Customer Care Proves Critical for Healthcare Services During a Pandemic

Amid the logistics and movement restrictions resulting from the COVID-19 situation, the DKSH Customer Care Medical Device (CCMD) team in Thailand took quick action to ensure that we were able to continue delivering lifesaving medical devices to our healthcare customers throughout the market.

As medical devices are critical for lifesaving operations and urgent patient care, healthcare providers and medical facilities like hospitals and clinics must have an immediate and efficient ordering system and inventory support for their supply of medical devices.

At the height of the pandemic, most organizations including DKSH had to implement mandatory work-from-home procedures to safeguard the health and wellbeing of our employees.

Challenge

The pandemic presented various challenges for the healthcare industry which affected deliveries, office, and warehouse-based operations. The implementation of stringent health and safety measures to daily operations also affected most field-based sales activities.

These restrictions affected our CCMD team who need to be readily available at the office to answer queries, calls and to facilitate orders from our customers. Reduced manpower and network connectivity issues by working from home had led to increased difficulty in monitoring the team’s productivity and call handling efficiency.

Approach

Faced with these challenges, we had to strategize and come up with a new approach to keep the CCMD functioning so that they can continue providing efficient customer services and without compromising our employees’ health and safety.

We introduced split-team operations with split floors seating arrangements at the office together with work-from-home options for the team. This was done to manage the risk of infection to our staff present in the office. To further support the 30 percent in the office and 70 percent at home approach, we established a new backup system to reroute calls using an external network. For those working in the office, we supplied Antigen Test Kits for them to conduct self-testing at home each Sunday before reporting for work.

To maintain the team’s productivity and efficiency, we relied more on digital reports and daily workflow reporting systems requiring staff to have regular check-ins with supervisors. We also shifted documentation formats to digital files instead of the previous printed hard copies.

Result

The approach helped the CCMD team to maintain its ability to deliver on all medical device orders, especially those related to emergencies and urgent orders. We proved that we were able to successfully manage and deliver our services on time without any impact on our customers’ operations.

More importantly, this meant that patients across Thailand were able to continue with their treatments and medical care despite the COVID-19 movement control and travel curfews in place.

Our Customer Care Medical Device team in Thailand has shown tremendous commitment to transform ourselves when the situation demands it. As with the pandemic, we were able to stay on target and deliver all products under the service level agreements with our customers.

Suntaree Phuvathanarak, Assistant General Manager, Customer Care