Efficient and Specific Customer Contact – worldwide
Interview with Christophe Loretan
VP of Sales & Marketing (Europe/Rest of World)
A central customer desk
In the 2022 financial year, COLTENE enhanced its customer service operations by adding a new customer desk function to the ZOHO application. While COLTENE regularly visits customers at their premises, day-to-day contact (which is often time-sensitive) is essential for ensuring the quality of dental treatment. Christophe Loretan (Vice President of Sales & Marketing (Europe and RoW)) explains how the new customer desk is promoting efficiency in day-to-day business and is making COLTENE a long-term partner to its customers.
To what extent does the new customer desk function bring COLTENE closer to customers?
Our field staff meet our customers for regular consultations and needs assessments, so they already maintain essential and direct contact with our customers. But, at the same time, dentists are pressed for time, so personal customer contact is competing with the time dentists need to spend on treatments. By launching the globally accessible customer desk function, we have resolved this trade-off efficiently for many everyday inquiries and interactions. Inquiries are answered based on the global network and the established knowledge base. So the desk function enhances efficiency and quickly gives customers the best possible answers.
How does the customer desk improve on-site customer contact in dental surgeries?
The customer desk function centralizes customer inquiries worldwide. Each dental surgery receives prompt, targeted service from a single location. At the same time, all the events and associated data are managed centrally and are available to the entire organization, creating a knowledge base that grows daily. This enables customer advisors to hold on-site consultations in a more targeted and specific manner. Day-to-day business inquiries are resolved through the desk more and more quickly as the database grows. Our customers greatly appreciate this customer desk function, because it allows them to spend more time with their patients.
What potential does the application have to further improve COLTENE’s customer service?
The inquiries we receive at present mainly fall under three categories: repairs, questions or complaints. Our goal is to provide a “complete carefree package” by adding other functions, such as the option of booking training programs. That way, the application will not only increase the global pool of expertise, but will also connect all the functions and workflows around interactions between customers and COLTENE. Last but not least, it also nfluences product development and strengthens our customers’ and COLTENE’s longterm partnership in further developing both dental clinics and COLTENE itself.