Introducing our teams: Customer Service & Sales

External quality assessment services should be easy for the laboratory to use and provide information to support the laboratory’s quality management. If everything goes well, the laboratory will only see the visible parts of the service: samples, the user interface for result reporting, and EQA reports.

Labquality has over 50 years of experience as an EQA provider, but despite how well the service process is designed, there’s always a chance for the customers to get confused at some point, or something might go unexpectedly wrong.

When an EQA sample is missing or damaged, there are problems in result reporting, or the EQA report is not completely clear, the top feeling is confusion or frustration. This is when a professional and service-oriented customer service agent gets the customer back on track, leaving a positive memory trace and enhancing the customer experience.

Providing external quality assessment services is more than sending samples and publishing reports. Communication with participants, seeking feedback, and having procedures for handling complaints are signs of a good EQA service provider and a requirement of the ISO/IEC 17043:2023 standard. Customer service typically handles advice, answers questions, finds solutions and resolves complaints.

Nowadays, global service providers across industries have adopted various software tools to support customer service as customer volumes and service requests grow. Task management tools help sort, coordinate, and follow up on requests, and traditional phone service centres can work as a live chat or even on social media. Many have invested in the latest entrant in customer service – chatbots, to provide pre-programmed answers to simple problems. The most significant advantages of chatbots for customers are promptness and scalability. Still, despite being increasingly advanced, chatbots can’t and will never be able to handle all the tasks human service agents have done.

Empathy, situational awareness and adaptability are needed when dealing with frustrated customers or solving complex problems. The ideal would be to combine a bot’s effectiveness and scalability into a human touch.

Labquality’s customer service is carried out entirely by service-oriented laboratory professionals, either by Labquality or local partners abroad. We receive and handle 14,000 emails annually, so a well-managed process is needed to deliver the service quickly and professionally.

Who do you talk to when you contact Labquality?

Labquality’s sales and customer service team includes six laboratory and service professionals. The latest addition is Kaisa (BLS and Master ofHealthcare), who joined the team last year.

Sarita has a vocational qualificationin Social and Health Care and a Master’s degree in Organic Chemistry.

Kaisa and Sarita are accompanied by a more experienced colleague, Elisa (BBA), who’s been helping Labquality’s customers for fifteen years.

Customer Service Manager Minna (BLS and Master of Healthcare) oversees the whole team and ensures everyone has what they need to deliver the service.

The rest of the team, Juha (Head of Sales, BLS) and Jukka (Key Account Manager, BLS), are responsible for Labquality’s sales development. You can often find them at our booths at international congresses and fairs, meeting customers and national partners in person.

Our small team is very consistent and fun to work with. Employee turnover rate is very low: apart from Kaisa and Sarita, who started recently, all the other team members have been working at Labquality for 5 to 25 years in various positions. We believe that proper education, laboratory experience, good communication, a pro-development attitude, and supporting each other show in the customer experience.