Episode 9: Customer Service and Tech Support are Here to Help… Part 2!: Learn More About the NxStage Customer Service and Technical Support Teams

Vanessa:

Hi everyone, and welcome to Visits with Vanessa, a podcast where we speak with home Hemo patients, care Partners and industry professionals about home dialysis. I’m actually a dialysis patient myself. I’ve been on dialysis for 25 plus years. I’m also the senior manager of advocacy and communications at Fresenius Medical Care. Okay, I am so excited to welcome back Dave, who is the VP of Customer Success.

Dave, you spoke with me last time and we had such a great convo that we had to do a part two. I’m so glad that you’re here with me again today.

Dave:

Well, again, thank you for inviting me and it’s a pleasure. As I said before, it’s just exciting to talk about what we do for our patients. And you you can never ask me too much about that.

Vanessa:

So last time you and I left off, we we kind of finished with, you know, the statistics, all the cool statistics with, you know, the 22nd getting back to a patient today. And I wanted to focus on kind of the importance of the role that your team faces when you are a home dialysis patient. You know, clearly you’re facing all different kinds of challenges and as such as running these, you know, tech support and even customer service teams.

What are some of the unique challenges that your team faces? Supporting these patients, you know, versus like supporting an in center patient. And I’m thinking about, you know, weather storms, like power outages, Like how does your team help support patients during these really challenging times?

Dave:

Well, exactly. Kind of what you said. Understanding that, um, these patients are home. They’re generally alone. You know, sometimes they have their care partner around. A lot of times they do. But, um, even just one or two people versus the in center environment where, um, I, I, I know you’ve been in center, I’ve been in center. The, you know, it’s a swirling bit of activity.

There is, there’s nurses, there’s social workers, there’s patient care techs, there’s nephrologists and, you know, biomed. So, you know, you’re surrounded by a lot of support and help and recognizing that when you’re at home, none of that is present. And, you know, at best, you have a caregiver. So you being under understand ing of that situation. And, you know, one of the things that’s really important in the contact center world is, is a quality I call command.

Um, what you want what I want when I call my bank, when I call an airline, when I call, you know, a telehealth service, you know, I want someone who I have confidence that they know what they’re doing and they’re going to get me the help I need and they’re going to do it quickly and they’re going to manage me.

And it always makes me smile when I call. And the contact centers and I, I feel like I’m well-managed, you know, it’s a feeling. It’s a good feeling. You feel like, okay, this person understands what I’m asking. This person understands, you know, my situation and this person’s going to be able to help to me. So I, I, I refer to that as call command are people have to stay in command of the call and guide the patient through what’s going on.

Because, you know, in in both situations, customer service or tech support, uh, you know, a lot of times the reason they’re calling is distressing, right? Some of their supplies are damaged. You know, the machine’s not working the way they expected it to work. And that, you know, that’s scary. Yeah. This machine’s taking all my blood out and putting it back in, So, like, I, I, I, I don’t like it when things don’t go their way, so we need to make sure we understand that.

And and the people calling us and, you know, are very prescriptive and confident and say we’re going to take care of you, Just stay with me and we’re going to go through these steps and and then making sure at the end that we’ve, uh, taking care of everything they need at, you know, preventing that call back. Cause what we all hate is having to call about an issue.

And then, you know, 10 minutes later or 2 hours later, have to call back. So, you know, all those things need to be present.

Vanessa:

So I’m wondering, Dave, like thinking of whether does your team do any proactive calling. In other words, like if there is going to be a bad storm coming, you know, sometimes patients might not be as good as getting prepared. Do you guys do anything like preemptively to prepare for that?

Dave:

Yeah, absolutely. We, um, we have people in both tech support and customer service who are always looking at the news, looking for, you know, everything from a, a geopolitical event to, uh, you know, weather is a big one. Uh, you know, especially, uh, us being based in the Northeast in the winter. We know how things can get snarled and difficult and snowy weather, but also, you know, water main breaks, you know, is a big issue for.

Yeah, um, dialysis patients. Um, and so just being aware of all those things, you know, Google’s our best friend and, you know, the, the online news services that can, you know, clue us into the, the bigger things. You know, one of the most satisfying things I know our our both of our teams take pride in is calling people and telling them about a situation in their area that they didn’t know.

But yeah, um.

Vanessa:

I can only imagine maybe you need to hire on your team like an onsite meteorologist and like a political person that knows what’s going on. Where?

