According to research by HubSpot on enhancing the customer support experience, the “statistics show that the more digital and automated the world gets, the more customers want to talk to a real person.”
Within the digital healthcare environment, our Customer Support team at Olinqua would wholeheartedly agree with this.
As we understand, a hospital environment and its workforce are busy and fast paced, hence additional technology and processes should not increase the cognitive load of healthcare workers.
This is where our Customer Support team believe we can and are playing a part in providing timely, empathetic help that keeps our customers’ needs at the forefront of every interaction.
Let’s delve deeper into the role of Customer Support and what our team believe are key elements to ensuring that our customers experience success whenever and wherever they use Olinqua’s technology.
Defining Customer Support
The definition continues to evolve as the expectations of today’s customers grow and change in response to continually rapid advancements in technology.
A personalised customer support experience is how our team view our services.
What does “personalised” customer support look like? It starts with an understanding of the customer’s situation when they call, email, and make contact. To get this important initial step of understanding required two landmark attributes: Empathy and product knowledge.
When we talk product knowledge, we refer to two important criteria: knowing the full potential of Olinqua’s technology, to realising the current use cases and processes for our respective customers. By combining this two knowledge, we can offer an informed and empowered solution for our customers.
Many of us know the definition of “empathy.” In customer support terms, product knowledge can only go so far, but when combined with caring for customers we interact with, the experience is elevated.
Customers become empowered to use the product, be knowledge experts for their wider teams and we use our empathy to relay our customers’ challenges (and wish list) to our product team.
Key elements for informed and empathetic customer support
Empathy in customer support involves:
- Understanding the consumer’s perspective to gain valuable insights for problem diagnosis and subsequent solution discovery. This understanding should then help to create a communication style that is tailored to the need, urgency, and requirements of individual customers.
- Having a knowledge base of your customer’s processes – what do they know about the solution’s capabilities, what have they used and more – can assist with collaborating with customers to arrive at an outstanding solution.
Having internal and external product knowledge enables and drives a “partnership” approach whenever we work to create a solution with our customers. When you have internal knowledge of your product, it not only makes a customer’s experience insightful and empowering but it also makes the support process fun for the team. Problem solving is one of the common traits for us in Customer Support.
Being reliable and agile with our solutions is another key element for successful customer support. Technology – as mentioned above – is constantly changing, and so too are workplaces with new or outgoing team members through to new processes – which all differ from one healthcare facility to another.
To deliver reliability and agility, we practice innovation to accommodate our client base. An example of this is our ongoing recording and documenting of all events to empower any support member to resolve common issues more efficiently. This of course can then be added to enhance our knowledge base.
Olinqua’s customer support experience
The Customer Support team at Olinqua not only ensures the above key elements are observed, but they are also implemented in our everyday through these experiences:
Two branches of customer support
- Customer Engagement – getting in touch and replying to our customers within a day or within the hour, based on identified severity levels, through to a proactive follow up that can involve pursuing unopened emails with phone calls. The key of course is timely communications and workflows that encourages positive engagement. In addition, we offer a 24/7/365 support desk, a dedicated 1300 number and class-leading service level agreement terms with 15 min engagement 24/7/365.
- Customer Monitoring – we provide proactive monitor our customers systems to ensure high availability and to act quickly in the event of a downtime. We also know that every customer’s system is different, so when we get an alert, we follow a comprehensive triage flow to do as much as possible to resolve the issue and get hands on – if necessary – to investigate further by, for example, working with the internal help desk.
Channel Partners knowledge
Research and understanding of all our channel partners’ technology and systems is essential to the Customer Support team at Olinqua. As mentioned above, this knowledge is key to understanding the context and situation of every end-user, from nurses to ICT (Information and Communication Technology) managers.
Customer Support beyond metrics
Here at Olinqua we are proud of our strong customer relationships that goes beyond Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and happiness scores (e.g. Net Promoter Score).
In our efforts to continue to deliver industry leading customer support, we practice and measure all the above but core to all these elements put together is fostering positive, collaborative relationships that help our customers grow, empowering them to succeed with Olinqua’s technology and by extension, their work to continue delivering quality patient care.
This mission-critical support services are provided by our team to 70+ hospitals around Australia.
For more information on our customer support services, please get in touch.
