Hach’s Kaizen Expertise Improves Hach Environmental’s Customer Contact Responsiveness

Many of you know about the use of Kaizen, the principle of continuous improvement, by the Hach family of companies to drive increased efficiency and improvement in the way we do things. Kaizen is typically recognized as a way to improve manufacturing processes to eliminate waste and inefficiency and allow products to be built faster. Many people don't realize that Kaizen can be applied in other areas, and we strive to continually improve every part of our business to provide our customers with the best products, superior service, and competitive prices. Kaizen is one key to making Hach Environmental’s customer service organization a world-class performer.

The spirit of Kaizen is to attack a specific issue in a given time period, allocate the resources necessary to solve that problem, and make it the focus of a team until it is resolved. As a result, anything that data shows us is an issue can typically be addressed in a week.

When Hydrolab first became part of the Hach family, customer feedback on responsiveness of the customer contact team showed a need for technology and process improvements. As a result, Hach Environmental looked to Standard Work and Visual Management Kaizen tools to bring consistency to the team's approach.

• “Standard Work” is a tool used to create highly disciplined and consistent processes. This governs how everything is done, and includes steps to mistake-proof the process, along with critical process checks to insure complete quality.
• “Visual Management” is another tool that takes the most customer-critical elements of any process and creates simple, visual metrics to allow us quickly and easily measure our performance to customer expectations.

Standard Work was implemented for all customer inquiries, including technical support, inside sales, order entry, and requests for returns. This helped produce a script that all customer contact personnel can refer to so that customer expectations are always met in response to phone and email contact.

Visual Management was implemented to create a system to track inquiries. Today, when a customer calls and asks multiple questions or needs more than one type of service as the result of that call, each need or inquiry is tracked. The tracking system includes information on when the customer must have a response, and what resources are available to ensure the response happens on time. Tasks are tracked, printed out, and posted on a wall by their due date, and most importantly, completed according to the customers' expectations.

The entire Customer Contact team was instrumental in creating the improved process. Customers and partners have also noticed the improvements being made in the speed and quality of responsiveness, as well as product knowledge and technical capabilities of the team. We'll continue to monitor our customer's satisfaction with these new processes, and continuously look for other areas in which we can improve our processes to delight our customers. We look forward to our next opportunity to help you!