Editor's note: Jamal Din is vice president/research for Kennedy Research Inc., a Grand Rapids, Mich., market research company.

With a core market of radiology departments in approximately 7,500 hospitals and clinics in the United States, GE Medical Systems Group has a small customer base relative to many industries. Soliciting the opinions of these customers who have made six- (or even seven-) figure investments in GE diagnostic imaging equipment is a high priority for GE Medical Systems.

Milwaukee-based GE Medical, a business group of the General Electric Co., uses two types of mailed surveys to encourage customers to voice their opinions. The first survey is called the post installation tracking study, which asks for the customer's opinion of the sales process, preinstallation, delivery, installation, training and product performance for their recent purchase. The second survey is the sales and service tracking study, which asks the customer to evaluate GE Medical's total account management and service delivery performance. This survey is mailed to every GE Medical customer annually.

"Our customers probably know us as well as we know ourselves, because they have multiple relationships with us," says Dennis Cooke, GE Medical customer satisfaction process manager. "It is essential that we understand our customer's level of satisfaction throughout every stage of the relationship. Our post installation survey measures our customer's satisfaction level with an individual transaction, and our sales and service survey measures our customers' satisfaction level with our overall performance at the account."

Every customer is important

With its relatively small customer base, GE Medical cannot afford to take customer satisfaction lightly. A disgruntled customer or two may have little impact on a consumer products company selling low-price/high-volume items, but it can have a much greater effect on a high-tech manufacturer selling big-ticket equipment to a few key customers.

"We can't afford to lose any customers. We look at each customer as a market of one," Cooke says. "We simply must be sure that our customers are satisfied with their investment." The continuous customer satisfaction surveys are key sensing tools used to ensure client satisfaction.

Customer satisfaction survey evolution at GE Medical

With worldwide sales of well over $3 billion, GE Medical Systems is the world's largest manufacturer of diagnostic imaging systems. Product lines include computed tomography, magnetic resonance imaging, X-ray, ultrasound, nuclear medicine and positron emission tomography equipment, all of which help physicians look inside the human body without surgery.

GE Medical Systems inaugurated the post installation survey five years ago, in an effort to strengthen its commitment to customer satisfaction. The sales and service survey was spun off three years later. GE Medical's market research department developed the original post installation survey and sales and service survey. Kennedy Research Inc., a Grand Rapids, Mich., market research company, helped GE Medical Systems develop these surveys and now conducts them on an ongoing basis.

"We saw the need to obtain structured input from our customers to drive customer-focused improvements in our business," says Lorna Young, market research manager, GE Medical Systems.
The surveys achieved their initial goal - obtaining customer feedback - but GE Medical did not have an ongoing process to resolve the issues the surveys uncovered. In late 1991, GE Medical created a customer satisfaction department for this purpose, with the additional mission of raising overall customer satisfaction. The new department took on responsibility for the surveys.

Initially, the post installation survey consisted of a quarterly five-page questionnaire. The survey included every customer who acquired a new GE Medical device within the preceding three months.

Study results were distilled a variety of ways. Since the findings addressed the performance of several different departments at GE Medical, Kennedy Research tailored a potpourri of written reports to the specific needs of various departments, including a monthly one-page summary of key findings from each individual survey, and a quarterly overview of the top five sources of satisfaction and dissatisfaction.
"But as the study matured, it mushroomed in terms of the type of information we wanted from it," Cooke says. "Each department was interested in a different aspect of the study, which meant that reporting the results became a fairly complicated process."

The shift toward automation

When GE Medical created the new department, the firm got together with Kennedy Research for a two-day "workout." The workout is a GE company-wide initiative that encourages teams - often including GE suppliers and customers - to simplify and improve work processes. The goal of this workout session was to streamline the customer satisfaction studies by identifying ways of eliminating or simplifying some of the work that went into them.

One of the most significant changes resulting from the workout sessions was to begin loading survey data onto GE Medical's mainframe computer. An internally developed custom software program at GE allows the survey data to be rapidly manipulated in myriad ways so each department can glean exactly the information it needs, in the format it wants.

