Teguar Computers specializes in industrial and medical computers and tablets and has had a 134% growth rate over the past three years, making it one of the fastest-growing companies in the technology sector. Using rugged components, their products are designed for maximum durability and built to withstand harsh environments in multiple industries like healthcare, manufacturing, and pharmaceuticals.
Teguar’s mission is to provide attractive, but highly functional, all-in-one computer solutions that are specifically and carefully designed to perform in extreme environments such as: cleanrooms, the outdoors, healthcare facilities, operating rooms, food processing plants, and manufacturing floors.
Teguar is ranked #1 among specialized industrial and medical grade computer manufacturers on Inc. 5000’s Fastest Growing Companies lists the last two years in a row. They are also certified as an ISO 9001:2008 company as of July of 2015, demonstrating Teguar’s dedication to providing the best products and service to their customers.
CEO Jonathan Staub, a Switzerland native, moved to the United States to take over operations in the U.S. for a German computer manufacturer. With in-depth knowledge of the industry, he noticed a need for better industrial and medical PC solutions, and thus Teguar was born to fill the void.
Below is a Q + A with Teguar’s Chief Operating Officer, Alex Daskalow about their exceptional customer service and how it has directly impacted their ability to grow their business.
1.
What percentage of customers are happy with their experience with
Teguar customer service (approval rating)?
We contact our top 100 customers for the year prior. This group seems to be
very satisfied with our performance. Our RMA (Repair and Maintenance
Agreement) customers are 100% satisfied with that service. We query this at
the end of every ticket.
2.
Every business has areas to improve upon. At Teguar, what has been a
customer service shortcoming in the past? How did you reconcile the
issue?
We used to only poll our top 100 customers, once a year. We now have
created the ability for everyone that interacts with us via email to give
direct feedback to that employee and that employee’s manager on that
particular interaction. This will enable us to solicit feedback closer to
real time.
3.
What areas of your customer service is Teguar hoping to improve, if
anything?
We are always looking to improve our customer service. We are currently
focusing on two customer service related key performance indicators,
“On-time delivery performance,” which we are trying to improve
incrementally as we are already very happy with our performance in that
regard, and “Repair Turnaround Time,” where we are shooting for repair
times that are at 8 days or under.
4.
What separates your customer service from the competition?
We pride ourselves on our response times to customer inquiries. This is
something we hear over and over again from new customers after they give us
an opportunity to quote their business.
5.
What do you think competitors or other industries fail to understand
about customer service?
I hope I am not giving away our secret here but I think our competitors
fail to understand how crucial quick response times are to our buyers. The
expectation is that all information is available instantaneously, almost
like a google search. We do our best to cater to this mindset.
6.
If you were to give an impromptu speech, what top three tenets of your
customer service philosophy would you outline?
There’s a lot of companies out there that claim they are there for their
customers but they aren’t. So first, we try to always keep in mind what we
believe the customer is expecting and try to meet that, if not exceed it.
So, not only exceeding customer expectations (do unto others as they would
do unto you) but also giving them more information than they’re looking
for, giving information about certifications plus the test results of the
certification, anticipating needs, constantly working to better ourselves
and the organization. A second tenet would be anticipating the future needs
of our client and being proactive in customer relationships. Our third
tenet would be constantly working to better ourselves or improve our
organization. Always having actions items for management team to work on
together to better the customer experience and grow. We try to approach
every detail the same way from small to big.
7.
How do you handle negative reviews of your customer service?
It’s going to be associated with the problem. Is it a lapse in our
process/procedure? Then we analyze what was the cause and figure how to fix
the problem. We figure out where we can fix the procedure or process as a
long term goal not just appease the problem in the short term.
8.
How do you handle positive reviews of your customer service?
We share them on our excellence board which is a place where we recognize
excellence from our employees and others.
9.
What area of your business has undergone the most growth due to
customer service?
Clearly our sales. You don’t make the INC 5000 list two years in a row with
bad customer service.
10.
What is your general philosophy on customer service? Why?
Do unto others as you would have other do unto you.
We’ve all dealt with bad customer service. You learn from all of those
engagements and we very firmly believe, especially in a very competitive
market, you need to differentiate yourself and we hope that our stellar
customer service will do that.
11.
What goals do you have for employees concerning customer service?
We have several KPI (Key Performance Indicators) across several
departments, with the focus being better quality and exceeding expectations
for our customers. One being on-time delivery because we have custom built
products. Making sure we get the product into our customer’s hands on time
is important. Two being quality of the repair and maintenance team.
Computer downtown means operation down time for our customer. If their
computers go down, their organization goes down in a certain way and can
impact their bottom line. So RMA customers (repair and maintenance
agreement) repair turnaround time in-house is very important.
12.
On which front is your customer service stronger: On the phone or
Online?
One isn’t necessarily stronger. Open hours have chat support or phone
support. There’s a lot of different way people can interact with us to gain
support. We’ve tried to make ourselves as available as possible.
13.
How do you handle customers who remain unsatisfied despite your best
efforts to reconcile their experience?
Anytime you’re dealing with the customer that’s unhappy, the first thing to
do is to listen. Try to put yourself in their shoes. 90% of the time there
is more going on behind the scenes for that customer and maybe the issue at
hand is amplified by what’s going on in their life. So the most important
thing to do is to try to convey that you’re here and you’re listening so
you can understand what would help to make it better. We often ask what can
we do to make this right? By setting the stage for expectations, you can
help to prevent unhappy customers.
14.
How do you organize customer complaints for future reference?
Part of our quality management system is by taking in positive and negative
feedback and we go through it once a quarter in a management meeting. We
analyze what is working and what needs work. Once a year, we also send out
a survey to our customers to learn from them what we can work on or what’s
working well. Recently we started working on a way that can help us get
immediate feedback. So we can learn “how is our service?” If it’s something
positive, that’s awesome, but if it’s negative that will help us speed up
the process of learning and getting better about working on our issues. Any
way we can get to the issues faster, that will help us get to our issues
faster.
For more information about Teguar’s company and products, visit www.Teguar.com.
