Learn How you Can Reduce Response Time in the Medical Device Industry

Paramantra has always been at the forefront of creating practical solutions for challenges faced by the Medical Service community. We understand that amidst high competition your sales revenue alone will not keep you afloat. As a supplier of medical devices, it is your responsibility to ensure that clients always receive prompt service. It is only when medical professionals and hospitals receive quality service, will they begin to foster a long-term association with your company. First-time response and repair time can make a world of a difference to the way in which customers experience your product. While there are myriad ways of offering quality service to clients, we decided to focus on acquiring insights from call trends. The 3-month data reflects incoming call trends for a group of medical device suppliers.

Incoming Call Trend

The projected data for incoming calls indicates that calls usually peak between 11:30 AM to 12:30 PM. It is safe to assume, that your team is most likely receiving scheduled maintenance calls during these hours. While the projected data shows a positive response rate of 70%, the aim should be to provide 100% engagement. The primary reason behind this is that any call could be indicative of a critical situation.

Another question that you need to address is who is answering support calls received post 7 PM? Your internal support team handles all incoming inquiries made between 8:30 PM to 7:00 PM, but they need to give equal, if not more, importance to calls received post 7 PM. You need to address all calls received post 7:00 PM as high-severity calls which demand immediate resolution. A device malfunction or a downtime is the most likely reason that you are receiving calls late into the night. As a result, you need to decide which team will handle these calls. The internal support team could continue answering incoming calls and then direct the field technician accordingly. An alternative is to directly route these calls to field technicians. These field executives are usually better equipped to understand the problem at hand and provide faster resolution. This will considerably decrease the time taken to redirect calls and explain the problems to multiple executives before reaching the right person.

There is a need to reduce response rates when you are dealing with medical device malfunctions. A downtime can cause a ripple effect where a minor malfunction could put a life at stake. Hence, suppliers of medical devices can ensure that all ticket requests received from multiple communication channels including calls, SMS, Email and from the device itself, are automated. Your systems should be able to auto-update, auto-predict and auto-report all issues. As a supplier, it is not merely enough to react to a mission-critical situation, rather, you should pro-actively prepare your teams to combat emergency scenarios.