The hard copy reports once supplied by Kennedy Research became a thing of the past. Now diskettes of updated data are loaded into the mainframe every week, giving GE Medical Systems immediate access to customer satisfaction feedback.

What's more, the high degree of automation has resulted in significant savings for GE Medical. The post installation tracking study costs about 25 percent less than it did before its integration into the mainframe.

In addition, thanks partly to the feedback from survey respondents, the original five-page post installation questionnaire has been winnowed down to one page, with little loss of substantive information. The survey still covers virtually every aspect of the customer relationship with GE during the purchase transaction.

The one-page survey is now mailed to every customer - usually the radiology administrator - who has had a GE Medical product installed in the preceding month. The process typically yields a 50 percent response rate.

"In effect, the questionnaire asks our customers to grade us," Cooke says. "It is important for GE to be identified as the sponsor of the study, but we use Kennedy Research to obtain objectivity."

Customer satisfaction and the customer issue escalation process

Though any GE employee in the world can access research data from the mainframe, primary responsibility for tracking the findings falls to a network of 12 field-based customer satisfaction specialists - 10 in the United states, one in Canada and one in Latin America.

"The process allows us to examine markets of one - each individual customer - not just charts and graphs tracking overall trends," Cooke says.

Every Monday morning, the customer satisfaction specialists monitor feedback from the weekly customer satisfaction data uploaded to the mainframe. They then work with GE field personnel to follow up immediately on any negative comment that crops up. For that matter, any customer who assigns a one or two ranking on a five-point scale (five is the best) to any overall question on the survey will promptly hear from a GE representative charged with resolving the problem.

The impetus behind the creation of GE Medical's customer satisfaction department was a cultural change that called for customer issues, or problems, to receive maximum visibility, a stark contrast to the past tendency to cover up problems.

"The cultural change we are evoking at Medical Systems is for our employees to feel that it's OK to ask for help to resolve a customer issue and [that it's] not a sign of weakness or ineptitude," Cooke says. "In fact, it is essential to use every resource available to maximize our customer's equipment uptime and overall satisfaction.

"We've designed and implemented the customer issue escalation process, which helps our field personnel resolve customer issues. Surveys with low scores and/or negative comments are among the inputs to the process. The surveys serve as a sensing tool for identifying problems that need to be addressed. The escalation process is 'closed loop': it begins with the customer's complaint and ends with the customer confirming satisfaction."

As the name implies, the customer issue escalation process is designed to escalate customer problems through the company to quickly resolve complaints. The idea is to apply the required resources of rapid resolution to the customer's problem.

"Ideally, we want to resolve problems at the lowest possible level, but when that can't be done, the customer issue escalation process allows us to address customer concerns rapidly," Cooke says. "It sounds counterintuitive, but we relish uncovering customer issues and resolving them, because it builds rapport and loyalty between GE Medical and its customers."

Results

GE Medical Systems has seen dramatic changes in its overall customer satisfaction ratings, in both the post installation survey and the sales and service survey.

When the post installation survey was inaugurated in 1988, a high percentage of customers ranked GE's delivery ratings at one or two. This has improved significantly in the survey's five-year existence. GE also has increased its applications training tools in response to feedback that training was not as comprehensive as customers had hoped. Sales and service survey overall customer satisfaction also has increased significantly over the two-years it has been in place.

Retaining customers

GE Medical Systems is in the process of implementing its customer satisfaction surveys for its worldwide customer base. Common global surveys will enable the best practice transfer and global issue identification.

Cooke says detailed customer satisfaction research for big-ticket items is essential because retaining existing customers is as - if not more - important than attracting new ones.

"GE Medical Systems is providing customer satisfaction feedback to every level of the organization to drive action plans for resolution of individual customer problems, in addition to driving broader process improvements," Cooke says. "We are committed to sharing this information throughout the organization and continuing to engage GE Medical employees in customer-focused improvement initiatives."