, we're in the ratings business. We ask our customers to rate our service on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being very poor and 5 being excellent. When we started this program, we were in the mid-3's. Since then we've gotten better and better, and now we're about 4.4. It's hard to get a perfect score from our customers -- they're very tough.