A Conversation with Dave Hartley of TransLogic, a Swisslog Healthcare Company
Dave Hartley, VP of Customer Care, TransLogic – suppliers of pneumatic tube systems for over 2700 hospitals
Q: What service challenges were you trying to solve with Neuron7?
A: The three challenges we were trying to solve with Neuron7 were…
- To collect knowledge from our experienced techs before they retire or move to other companies
- Reduce warranty costs
- Improve customer satisfaction by quickly bringing our junior techs up to par with our more senior techs
Q: What has been the impact to your business from using Neuron7 to solve these challenges?
A: In our first year using Neuron7, the biggest impact has been in our customer customer care call center. We’ve seen a reduction in wait times by about 45%, knocking off over 2 minutes that our customers were waiting.
We’ve seen a reduction in calls from our users into the call center because they’re using Neuron7 instead of calling our call center. We’ve seen our abandon rates decrease by 31% and we’ve seen our service rates increase by 17%. We are getting to our customers in a quicker amount of time and providing them answers before they get frustrated.
We’ve seen our customer satisfaction go up and, in the field, we’ve seen our technicians’ customer satisfaction scores go up.
We are no longer getting complaints like “Why don’t you send the person that the tech on site is on the phone with?” We’re now seeing “Hey, even though he’s new, he’s a very good technician. Keep sending him out.”
Q: How did you initially hear about Neuron7 and what sold you on working with them?
A: At a TSIA conference I went to about four years ago I stopped at the Neuron7 booth and said “What is Neuron7?”. They talked us through it, we liked the idea, and we started the process of being prepared to go with the AI company.
We chose Neuron7 for their proof of concept. We gave them 30 days worth of data from a particular site and gave them a week to crunch it. The site was a New York customer, not even on my side of the business, on another side of the business.
We knew what the problem was. It took us three months to figure out three issues.
Neuron7 came back in a week and identified all three issues, not only because of their AI tool, but because of their service-related experience. Neuron7 was able to describe the problems exactly like we do in our own lessons learned. They did this without ever knowing the customer, being there, or even seeing the issue, just from our data.
Q: What were your requirements when you’re looking to partner with an AI solution like Neuron7? And how did Neuron7 exceed those requirements?
A: We were looking for easy applications, embedded into Salesforce, which they do. And we were looking for a tool that is easy to use.
With N7 Intelligent Search, we’ve had over almost 10,000 searches and of those, 96% are correct, an accuracy that’s pretty unbelievable.
Q: What recommendations would you give to other service leaders as they’re looking to start their AI journey?
A: You’re never going to be ready enough. Your information is never going to be good enough. The AI tools will learn and get you to where you want to be. If you wait, you’ll never pull the trigger and it’ll never happen.
"With N7 Intelligent Search, we've had over almost 10,000 searches and of those, 96% are correct, an accuracy that's pretty unbelievable."
Q: Can you describe the business case you set out to achieve with Neuron7 and the results that you got working with the solution and the people?
A: The first thing was to improve customer satisfaction and reduce warranty cost, both warranty cost from our techs and from parts replacement. In year one, we went heavily with our call center because that’s where we thought we’d have our biggest impact. We said something like 70% of our improvement will be there. Those numbers have improved. They improved so much.
We’re not backfilling a position that’s going to be vacated shortly because Neuron7 has allowed us to do that. So we’re not rehiring that position.
We’ve reduced our technician labor warranty. When we go out and try to fix something, we have to come back out and repair it again if we didn’t do it the first time. We reduced those visits by 330 hours, 3/4 of this year compared to last year. It doesn’t sound like a significant amount, but that’s 41 visits that we’re not taking away from another customer. It’s 41 times we’re not interrupting the schedule that we have planned. It’s 41 times we made the customer happy the first time.
And we’ve just been using that for less than a year – it’s a big improvement and we’ll continue to improve as we go on.
Q: What’s the main reason you’d recommend Neuron7 to other service leaders?
A: I love the culture of the people that work there. First, they’re not sales, they’re not project management, they’re service first. They want to care about what you’re doing. That is the number one thing. The tool itself is great. I mean, it learns! It tells you when there’s an issue like, “hey, look at this data, make sure it’s correct”. It does what AI tools are supposed to do. But the biggest reason would be the culture fit with the people.
Q: What are you looking forward to next in partnering with Neuron7?
A: The next thing I’m looking forward to is the analytics that they’re developing. One of the biggest ones is how parts are used, where they’re used, how often they’re used, and who’s using them. For anyone that has a bunch of technicians working for them, you want to know who are your better techs – who’s a parts replacer and who’s a troubleshooter. Neuron7 allows you to help determine that from the analytics that the tool provides.
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