Dave:

Yeah, well, I mean, you joke, but, you know, those are the ways we’re heading in the future. Uh, you know, we haven’t talked about this much, but, you know, we’re planning for, you know, there’s hundreds of thousands of people in this country whose, um, uh, kidneys aren’t working the way they need to be. And, you know, we have, uh, you know, 12 or 13,000 patients.

We want, we want to give that home experience to so many more patients than we’re giving today. And to do that, well, we’re going to have to do things like that. And we’re you know, we have three things that we focus on a lot. Uh, I, I call them p p r e you know, we need to be proactive.

Uh, one of our goals for both of our contact centers is to make more outgoing calls and incoming calls. Exactly in the situation you brought up when there’s weather, when we know that because of, um, not getting a delivery, that they’re low on supply. So we call them and say, hey, there’s a situation, you know, it looks like you might be low on supplies.

Do you have everything you need? And, uh, or maybe we just have the wrong inventory. So being more proactive, uh, being more, um, uh, focused on retention because, you know, one of the things that’s tough and, and home dialysis is people who drop in go back to the incentive environment because it’s too much of a we call it burden of therapy at home.

You know, we want to be able to be retentive. We want to be able to through the services we provide and customer service and tech support. We want to be a force for retention. So proactive retention and then efficient. You know, we want to make sure we just recently added in tech support away. Um, you know our machine when it’s pumps have been on for 4000 hours, it throws up what’s called the cautions 71, which tells you the machine needs a PM preventative maintenance.

Um, when you call in for preventive Mason, you don’t need to speak to anyone. You just need to know that the address we have for you is right. The phone number we have for you is right. The serial number of the machine that you’re returning is right. And so we now have a way to do that with complete automation so that we can save our people for talking to the patients where they can add value.

All right. When all we do is confirm that you have this machine serial number and what your address is, you know, that can be done with automation. So we’re very focused on efficiency and making sure we’re using our people for the types of calls where they can add that empathetic, um.

Vanessa:

Value. This is so cool. I love it. Like so many interesting things that you’re doing really, really interesting and I really want it started from really ground zero. So when you are a new patient, right, you just started home hemodialysis with the next stage system. What can we expect from the customer service team? How does your team play a role in that?

Dave:

MM Well, our our best practice is a multitude of things happened along along that journey. Um, and that generally starts in the, in center training that they’re going through, uh, to, to be on the, our therapy. And we do ask that the people who are doing that training give an orientation to tech support and customer service, um, sometimes even make a call and we’ll use a, an alarming issue or some other issue that’s come up during the training to call in to tech support or customer service just to get people a little bit exposed for it.

So that’s that’s really where the journey starts. But then when it comes fall into our department is, is when they do get home and making sure that they get that that first order. Um, our most seasoned customer service reps are what we call NPS reps. New patient start reps, and they, we do a welcome call for everybody who’s coming on to home therapy where we orient them about how things are going to work.

Mainly around the, uh, um, on the customer service side, uh, the uh, supplies delivery and stuff. Cause that that’s important that they understand how that works. And so we orient them to that, make sure that they understand when they’re going to get their first order and then what, what’s going to happen after that. Um, but then we also do things, um, we have what we call the IWC, the early warning system and tech support where um, if a patient starts and we don’t hear from them, we’ll call them.

And because generally if a patient started and we don’t hear from them at all within 90 days, either one of two things happens. Either they’re doing really well, which we, which we like to hear about that. But then, you know, what we really want to catch is those situations where maybe they aren’t comfortable or they lost our number or they didn’t know we were.

You wouldn’t believe the number of people who don’t even know we’re seven by 24 and we have to. And, you know, they were told that by their clinic staff and so forth. But it’s just, you know, they’re absorbing so much information. It’s during that time, it’s hard to remember all of it. So, you know, we reorient them to that, to we’re always here.

They can call any time that there’s no you know, we’d like people to call back. We’d rather they not call about the same issue, meaning that we’ve done our job on the first call. But they can call us any time. So.

Vanessa:

So I do have a question, though, about a new patient. So if I am a new patient, are you is your team setting up that new patient kind of call, like welcome call, or is the nurse setting that up?

Dave:

Well, we do it jointly with the center. You know, we work with the center and the the the therapy nurse there or, you know, whoever they have. Sometimes it’s an administrative resource, sometimes it’s a nurse. But most like we it’s the nurse that we work with to set that call up. And, you know, we do those calls on a vast majority.

We can’t or we like if they won’t respond and we can’t set it up or the things don’t happen. But in a very, very high percentage of the transition homes we have that that new patient start call that welcome home call.

