INTERVIEW
In Focus: Scientific & Medical Equipment House
4 years ago by Usman Ghani
The Customer Service Director of Scientific & Medical Equipment House in Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Najeh AlHamad speaks about the importance of putting customers first and ensuring rapid, round the clock service. He further discusses feedback mechanisms in place at the company and the focus on client satisfaction.
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Q: Tell us a bit about your services and what makes Scientific & Medical Equipment House stand out among the competition?
AlHamad: PV “Protect Vision” and SMEH “Scientific & Medical Equipment House”, both are a member of Al Arifi Group of Companies and founded to work as reputable players in the Healthcare Sector in KSA. SMEH is one of the leading companies with around 40 years of experience in healthcare services. Both Protect Vision and SMEH’s reputation for excellence are well established and highly-respected in KSA.
In our Unified Customer Service, we deliver high-quality world-class Maintenance Services to 5000 Medical Devices installed in KSA, with a focus on convenience and rapid service. Our teams were dedicated to provide services with round-the-clock support especially during this pandemic. We provide quality solutions to meet clinical and operational needs, and we’re continually improving our services to support our customers.
Q: What is your brand philosophy when it comes to Client Satisfaction?
AlHamad: Client satisfaction is about building a strong professional relationship with all our customers, which is grounded in honesty, fairness and integrity of service. We provide and deliver professional, helpful, high quality performance in our services. We don’t just say it, we act on it. Our brand philosophy when it comes to Client Satisfaction includes the following:
- High quality maintenance services with a focus on convenience and rapid service
- Customer First Approach
- We do what we say
- Straightforward and honest
Q: Do you think service standards are rapidly changing? If so, how do you measure and stay in sync with the changing standards?
AlHamad: We understand that our target market needs more than just standard repair services, the need grew out of rapid and convenient service. Service Standards in the Medical Equipment Field are generally not changing rapidly as we assume that there are no unforeseen changes in the technology to make the standards change rapidly. However, we improve our performance, monitor our progress, change readiness, adhere to timelines and execute with speed and high response. Our Service Quality and Process Section is responsible to monitor, control, measure and maintain the service delivery and ensure the quality to be within the standards by controlling the Response Time, The Down Time, The Frequency of Visits per failure, etc.
Q: What are your feedback mechanisms to assess customer satisfaction with your services?
AlHamad: In our newly developed system, our customers have access to provide feedback to our Customer Care Center or directly to the Customer Support Engineers, whether it may be in service or the whole operations. We make sure that their complaints and assessments were recognized and dealt with seriously. Additionally we are conducting customer satisfaction and evaluation surveys through the after-repair visits by our customer success reps and through mobile apps. Also we are monitoring and analyzing service quality standards like average yearly system availability and uptime.
Q: How do you handle customer complaints and in what order of priority are these resolved?
AlHamad: Once we receive the complaint we try to solve it immediately depending on the nature and complication of the complaint, otherwise it is escalated with an immediate effect to the higher level for immediate action. We stay calm, listen to the customer, acknowledge the issue, gather all the facts, implementing the customer-centric system, giving them importance and offering a better solution.
Q: How do you ensure that your clients get the best quality of after-sales support?
AlHamad: By carrying out the installation, commissioning, technical training, PPM’s and other service activities on time. Also responding immediately to all calls with enthusiasm and dedication to their job and to close the job within the timeframe. We provide the finest quality service with state of the art tools and brand new spare parts to resolve any technical issues. We take good care of our team, that’s why they take good care of our clients.
Q: How often do you conduct trainings for your staff and what are the key soft skills that you focus on?
AlHamad: Technical and soft skills training is one of the most important subjects, therefore we have continuous education programs in our company, providing trainings and enhancing skills of our teams when it comes to servicing, repairing, negotiation skills and dealing with the customer. We focus on upgrading and enhancing our knowledge as per the latest development of the device and this is done twice a month. We also send our CSE’s for International Service Trainings for all the products that we are dealing with.
Q: What services and features do you plan to introduce in the coming years to further enhance the customer experience?
AlHamad: We want to implement our remote/virtual care services up to at least 60%. The current Covid-19 Pandemic has become part of our daily lives now and going to hospitals to perform service for all the hospital devices is not easy. Through our virtual services we can remotely repair, especially during an emergency.
About Eng. Najeh AlHamad
Najeh AlHamad has 25 years of extensive experience in Biomedical Maintenance Management, ECRI Maintenance Management and he is Six Sigma Green Belt certified. Prior to joining PV-SMEH, Najeh held senior management roles at Siemens Healthineers-KSA as a Country Head of CS Sales & Marketing, Head of Tendering Dept, and Branch Manager, with the top Engineering job Category level as Managing Engineer. Najeh strongly believes that Rapid Service and Close Follow up is key to success.