Surveys Help Toshiba Connect With Customer Needs
Consumers waiting in line for their flu shots—and the docs with the needles—aren’t the only ones concerned about healthcare reform. B-to-B marketers have their brows furrowed too.
“Healthcare reform is a very big issue for us, and how we interact with our customers is colored by that,” says Cathy Wolfe, director, marketing services, Toshiba America Medical Systems. “Any change in healthcare sort of freezes our market.”
Price points for Toshiba’s systems range from $25,000 to $200,000 for an ultrasound scanner, to an average of $1 million for an MRI machine. Average sales cycles run from a couple of months to a year, depending on the item. Wolfe notes the diagnostic imaging market as a whole posted sales of about $6 billion in 2008; this year, that’s on track to drop to $4 billion.
“Now, the sales cycle is longer and customers are doing more research,” she says. “We have to make sure everything is really buttoned down and done right, and that we make sure we’re doing a good job of maintaining the perception in the industry and with third party analysts, because our customers are using those folks a lot more to determine who they’ll buy from.”
Wolfe says she looks at customer satisfaction through the “six Cs:”
· Context: the environment the company operates in (for Toshiba, that means healthcare reform)
· Culture: the face of the company, both to employees and customers
· Customer-centric: making the customer the center of the company’s universe
· Communication: how the company connects with the customer base
· Celebration: the completion of the cycle (“If we’ve done well with our customers then we need to celebrate how that happened,” notes Wolfe.)
· Continuous improvement: What needs to happen next?
Toshiba keeps on top of customer satisfaction levels with regular internal surveys. When it began the survey program about a decade ago, they found that while the company’s products were viewed as reliable, customers weren’t happy with the business as a whole. Over time, internal processes were improved, “a lot of fire fighting” went on and approval ratings went up.
“We ask customers to rate us on a 10 point scale,” says Wolfe. “If they give a rating of six or below, that generates a performance alert, and the company addresses the issue.”
Wolfe admits that initially it wasn’t easy to convince the sales force of the worth of the survey program. How did they show reps the light?
“There wasn’t a great understanding of how it would help them manage their business or how it would help their employees on the service side of the organization,” says Wolfe. “So we took the [survey] information and drew a strong link to what appears in the ratings of the third party analysts, so our folks understand that what they do here and now has an impact on what appears in the market, which has an impact on the perception of the company and our ability to be successful.”
How is ROI of the surveys being judged? “I wish we had a much closer tie to that than we do currently, but we basically look at it by the company’s sales,” says Wolfe, noting Toshiba is in the process of implementing an Oracle back office system. “We would really like to be able to do it by things like customer type, but we’re not there yet.”
The next step in Toshiba’s customer facing initiatives, says Wolfe, is looking at how to better deal with larger institutions, which can have more demanding needs, and to implement more customer skills training for employees.
