Case Study: Biotronik

Case Study: Biotronik

The following case study is based on an email interview conducted with Dennis Tomlin of BIOTRONIK.

BIOTRONIK's has a relatively small IT department to serve a large number of internal customers: the US division of the company. Ultimately, HelpSpot's self-service capabilities and issue centralization made it the right fit for their needs.

First step in maximizing staff's time: create a self-service channel that empowers the customer. Dennis Tomlin of BIOTRONIK recounts that during implementation customers were reluctant at first to use the portal as past attempts to implement similar had failed. Education and HelpSpot's ease of use led to customers embracing the portal and even commenting on "how pleased they are with how the system works".

Wisely, BIOTRONIK helped ease the customer transition to the portal by implementing HelpSpot's APIs to link the customer portal with their intranet so the request submission form pre-populates with their (customer) contact information and all customers have to type is the issue.

"We are involving them (customers) in the process of learning how to solve their own problems. This has cut down on the number of calls and gives us more time to focus on solving the problems."

What better way to empower staff than to keep the important information right at their fingertips. As Dennis explains: "...requests can be tracked from the time they enter the system through resolution" with the added ability for "staff to share resolutions of problems". HelpSpot's centralization of customer inquires ultimately eliminates that "black hole of support" customers would complain about in the past.

Again a HelpSpot API (Live lookup), the request page has been connected to an internal MySQL database allowing staff to "...partial type information for a customer and have the rest filled in automatically." A huge time savings for a small group fielding up to 200 calls a week.

So what's next? Dennis confidently believes "HelpSpot has helped us to respond to service requests in a very timely manner, resulting in happier customers". So after realizing success in the US IT department, BIOTRONIK as recently rolled HelpSpot out to the US customer service department (in support of a new CRM roll-out). The US HR and facilities departments are also now being considered as potential future areas for use of HelpSpot.