The following memorandum was forwarded by Mr. Terry Adams (Regional Manager) to Shimadzu senior management including Pat O'Donnell (former Regional Manager; what happened here?), Chris Gaylor (East Coast Area Manager) and Lorenz Brosnan (National Sales Manager):


I feel that it is important to express my current state of dissatisfaction with my job. It has taken me about 3 months to come to grips with the fact that I cannot continue to be a top performing Shimadzu salesman unless I either change my attitude or Shimadzu changes the way that we support our customers. (Editor's note: Don't stop now!)

I believe that this company has come to a cross road. That cross road is to place the customer as our top priority or as it currently seems to push paper and memos around and push off customer needs to each other. It seems that every day I get at least one complaint about various aspects of our business. They range from not getting the correct part number, not being trained properly, people not returning phone calls to them, getting different instructions from different people, equipment not working properly, etc. etc. etc. I don't mind handling the complaint, it is just that I am tired of making excuses. The same excuses that we used four to five years ago. Are we ever going to grow up as a company and find an efficient way to address the customer needs? It seems that if you report a problem, everyone from marketing, service and quality assurance has an excuse as to why it is not their responsibility or why I should go tell my customer to "take a hike, it is not important enough for us to concern ourselves with." (Editor's note: This is amazing!)

Somebody please wake up! These "stupid, don't know what they are doing" customers are our customers. They are our bread and butter. They pay our bills. They are our future because if we lose their respect, we lose a good part of our business as well as the references we need to make the business grow. A salesman will never sell any more products than he currently does unless he allows his customers to help him. You could give me the names of everyone in my territory that is purchasing equipment but unless I have a good reputation, we will only get a small part of the business. The part that we will get will be the uninformed, the friend, or the customer who uses us as a protest against a competitor such as HP. (Editor's note: No surprises here!)

Now I know that you are going to say: "Tell me about your problems and we will get you the help you need." What help? We hire tech support people and provide them with little or no training. I am not talking about putting them in a class for a week and now their an expert - that's not training. I am talking about putting them in front of a customer with a real problem, about how to handle a customer, about how to troubleshoot the instrument, about when to ask for backup, about how to schedule themselves, about what a timely response is. These are things that need to be taught in the field. We should be having our field staff travelling together and communicating better. We should have some way to assess their abilities to figure out if they should be sent out on a problem. When we send in our expert and they are less trained than the salesman, we have a credibility problem. Sending a "body" out there rarely solves anything but buying an extra couple of days. (Editor's note: Maybe Mr. Adams is on to something here....)

It use to be that when I did all of my own technical support and part of my own service that I could see problems before they became PROBLEMS. We could head off problems at major accounts before they infected everyone else at that account. Nowadays, when a customer has a service problem, they get a rapid response that fixes the hardware problem and typically a hefty bill. But I would argue that 50% of these calls are just a symptom of poor training or communication. The service personnel understand how to get an instrument to function when we push the right button but they don't know how to run the instrument the way a customer does. They don't know how to question the customer to find out if there exists problems in his sample prep, his data interpretation, his procedures, etc. I know that it is unrealistic to expect a service person to understand the hardware repair for 50 some instruments, let alone the customer's applications, but I do expect that we should be communicating better than we are. Often times, I find out that an instrument was repaired but did not really solve the customer's real problem. Of course, he never described his real problem to the service man; he may have just stated something like: "I think my injector isn't working." The service man overhauls his injector, bills him and the customer's problem continues. Unfortunately, we don't find any of this out until we arrive and see a new HP instrument in his lab. When we ask why he didn't call us back and say the problem continued, he states something like: "I couldn't afford too." The only answer to this scenario that I can conceive is to have the salesman follow up every service call and/or discuss the problem with the customer while the service person is on site. I can tell you this is impossible because there is not enough hours in the day to bring in the dollars you ask for as well as follow up every contact between Shimadzu and the customer. (Editor's note: Does this sound like that unrivaled customer service that Shimadzu so ardently proclaims on it's WWW page?)

