Customer experience matters, even at the frontiers of science

Published by Harshad Jahagirdar on Jun 15, 2022.

With changing customer behavior, providing a consistent customer experience can help you boost engagement, generate loyalty and brand equity of your business.

With both chemical and biological analyses occupying center stage, there has been renewed interest in developing and using laboratory equipment. Some forecasts⁽¹⁾ expect the global life sciences and laboratory equipment market to reach USD 56 billion by 2023.

However, with competition and major brands crowding the market, every aspect of customer interaction has been challenging. This has resulted in a surge in technology usage and digital solutions for customer engagement. Indeed, whether delivered in person (like in the good old days) or digitally, customer experience remains the most significant differentiating factor in capturing mindshare. And by 2022, global spending on CX (customer experience) is estimated to reach $640 billion⁽²⁾.

Here, the blog elaborates how digitization influences lab equipment marketing through the following use case.

1. Building a great customer experience
2. Customer experience statistics to look for
3. Ethosh aids in creating a seamless customer experience

Building a great customer experience

From the point of view of lab equipment manufacturers, the first contact with a potential customer may mark the beginning of an association that never really ends. It can go on to spawn more productive associations long after the initial sale, depending on the quality of the customer experience.

Here is a quick look at the essential stages in the customer experience journey and a few tips on making every step rewarding.

1. Marketing and sales -

Create awareness:

Go beyond merely listing your products. Focus on the complete solutions you are offering that simplify your customers' workflows.
Generate interest:

Emphasize your value propositions—like the ease of use, synergy, connectivity, efficiency, and precision.
Facilitate exploration:

Can the customer explore and experience your solution? Create supporting experiences that enable potential customers to see how your solution benefits them, thus driving them to a purchase decision. You can opt for immersive and augmented experiences for greater impact.

To explain the point further, consider a company launching a new product with innovative technology that enables spatial profiling of gene expression data. They wanted to provide complex and innovative technology that facilitates data analysis and research in a format that allowed clients to explore and test the product themselves. Read the case study to learn how augmented and virtual reality experiences helped the users explore the product in a virtual lab and understand its functionality, technology, and benefits.

2. Service and support -

Enable seamless installation:

Help the customer get the equipment set up and running as quickly as possible so they can continue focusing on advancing their research. Provide essential startup training, remotely if necessary. Make product information available through convenient channels.

Consider a company that typically printed installation, maintenance, and troubleshooting instructions for lab personnel and field service engineers. Manuals often exceed 100 pages, causing user frustration and tech support requests. It's tough to identify specific information in multiple instruments' printed content. Engineers and workers complained about the manual's complexity. Both field service employees and clients had a poor experience.

Read the case study further to understand how interactive web-based installation, maintenance, and troubleshooting guides aided better service and support. Also, how valuable digital content facilitated customer enablement and uplifted their customer experience.

Simplify training and maintenance:

Train customers to help them keep up with the latest advancements in technology and emerging application areas. Proactively offer solution-based refresher training and on-demand educational programs. Facilitate remote and on-demand monitoring of lab equipment performance to improve efficiency.
Recommend appropriate consumables:

Recommend supplies and consumables that are optimized for your solutions and tailored to the customer's needs. Simplify their selection and purchase.
Facilitate research:

Make it easier for the customer to apply your solutions for their research. Supply evidence-backed information on proven and potential applications.
Provide value-added services:

Partner with the customer throughout their journey and add value at every stage. Is there a finance plan you can offer to make it easier to procure equipment? Brief them about your compliance, qualification, validation, audit, and documentation services. Let your experts help the customer stay updated on the latest innovations in areas relevant to their core business. Suggest ways to adapt your solutions for innovative applications and exploit emerging opportunities.

3. Staying in the forefront of science and customer experience -

Dr. Burton Richter, the American physicist, once said, "Modern science is fast-moving, and no laboratory can exist for long with a program based on old facilities. Innovation and renewal are required to keep a laboratory on the frontiers of science."

If Dr. Richter were not caught up in the collision of electrons and positrons, he would have probably added today, "You also need a customer-centric approach to engage effectively with today's laboratories."

Assume a company with a vast TA spread across 100+ countries is committed to provide an engaging and interactive customer experience with their full product and solution range, as well as web content spanning hundreds of thousands of pages. How would the organization deliver the experience with agility and within budget constraints? Read the case study to find out how this Biotech instrument and solution maker turned old, outdated customer experiences into digital, engaging customer experiences and generated4x the number of leads.

Customer experience statistics to look for

86% of users are inclined to pay more for a great customer experience.
64% of buyers consider customer experience more important than price⁽³⁾.
75% of consumers are more likely to purchase from a company that knows their name and buying history and recommends products based on their preferences⁽⁴⁾.
33% of consumers who ended their relationship with a company did so because the experience wasn’t personalized enough⁽⁵⁾.
74% of consumers are at least somewhat likely to buy based on experiences alone.
61% of consumers will pay at least 5% more if they know they’ll get a good customer experience⁽⁶⁾.
66% of consumers say they will share personal data about themselves if they think it will elevate their customer experience⁽⁷⁾.

Ethosh aids in creating a seamless customer experience

Ethosh follows a customer-centric company approach in which the consumer is always first and foremost. From user needs analysis to user experience design, from detecting knowledge gaps in existing assets to filling those gaps with new knowledge assets. We work directly with marketers, customer success representatives, and customer support and service teams to ensure that our digital solutions fulfill the goal of creating a seamless customer experience.

Ethosh's customer experience solutions are one of many tech-infused options for customer enablement. We take a holistic approach to designing and developing digital solutions for our customers and end-users. We use virtual reality to decrease the need for on-site or physical product training, saving you and your clients time and money.

Our center of excellence delivery model enables us to scale delivery to meet the particular needs of our customers, provides agility to address changing consumer preferences, and ensures a faster return on investment.