Siemens Healthineers reimagines customer engagement

Accelerating digital workflows

Siemens Healthineers generated revenues of €14.5 billion in 2019, up 5.8 per cent. Every day, five million patients globally benefit from its technologies and services. By all measures, the business can be seen as a success.

Yet success is no barrier to transformation. Siemens Healthineers is in the process of reimagining the way it supports, services, and sells to its global customer base. As healthcare goes digital, Siemens Healthineers is accelerating the promotion of digital workflows.

A world of always-on healthcare

As much as two thirds of the solutions of Siemens Healthineers is software based. Solutions are a lot more connected and complex. They require a different approach to sales and support.

More touchpoints mean more data. Siemens Healthineers wants to make sense of this data, creating digital workflows that work for its staff and customers.

“The market is undergoing a paradigm shift,” says Christian Hopf, SVP CRM, Customer Services at Siemens Healthineers. “Today, data is of the essence, connectivity is of the essence. We want to make the online interaction the first choice for customers.”

This doesn’t mean Siemens Healthineers is abandoning its human talent. It is recognition that digital transparency, and an always-connected approach, can make customer engagements ‘stickier’. Support can be more proactive and efficient.

Data when and where it’s needed

Siemens Healthineers established its Remote Service Center (RSC) function 15 years ago. The aim was to deliver, where possible, remote support to customers and coordinate face-to-face support when necessary.

It has been a remarkable success. Staff has grown from 40 to 1,200, managing an installed base of around 600,000 pieces of medical equipment. The team manages 120,000 service activities each month. It wants to do better.

“If you can improve by one minute each and every service instance, you can create massive time and resource savings,” says Jörg Modlmayr, SVP Customer Service RSC, Siemens Healthineers. “There is huge potential in automation and workflow management.”

The goal is to give every service employee access to the information they need, when they need it, from the location of a spare part, to a customer’s service history, to diagnostic walk-throughs. The platform should be mobile, and the experience should be as user-centric as the most popular consumer apps.

“One platform to unite our knowledge base, our service management, our product documentation, our contract information,” explains Modlmayr. “Everything you need in one place, at your fingertips, delivered in a context-sensitive way.”

Winning converts with a user-centric approach

ServiceNow Customer Service Management (CSM) is the platform on which Siemens Healthineers has built its digital workflows. It enables teams to see a single view of all their products, services, cases, and information, and take swift action for customers.

“We had very good systems previously,” says Modlmayr, “but we had multiple systems. ServiceNow creates a global, harmonized platform.” He says the stability, simplicity, and the user-centric functionality of the ServiceNow platform is key in gaining traction among users. But it is ServiceNow’s long-term vision that is most important to the business.

“If you’re really looking to change, you can’t be looking at a two-to-three year investment. The digital world is so dynamic, change happens so fast. We wanted a partner that could demonstrate innovation, and speed of innovation. ServiceNow has that philosophy.”

This is a journey, Modlmayr points out. The future is increasingly intelligent automation, with ServiceNow’s machine learning to the fore.

A connected and modern service experience

By connecting its multiple systems Siemens Healthineers is better able to establish and monitor relevant KPIs. Beyond first time fix rates and mean time to failure, it can then drill down into the data. It can identify broad trends or issues at any individual level. When glitches are spotted in one part of the world, global fixes are faster to roll-out.

The platform provides the basis for significant efficiency and productivity gains. 

In a healthcare industry that operates 24/7, the engagement creates a connected and modern service experience for customers — and drives better patient outcomes. It presents a modern image for a modern business. “Customers operate in the modern world. They expect a new model of service,” says Hopf. “It’s important we’re perceived as a leading company in terms of how we interact online with customers. Those interactions are maturing continuously.”

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