Several months ago, I posted a blog highlighting how feedback from customers plays a key role in helping us identify opportunities to improve the products and services we offer. Our Customer Satisfaction Surveys are instrumental in capturing your feedback. Earlier this year, we sent our brief survey to our customers and since then have been spending time with our management, sales, product management and product development teams to analyze your feedback and determine what changes we can implement to make improvements.

Before I present the key areas that we will focus on, I thought it would be interesting to share the results of how you rated us overall. The chart below is based on our last round of surveys, rating us from 1 to 10 on ‘how likely it is that you would recommend us to a peer?” (10 being most likely). The ratings for 8, 9, and 10 represent 87% of those responses.

While we are pleased that so many of you would recommend us to your peers, we will continue to work hard to keep you satisfied and build those numbers even higher.

Based on your feedback, here is a quick look at some of the key areas we are working on:

1. Live chat: You asked if we would consider providing a live chat service option to assist with technical support and sales related questions. Well, we considered it and we agree that it’s a great idea. We just launched a trial of live chat on our website during regular business hours. Try it out for yourself and let us know what you think. 
2. Customer appreciation program: We have been thinking about this one for a while now. We would like to introduce a program to recognize so many of you that are frequent purchasers. This is where we are going to need your direct input. We have some ideas that we will announce in the New Year, but before we finalize the details we will give you another opportunity to provide your feedback on this. In our next customer satisfaction survey, there will be a dedicated area where you can offer suggestions for our Customer Appreciation Program. We will go through your submissions and use them to help detail the program in our next Customer Feedback blog. 
3. Data demonstrating performance on NGS: We receive many tech support calls and feedback on our surveys asking for more information about the performance of Oragene/saliva samples on Next Generation Sequencing platforms and what impact, if any, the bacterial content in saliva has on results. We believe it is very important for us to demonstrate performance of our products on downstream applications. As a result, we worked with Seven Bridges this year to analyze performance and presented the findings in a poster at ASHG titled “Blood vs. saliva: analysis of the effect of sample type on variant calling confidence for human Whole Genome Sequencing”.  We found that, even with minimally reduced coverage due to the presence of bacterial DNA in the saliva samples, there was no significant difference in the number of SNPs and indels called. The results show that saliva and blood are highly concordant with respect to variants called, making saliva a suitable input for whole genome sequencing. You can find the poster on our website here.
4. More environmentally friendly: In an effort to maximize how environmentally friendly our products are, we will be moving to a merged label/instructions for all products that are in a clamshell package. The merged option will eliminate an extra label on the package ensuring that both the clamshell and the instructions can easily be recycled.
5. Shipping: We are currently updating our shipping processes to increase efficiency and communications surrounding shipping. We will provide a full update along with our new shipping commitments in our next blog.

Your input provides direction on how to make us a better fit for you, so please continue to communicate with us. Make sure to respond to our survey invitation next week and include your ideas for our Customer Appreciation Program. The survey only takes about 2 minutes to complete. As always, we look forward to hearing from you.