Customer education: Helping our customers get the most out of their solution

“Customers don’t know what they don’t know” – day to day usage is one thing but learning about additional or newly developed functionality to speed up workflow and provide other benefits is essential.

John Hamill, Service Manager at CliniSys | MIPS gives a personal view of a new program he’s launching – Customer Service Tutorials.

“I was challenged at the beginning of the year to answer the question of what we can do to help our customers get the most out of their solution and present my findings to the Senior Leadership Team at CliniSys | MIPS.”

“Training has always been something I enjoy doing and I was delighted to have the opportunity to develop a program for our customers. We appreciate that laboratories have a number of challenges lately to overcome with regards to product training, so any process needs to be simple and easy to access. Inducting new staff members is a time consuming process as there are many different aspects concerning their LIMS solution that needs to be covered.

“We also mustn’t forget that there are existing staff members who need refresher courses to maintain competency levels and a necessity to introduce and train on new releases of software. Levels of knowledge required for individual roles also varies widely, i.e. System administrators have to know the whole solution and be able to maintain and adapt the solution to meet the many challenges pathology labs face on a day by day basis.

“Ideally we would love to run Training Courses in a classroom style environment where we can interact and provide practical workshop sessions. However, because of time demands and workload pressures this is increasingly difficult to achieve. Our new material that we will publish on-line will make it easier for users to learn about our products and how to troubleshoot any issues they experience. With the material being on-line they can catch up on our content whenever and wherever suits each individual user.

“We already have a number of different options to help with customer training and other tools for assisting with using our products :-

• Product training courses, we have been able adapt these courses to run them remotely via Microsoft Teams or Zoom.
  
• Knowledge base, available on our Service Portal for rapid triage of common issues
  
• On-line help files, easy access from our products; easily searchable containing screen shots for simplicity.
  
• Annual classroom program, free of charge training courses designed to be completed in one day to maximize opportunity for customers to attend. Due to the pandemic these have had to close and we therefore moved to digital webinars to share information. Now with the added benefit that we can record the sessions and share with a wider audience
  
• Bi-annual user groups – highly beneficial for our customers to learn about new developments. These include master classes and workshops on specific areas. Again moved to a digital platform this year due to the pandemic. Customers find these events so valuable and take the knowledge they’ve learnt and shared with other customers back to their labs. The recordings of these digital sessions are also available on the CliniSys | MIPS YouTube Channel

“With these challenges identified, I presented on a number of different options that CliniSys | MIPS could do to help our customers with their training requirements. We discussed these and many more options and came up with a plan to drive this forward.

• 12 monthly roll out plan for delivering content to be available on-line with the focus on troubleshooting
  
• Enhancement of our Knowledge Based Articles (KBA) with videos explaining how to resolve issues
  
• Product surgeries where customers are invited to ask us questions about challenges they have in the lab so we can offer solutions. These will be run and recorded as part of National Customer Service Week. (5th – 9th October 2020)

“In addition, the product team are also doing their own review of how we help our customers get the most out of our solutions and they have some great ideas for enhancing the help files they already provide. Not only will the enhancement or new module be clearly explained but the reasons it was introduced together with the anticipated benefits will also be detailed. This new approach has already been introduced as part of our new Specimen Processing module.

“Our customers have already been notified of our intention to deliver regular monthly on-line tutorials and feedback on this approach has been extremely positive. Our first videos are already available via our YouTube channel and we’ll keep our customers updated as new content is published.”