Vanessa:

Yeah, that’s awesome. All right. So now, you know, they’re a new patient. They’re they’re settled. Let’s say no longer a new patient and they’re ready to go on a trip. Okay? And we know that there’s a lot of different kinds of trips that patients go on. I mean, I happen to love, you know, get I don’t know, say that I love getting but I love traveling and I bring my machine and supplies everywhere I go.

Right? So I know you guys support me all the time with that. How does your team support travel? Like what? What does that look like? Does a patient call up and say, I’m going away and here’s my, you know, like, here’s where I’m going to go? Or how does that work?

Dave:

Yeah, Um, it’s a very involved process because it does have a lot of moving parts to it. You know, we have a very synchronous system which when you’re at your usual place of treatment where supplies are delivered, but travel is anything but synchronous. It’s, it’s all about the synchronicity. And you know, over the years we’ve developed a lot of processes.

You know, one of the things that I think is key about next stage is, you know, we’ve been doing this for a long time, but, you know, close to 20 years now. And, you know, we’ve developed a lot of internal practices about how we do travel. And one of the most wonderful things about being part of the Four Cities organization for the last four years is now we have access to so much more resources around the world when people travel.

So it makes what we can do even better. Um, more complicated too, because again, when you travel, there’s a lot of moving parts. But, you know, we, we now have a complete travel dashboard. We work closely with our logistics people and our other resources to make sure that they, you know, they have the equipment they need, that it’s all, you know, we have, you know, a consent forms and different paperwork that has to be filled out.

But, you know, it’s all about making that that journey better because the you know, there’s so much that is tough about about being on dialysis and and the freedom to travel. Um you know, I, I make the analogy to my wife situation where, you know, it’s very hard to travel in a wheelchair, but, you know, the freedom of knowing you can do it is so uplifting, is so mentally freeing that, you know, we work really, really hard at trying to make that a good experience.

And as we’ve gotten bigger and more sophisticated and part of the Fresenius World, you know, we’ve added so much to that process to make it, to make it better, to make it more complete to, you know, we have a I think it’s 30, 30 some different steps we go through that we now are very deliberate about making sure every single one of them is taken care of.

And, you know, we have a lot of internal coordination to make it work. We have to work with the shipping people. We have to work with the, you know, the factories that are producing the supplies. So it’s a lot of different moving pieces. But, you know, I’d like to say we’ve gotten it a lot better. Um, and it’s a lot more sophisticated and we have a lot of plans to make it even more sophisticated.

Vanessa:

Awesome. Love it. I know some of the things that you guys did that just kind of want to give you kudos. So, you know, first of all, I believe now and correct me if I’m wrong, you have a dedicated even travel team like people that are kind of experts in that space.

Dave:

We do.

Vanessa:

Yeah. And then the other piece that I’ve noticed over I don’t know, I want to say maybe years that you started is love, you know, confirmation email that your travel order was placed and you can go back and check it and all those little things I think really helps support the patient as well because you do work with your health care team to submit your prescription.

So it’s so helpful to know, kind of track it through email, right. That you know, that your prescription was placed and that the the customer service team is taking care of it.

Dave:

Absolutely. Um, you know, all those things, you know, we’ve come to expect that, you know, with the world of Amazon and, you know, we get confirmation of everything we know sometimes even know where the truck is. We haven’t quite gotten there yet. But, you know, the more positive verification and when you get a piece of verification and it says something that is wrong, meaning that we don’t have the right information, you know, you can now see that we, uh, cause the best thing to make the best experience.

Make sure if there is a hiccup that we know about it earlier, the earlier we know about it, the better our chances of correcting it and making sure it all goes smoothly. And and this is complicated and that and that’s what, you know, our 20 years of experience in doing this is is a real value to our our patients.

Vanessa:

So I do not have the in front of me and I don’t know if you know it off the top of your head, but do you have any idea how many travel orders you guys did maybe last year or what that looks like?

Dave:

I don’t know that off the top of my head, but I do know that, um, a vast majority, 30 of our patients travel. Yeah. Um, that that surprised me. Um, I, i, I, I didn’t think it was as widespread. I learned that in the past couple of years where. Where I’ve seen that, um, and, you know, travel can be very simple.

It can be I’m, you know, just taking my cycle or and a few bags away for a weekend getaway. And there’s, you know, there’s not that much to it.

Vanessa:

But that doesn’t mean you have to go in an airplane like it could be. I’m taking some of the supplies from my home, putting it in a car and traveling, you know, somewhere.

Dave:

Yeah.

Vanessa:

Yeah.

