To read Part One click here.
I previously discussed the pitfalls of the traditional order processing efforts of many Medical Device and Diagnostics Companies. Many hospitals submit orders to these companies, which then need to be addressed and processed immediately to ensure that the hospital has sufficient supplies to perform their health care services. For some of my customers, flagging priority orders from hospitals ensures that high risk patients get the care and treatment that they need. I’ve seen that urgency to be especially important within the Cardiac and Respiratory sectors of the Medical Device Industry.
Sadly, it is very common that Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) cannot identify that an order is a critical one until they physically get around to working on it. At times, CSRs will not know of urgent orders until a customer faxes or emails the order in, and then immediately jumps on the phone a few minutes later to inform the CSRs of that order. The ideal scenario would be a means for the Customer Service Supervisor to maintain a list of important key terms that could automatically flag an alert and raise the priority of that order. This means would identify the customer that sent in the order and then enable the CSR to pull up the order image instantly when the customer’s phone call comes through.
Several Companies shared with me that they also struggle to track which CSR is working on an order, the status of that order and if it is a rush order or not. The in-house generated solution for these companies is often a shared fax / email inbox where users will apply different colored flags as a rudimentary means to give Supervisors an idea on the number of orders in the queue, who is working them and their stage. That’s a low cost option for visibility and yet the common complaint I hear is that method does not lend itself to reporting, it does not really help the CSR to find the order quickly when the Customer calls in to chase the order or make a change and there is no way to track key timings such as how long the order sat untouched, how long the Order experience was for the Customer.
I enabled one of my West Coast customers to shrink their Order entry team from 30 to 21, 9 CSR’s were moved into selling and service roles. I’d love to tell you that value was achieved as a result of our OCR technology or ERP integration, and yet in truth, a first phase approach of eliminating the paper and improving Visibility of the Order Queue and staff activity enabled these results.
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