I’ve worked with mass spectrometers for most of my career, in a wide variety of roles. Recently I’ve been hearing an increasing amount about customer service, or in some cases the lack of it, so I thought I’d take a look at what is changing, and how contemporary companies in our sector have changed to meet new (and increasing) demands.
Firstly, it’s obvious that customer service has always been important in our industry, as the tools of our trade are highly engineered (highly strung?) miracles of technology at the cutting edge of analytical science. In other words, they go wrong; it just happens. So why the increased focus on this aspect? I think it is due to several reasons.
Sadly, in my opinion one of them is that fewer scientists in the Earth sciences and nuclear sciences are getting the deep hands-on experience of analytical instruments such as ours. This is partly due to the instrument vendors making the instruments less accessible. As automation and software control have increased, the ability to make meaningful mechanical adjustments to these instruments has dwindled. In a way it’s the same as our cars; with my first few cars I was able to change some relatively major components such as starter motors. These days if I open the bonnet/hood of my car I see… a sea of black plastic.
Modern mass spectrometers can also seem this way, the days of physical knobs, dials and gauges have gone forever. The first mass spectrometers I used were really quite physical in operation, you adjusted a voltage by turning a knob, and the readback gauge by the knob made it clear what you’d changed. Somehow, whilst being perhaps easier to use, software control doesn’t have the same level of tactility and doesn’t encourage the user to be aware at a mechanical level what is going on with that instrument.
Aside from a reduction in interaction, I believe another factor driving the increased focus on instrument support is the global changes we’ve seen in the supply of our goods. It’s rather trite to say that we live in a throw-away society when many people and companies are addressing the lifetime of the goods we produce, but we certainly live in an era where we have become much more demanding of our suppliers. Those in the first world can access the products and services they require with almost no time delay; companies such as Amazon and Uber Eats have seen to that (other similar companies are available, many others!). What I mean is, us in the middle classes have come to expect what we want, virtually immediately. It’s no different with mass spectrometers.
Of course, a third factor is that scientists that work in our sector have increased workloads, and typically shorter timescales in which to produce data. Factor these three things in, and it is no wonder that demand to keep the instruments running as much as possible has moved higher up the agenda.
So how does this demand for greater “up time” manifest for the instrument vendors? Having worked at five or more such vendors (more if a name-change counts as a new vendor), I can say that instrument reliability is a major focus, as is ease of access to the parts most likely to need replacement. However, we’re not making toasters here, so it is hard to fully test instruments to destruction as Ikea do with their chairs. There are always going to be reliability challenges.
The vendors have attempted to address these support challenges in a variety of ways. Some of the larger organizations have instigated a ticket system, whereby your issues are dealt with in order of receipt, typically instigated by telephoning a call center. If your issue becomes more serious, or is not dealt with in a timely manner, then there is an escalation process. This creates excellent economies of scale for the support structure and is great for tracking the efficacy of support activity. A potential downside is that the first point of contact for the user may not be a specialist, which can lead to frustrations when the person at the end of the telephone can’t help, or even worse doesn’t know much about the instrument in question.
Some of the smaller companies don’t have the reach to implement a system like this, or perhaps don’t want to implement it, and therefore rely on a more personal approach. Here at Isotopx we try to make it as easy as possible for our users to contact the right technical support person (or group of people) straight away. Users typically get the cell phone number for the engineer that installed their instrument, and we have a very active Teams chat function that a number of the engineers use daily. We’ve found that this first line of defense does fix a reasonable proportion of issues (well over half), meaning that oftentimes an engineering visit is not required.
So does the “personal” approach work? I’d say it depends, with factors such as the time demands of the customer playing a part. I remember from my engineering days that when I installed instruments, if I gave the lab manager my direct line (well before cell phone days!), then it did create a lot of goodwill – as long as I was available. What about Isotopx? You’d have to ask our customers! But for the most part we get it right, with our online support via Teams probably being the most effective and widely used line of support.
What else can the vendors do? Some things are obvious; a timely personal response following a request for help goes a long way, even if that response states that we can’t fix it right away. Let’s use the car analogy once more – I recently acquired my first electric car and it has not been without fault, but when the dealership wants to give me an update, it’s the same service representative that calls me each time, meaning I knew I was speaking to someone who understood my pain. This applies equally well to analytical instruments.
Another obvious positive step is to ensure that well trained engineering staff (and parts!) are widely available. I can assure you that all the vendors I have worked with take this aspect very seriously, but we’re up against factors in life that can’t be influenced, such as staff changing jobs or parts becoming unavailable from third party suppliers. Ultimately it is a juggling act and I feel that we keep the balls in the air most of the time here at Isotopx, and we do encourage our users to let us know when we get it wrong.
As a final note, one thing I have worked out over the years is that people have long memories for poor customer service, and that applies to many aspects of commerce. I can think of several labs where they more or less refuse to consider a particular instrument vendor due to a historical case of very poor customer service. That’s a lesson for us all!
That’s all for this month, but if you’ve got any thoughts about customer service in our world of isotope ratios, or indeed an interesting anecdotes, then please let me know, I’d be keen to hear (Stephen.guilfoyle@isotopx.com).
