Contact lens manufacturer Wesley-Jessen focuses on customer opinion with ongoing research

By Quirk's Staff | April 1, 1993

Reading time: 6 minutes

Abstract

As part of its total quality management effort, Wessley-Jessen used a range of research strategies to help improve the company’s performance. It held focus groups with opticians, optometrists and ophthalmologists to determine the service attributes to measure in a mailed survey to its customers. The company then mailed surveys to an extensive customer base. By applying quadrant analysis to the quantitative results, the company was able to determine which areas to concentrate on in its total quality management process. The company also sought input from its own employees.

Research Topics:: Employee Opinion Studies | Focus Groups | Health Care (Healthcare) Research | Qualitative Research | Quantitative Research
Industry/Market Focus:: Health Care (Healthcare) | Medical/Surgical Products
Content Type: Research Methodology

Share Print

Making contacts

In its history, Chicago-based contact lens manufacturer Wesley-Jessen Corp. has brought many innovations to its industry. Founded in 1945 by two optometrists, Dr. Newton K. Wesley and Dr. George Jessen, it was the first U.S. company to make contact lenses. More recently, it introduced the DuraSoft line of colored contact lenses. The innovations don't stop at the product line. Through research and a total quality management (TQM) initiative, Wesley-Jessen (now a division of Schering-Plough Corp.) is working to raise the service standards in an industry that historically hasn't paid a lot of attention to customer satisfaction.

"The key finding that came out of our initial qualitative research (back in 1990) was that the contact lens industry as a whole was rated poorly," says Jim Moritz, director of total quality management, Wesley-Jessen. "Even today, in our own research results, the leader still only satisfies their customers two out of three times."

TQM effort

To improve the level of service, Wesley-Jessen began a TQM effort after talking to its customers to determine the service attributes to measure in an ongoing survey effort. With the help of Minneapolis-based Lakewood Research, the company held focus groups across the U.S. with opticians, optometrists, and ophthalmologists working independently and in retail chain locations. "The basic purpose was to get a laundry list that we could include on the questionnaires," says Gary Ballman,

director, Lakewood Research. "In terms of results, the consensus was that service quality standards in that industry aren't terribly high. Optometrists want their manufacturers just to do the basic core things right."

The information gathered from those focus groups helped in development of a questionnaire that is sent to W-J customers. (Some telephone follow-up is used but mail is the main vehicle for the survey). In the mail survey respondents are asked to rate contact lens companies on each of the service attributes. They also answer some marketing and segmentation questions. "We try not to add too many extra questions because you want the survey to be easy to fill out and return. But if you're going to survey your customers on customer satisfaction then marketing is another area that you might ask them about; what product do you want that's missing in the industry, etc. We also ask a few questions on the trades: are you a chain location, are you an optometrist, optician or ophthalmologist? We get a little segmentation, some marketing and some service characteristics.

"We feel the customer research is one of the smartest things we've done," Moritz says. "Getting quantitative and qualitative data on what's important to the roughly 3O,000 doctors that we deal with told us what our strengths and weaknesses were and where we needed process improvement. And what we have done over the past two and a half years is pay very close attention to the 26 service characteristics that the doctors have said are the most important to them."

Ordering system

For Wesley-Jessen, product quality has never been a problem area. Instead, in the early research customers expressed dissatisfaction with the product ordering system. "The doctors basically tore apart our ordering process by saying it doesn't work, so we spent a great deal of money and time to fix it. Now we are perceived as having one of the best order processes in the industry. The research directed us right to the activity and results that were needed in order for us to enhance our performance in the minds of our customers."

The customers phone their orders in to the company's Chicago processing center which handles 5,000 orders a day and over a million per year. "We ship over 75,000 different SKU's based on those 5,000 phone calls.

Of those orders approximately 75 to 80 percent want them delivered the next day, so try taking 5,000 orders a day of 75,000 different contact lenses and somehow get them there by 10 o'clock the next morning. The logistics are extremely challenging."

Recently, the company switched to an automated picking system to increase the efficiency of the order- filling process. "The automated system can pick an order based on a UPC code and bring the lenses to the operator as opposed to the operator going to the lenses. That seriously cuts down on pulling errors and speeds up the process of getting the lenses packaged and sent out."

Quadrant analysis

One aspect of working with Lakewood Research that has been helpful, Moritz says, is the research company's use of quadrant analysis, in which attributes measured in the research are displayed as dots on a diagram showing both their importance to customers and the customers' appraisal of the company's performance in meeting expectations. The quadrants are typically divided into sections of high importance-high performance, high importance-low performance, low importance-low performance, etc. "The quadrant analysis allows you to become very focused very quickly. It allows management to see which dots are in the high importance-low performance quadrant and put together a plan to get out of that quadrant. Period."

As an example, Moritz cites the attribute "easy to place orders." "That dot showed up in our original external research three years ago in the high importance-low performance area, so we made the kinds of process changes internally that allowed us to fix it so that doctors perceived that it was easy to place an order when you dealt with WJ and thus move the dot over into the high importance-high performance quadrant."

An added benefit of quadrant analysis is that it helps with the politics of determining which service areas and processes within the company would be addressed by the TQM initiative, Moritz says. "When you start a major TQM effort, as we did three years ago, a lot of the executives want their processes worked on. The research helped us with that because it defined for us what the one or two key processes were that we had to fix immediately in order to get our customers to perceive a major difference in service levels. That way people (within the company) don't feel like they've been overridden or passed over, or that TQM isn't working as hard in their functional area."

Identify errors

Another important pillar in constructing a TQM process is employee involvement. W-J has programs in place to involve both the front-line employees - those who deal face to face with the customers - and those in management positions in the TQM process. "The people who do the front- line work are almost always the most tuned in to the process. So without their input and their willingness to identify errors that occur in the process then you can't improve the process. Their involvement is absolutely critical."

Upper-level employees are involved through Lakewood's Quality Consortium, in which they rate the company's performance in the categories of the Malcolm Baldrige quality program, including leadership, quality of product, customer satisfaction, etc. "It's a good internal listening mechanism," Moritz says.

On the right track

The ongoing research shows that the company's efforts are working, Moritz says. "In 1990 when we did our qualitative research, W-J was ranked dead last in overall customer satisfaction out of seven major competitors in contact lenses. In 1992 we moved into second place, with the goal of course of being number one in '93. The research is telling us that we're on the right track. Listening to internal and external customers is absolutely critical to any successful TQM effort.

"Even though we've made these drastic improvements, the industry as a whole still has a long way to go in being perceived by their customers as meeting or exceeding their expectations every time they do business with us. Some of it is logistical; when you're dealing with so many orders and you've got to get that product out the next day, it's a nightmare. A lot of it is just the industry's inattention to customer satisfaction over the last 20 years or so. Recently it all came to a head and now everybody's scrambling to get caught up."

As the service levels in the industry rise, expectations may change, Lakewood's Gary Ballman says. "Expectations are rising; we see that in lots of industries. As certain manufacturers become more sensitive and begin to do better, the bar for performance standards is raised throughout the industry."

So while Wesley-Jessen works to satisfy its customers, the company plans to keep checking with them to make sure it's using research to measure the right attributes. "This year we're going to go back and test the service characteristics to see if they're still the things that are most important to the doctors. We want to make sure we stay on top of things," Moritz says.