Dave:

And and the difference between some people are more comfortable, you know, if they’re just going to do one or two treatments, you know, just taking their cycler with bags. We have other patients that prefer to bring their pure flow with them, and they have the means to do it. They have a motorhome, they have a a truck, they have something where they they can transport it that way.

But, you know, whatever way you want to do it, you know, we’ll find a way to support that.

Vanessa:

That’s awesome. All right. And so then my last question really about how your team plays an important role in, you know, patient support really is what about with inventory and ordering supplies? Because that is that’s an ongoing cycle that patients need to do. And you talked a little bit about it before last time we spoke. Right. So just to refresh your memory, last conversation you and I had, you spoke a little bit about, you know, patients can order either monthly or they can order every other month.

Can you maybe a refresher on that, but then be just talk about how your team supports the inventory supply process.

Dave:

Absolutely. And that’s one of the things we think we do very well. Always know we can get better at it, but, you know, we do that fairly well. Well, we the flexibility, you know, I was trying to use the the multi month as an example of sometimes it’s easier to get less deliveries and, you know, have more supplies on hand.

But we also do the opposite Sometimes we deliver every two weeks because if they’re in a very small home, a very small apartment, and they don’t have room for much, they you know, that, uh, you know, we’ll even do it more frequently then. But our, our standard is, is monthly. And, you know, everything we do is centered around that, that standard experience all although we can accommodate the other ones, um, and the standard experience is also about making sure we always have what the current inventory is.

So you know, we send out, we give patients three different options. They, um, we give them three different automator options and then of course they can always call us, but, you know, they can text us, they can email us and they can use an IDR and let us know how interactive voice response system to let us know how many of each type of supplies that they have that they have on hand so that we can make sure their next order gives them the appropriate.

So, you know, we try to add value where we can when when things get messed up in, you need to talk to a person. The person’s always there, but for most patients, most of the time it’s just routine. Give us the inventory. We make sure the next door you get has the supplies you need and we just repeat monthly.

Vanessa:

So reassuring to have you and your team there, you know, really providing so much support. I really appreciate that. As we wrap up today, I’m wondering what direction do you see your customer service team heading? Like what does that going to look like in the future?

Dave:
Well, you know, I mentioned pre proactive, um, retentive and efficient, right? That that’s where we’re going. Um, more outgoing calls, uh, you know, being able with all the data that we get, uh, you know, we haven’t talked so much about next to me, but next to me with the, uh, the features that it has and the iPad capabilities that we have with that, you know, we know more about how your treatments are going and what alarms you’re getting, everything from what alarms you’re getting to the supplies you’re using.

So we’re trying to use that data to be more intelligent, to ask less of you because we know certain things are happening. So, um, you know, that’s about the proactive going out there and making sure we’re calling you when we notice a certain string of alarm sequences calling you when we notice that you’re, um, you know, maybe treating more often than, than we have on your prescription so that we can make sure we adjust the prescription and adjust the order so that you have have what you need.

Um, and then, you know, retentive is all about just making sure, you know, we make it easy. One of the things that I use as an analogy often for, for Ph.D. is, you know, PD is a wonderful therapy. Most people in our world know what we know what PD is. And you know, what’s appealing about PD is the simplicity.

I always tell our people we need to make HD have the simplicity of PD. Um, and, you know, whatever we can do to make that experience simpler and easier, like the PD experience, that that’s what we’re aiming for. And, and that if we make it easier, will retain more patients. We’ll have more patients who don’t drop because, you know, it is hard.

And then the last thing is efficient. You know, we want to respect your time. You we want you to respect our time and we want to spend our time on transactions where we’re adding value. You know, when we’re just asking you how many of this box in that box you have, you know, you can do that through automates when you when things aren’t going the way they should and you want someone to help you sort things out, that’s when you need a person.

And we want to make sure we have that person available to you 80% of the time within 20 seconds so that, you know, you have a good experience and, you know, use the best of both worlds.

Vanessa:
Options, options, options.

Dave:
Absolutely.

Vanessa:
Dave, you have some really exciting initiatives for the future. I really appreciate you sharing them with us with that. Unfortunately, we have run out of time, but I am so glad that you’re able to come for our second conversation that we had today. I thank you for joining us, Dave.

Dave:
Oh, you’re quite welcome. The pleasure has certainly been mine. Thank you.

Vanessa:
So to our listeners, if you have any questions and you want to learn more about home hemodialysis, please call one of our patient consultants. You can reach them at 1-888 200-6456 or you can go to NxStage.com. Our consultants are all current or former dialysis patients. They look forward to speaking to you. It’s also important to note that not all patients may experience these health benefits.

I look forward to another episode of Visits with Vanessa. See you next time.