of the Year Award for 2018 at this year’s Optician Awards
For Chris Willis, Optos’s sales director for northern Europe, being a good optical supplier involves several things. First, you need to have ‘a good product that people need’. Second, ‘know your market, your customers, the environment in which they operate and what it is they need,’ says Willis. After that, it is about knowing your product – ‘patients rely on the optometrist to know the eye, and they rely on the industry to know the products’. And finally, be responsive to customers. ‘It’s critical for us to respond to requests for information, support or whatever else they need from us in a timely manner,’ he says.
It is this mentality that resulted in Optos winning the Optician Award for Optical Supplier of the Year in April. Willis says the team were not expecting to win because of the quality of other providers and their products. ‘It’s a fast-moving industry with a lot of innovation,’ he says. ‘So, at these events there are always a lot of great companies and great products, and competition is fierce.’
‘It felt awesome to win,’ says Willis. ‘I think these awards are more for people and practices in the industry who have done something different. For us, what was really important was when those people who the awards are about nominate you, and not only nominate you but also recognise what you’ve done for them.’
The customer feedback in regard to Optos’s products, such as the California and Daytona that produce optomap images that map the retina in a ‘patient friendly way’, has been extremely positive. Not content, however, to simply rest on this feedback, Optos regularly sends out customer satisfaction surveys that are used to create a net promoter score – the likelihood of its customers to recommend Optos to others.
‘It’s been on the up ever since we started to measure it,’ says Willis. ‘It helps us identify and address potential opportunities for improvement in the organisation through analysing the questionnaires.’
In terms of going above and beyond the service expected by its customers, Willis says Optos’s commitment to spending time in practice and helping clients get the most out of its technology is paramount. ‘People tell us that “nobody spends this amount of time in the practice”,’ says Willis. ‘Sometimes the team end up staying close by if it’s not near to home, even spending three nights in a hotel so that they can be at the practice for four days.’
Willis says the biggest effect of the award has been its recognition of the role of the entire Optos team. ‘It’s been super positive,’ he says. ‘The customer sees the sales person, but in reality there are so many people involved in the successful delivery of that device into the market.’
Willis says: ‘Getting an award like this gives us the internal opportunity to thank everyone in the organisation for what they do. The unsung heroes are the engineers, the quality team, the drivers, the manufactures, finance, customer service, HR and more.
‘When we get an award like this we are able to place it in the office, we are able to tell everyone about it, we do an internal newsletter that shows people that their efforts are recognised,’ he adds.
As well as the enthusiasm that the award has instilled in the team, Willis says it has also proved useful for the sales teams’ morale. ‘This is recognition for the sales team to keep doing what they are doing,’ he says.
When asked how Optos will look to improve its service as a supplier in the years to come, Willis says that a continued focus on its customer satisfaction surveys and net promoter score will allow it to continuously ‘evolve’.
‘We don’t know what we don’t know,’ he says. ‘We are dedicated to understanding how we are perceived in the market and we keep trying to improve our questionnaires – we never ask a person the same question twice – in order to understand our customers.
‘It’s a process that’s now ingrained in what we do at Optos,’ he adds.