UNITY: Enhancing Our Ability to Serve and Delight Customers | Varian

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UNITY: Enhancing Our Ability to Serve and Delight Customers

UNITY: Enhancing Our Ability to Serve and Delight Customers

By Kolleen Kennedy, MS, President of Varian Oncology Systems

We know that oncology today is practiced in the context of ever-changing global healthcare trends, from personalized and evidence-based medicine to healthcare cost-containment initiatives. Taking care of patients is challenging enough; adapting to these types of trends significantly complicates the daily healthcare environment.

One thing that should not be challenging is doing business with Varian. When I assumed leadership of Varian’s Oncology Systems business, I made customer satisfaction—I call it “customer delight”—a top priority. My aim is to develop processes and programs that ensure you have a world-class experience each time you interact with Varian. I’d like to share with you some of the initiatives we have undertaken to enhance our ability to serve—and hopefully, even delight—our customers worldwide.

We have launched two programs to help us better serve you: a new Varian Oncology Systems (VOS) organizational structure and a customer relationship management (CRM) system called Unity. The new organizational structure was implemented in October 2014. The Unity project is rolling out in phases. It represents a significant investment in infrastructure designed for world-class customer intimacy—our ability to understand your organization better in order to provide a tailored, effective, and expedited sales, service, and support experience.

VOS geographical organization structure

Our new VOS organizational structure is meant to bring us closer to each of you through the creation of three geographic regions under regional leadership: the Americas (AMS); Asia- Pacific (APAC); and Europe, Middle East, India and Africa (EMEIA). We have integrated our operations within these areas, with close alignment between sales, marketing, training, and service functions. This regional integration enables a more nimble and flexible organization, and empowers Varian employees to be agile in responding to your needs.

We believe that this regionalization will allow us to more tightly align sales and service teams to better serve you, optimize application training for your clinical protocols and operational requirements, and tailor marketing programs to your local healthcare environment and needs.

The Unity project: Infrastructure for world-class customer support

To ensure an exceptional end-to-end experience for Varian customers, we have also launched a comprehensive new CRM platform called Unity.

Unity is a multifaceted tool that connects us to you deeply and broadly by putting all customer information in one easily accessible data warehouse.

The Unity project will roll out in phases, with each phase adding capabilities that help us do a better job of assisting you. For example, the first phase, which has been launched, included a new telephony system that identifies the caller. When you call our Help Desk, Varian support staff will know who you are and have immediate and complete access to essential customer information, such as your service history, any training or flex credits to which you are entitled, your current technology configuration, your open service tickets and in-process work orders, and information about your last quotations. With the new system, our Help Desk agents will always have the latest history of your interactions with Varian, and vital information such as the versions of software you are running and when they were upgraded.

The Unity project has also empowered our global Help Desk agents with a knowledge management system designed to help them troubleshoot issues more effectively, with fast access to relevant information. They also have improved access to contract information, so they understand your entitlements at the time you are asking for service.

In addition, our customer portal, MyVarian, has been integrated into our Unity platform so that you now have direct access to case order and work order information, including up-to-date status on all your projects. You can also create cases directly in MyVarian without even picking up the phone.

As new Unity capabilities come on line, I predict you will experience a more united and proactive Varian that knows you—and can better understand, anticipate, and meet your needs. In the next phase of the Unity project, we will launch a new quoting tool that simplifies and accelerates the quotation process, leverages your installed base information to improve the accuracy of upgrade quotations, and more. These new capabilities will help ensure that orders you place with Varian will meet your operational needs.

In the future, we will continue to do our best to delight our customers, as we work to innovate, support, and simplify cancer-fighting solutions worldwide. Through our new organizational structure and the Unity CRM system, we are committed to serving you as fully and directly as possible.

My hope is that as we continue to focus on understanding your unique needs and how our entire organization can address them, you’ll feel delighted each time you experience Varian.