I also know that you will say "if we feel that our field people can't handle the problem then we can go inside and ask for help." But I am going to tell you that I am not sure that some of our inside people, although specialists, know as much as our field people do about their instruments. This is because they rarely run the instruments the way a customer would. They are shielded from customers by being inside too much. They don't seem to care about the science the way that an in-house specialist should. Where are application notes, what scientific meetings do they attend, what journals do they read? They seem to be most concerned with reading competitor's ads, reproducing problems from the field and doing telephone support. Again with little or no communication to the field as to the nature of the telephone call. How can I head off a problem before it exists if I am not informed? I have customers call in and are told to try several different things from different people inside, all of which I am sure is well intended, but leaves the customer with the opinion that we really don't understand our own equipment. The other problem with going inside for help is that they are so overworked it seems "putting out fires," that they can't help us in a timely manner. A problem that takes us two weeks to look at and two months to solve does little to impress on the customer that they should continue to buy Shimadzu products. (Editor's note: We can't add anything to that!)

I can surely say that I am not sure where we are going as a company. I see the field people getting laptop computers that I assume are going to increase communications but no one seems to be using the bulletin board. If the purpose is to make quoting customers more efficient, I still haven't seen it. I know something is in the works but I wonder how many of us will use it? Will it really save time? Is it worth all the effort and man hours we put in it? Will price changes still come out on paper so I have to spend hours correcting my online price book as well as my hard copy price book. It seems that we have been spinning our wheels for about three years now. Are we going to make some use of power leads data? Is it worth the effort? Do we have the manpower to manage it? Can it be supported by our in-house staff? Is the only purpose of power leads to make a transition to another salesman easier? (Editor's note: Three years is an awful long time to be spinning your wheels!!!)

We have a training center. Are we supposed to run it like a business? Are we trying to make profits from the tuition or is it supposed to be a sales tool? Are classes being taught that are superior to the training in the field. Sometimes I wonder if I am increasing or decreasing my efficiency by having a customer go to training? Some come out and say "If I have a problem, I call you" because they were not that impressed. Some come out and say "Why didn't you sell me this or that - So and So said that...." Hell so and so shouldn't tell my customer what's best for them unless they go to his lab and watch how it works. All that winds up doing is helping me lose my credibility. It seems to me that when we have customers in our facility, we should be giving them the best sales presentation ever conceived in a subtle manner. We have two or three days of their undivided attention while being surrounded by other Shimadzu users. Are we trying to sell ourselves - I don't think so. Walking them through the building is not enough. We should be interacting with them on breaks and finding out what we can do to help them. (Editor's note: Why would students in a learning environment want to be pestered with a sales pitch???)

I see us making profit from service, but at what cost to sales? I thought that we were looking for long term growth, not short term gain. Our reasonable and different approach to service is what landed us in several of my existing accounts. It is what set me apart from my competition. It seems now we are trying to compete with the competition on their terms. I know that in several accounts that Shimadzu is looked on as no different that HP and Waters in terms of how it treats a customer. As a matter of fact, we cannot compete with them as they out number and out support us. (Editor's note: Well said!!!)

When I first came here, it seemed to me that we were a company driven by the customer. Whatever the customer wanted, we tried to accommodate; we tried to compromise, we at least listened. Today, I think we are a company driven by the competition. Customer suggestions and requests are greeted with answers like "What other company has that feature?" We certainly seem to spend more time trying to figure out what our competitors offer than we do to listening to our own customers. Our decision makers are tied up inside and can't get into the field. They rely on salesmen for some information but of course, this is not first hand and often details get lost in the translation. We need to spend time imagining that we are our customer. We should put ourselves in their places. We should operate our equipment the way the customer does. Only if we allow ourselves to be driven by customers will we ever be leaders in analytical instrumentation. (Editor's note: We are wondering just how does Shimadzu operate it's equipment???)

....All and all, I will continue to struggle to come to grips with this position. Some days are good and some are bad. The problems will be here whether I am here or not, so I should stay around and try to solve them. After all, "quality is my responsibility!" It seemed that when I joined this company, everyone here believed that we could become a great company different from the rest, but now it seems the attitude is that we are just another company trying to be like the rest. I would like to hear from management a couple of things: 1) do you recognize that support problems exist and is costing us our long term business, 2) do they understand that we don't put ourselves in the customer's shoes enough, 3) what are our long term plans, where are the details, who is going to direct us, 4) is it my job to spend about an hour a day writing memos so that they can be passed around to each other and eventually forgotten. (Editor's note: So what does Shimadzu management have to say???)

Pat, I understand that you are doing the best you can , hell everyone is. We just need to make some decisions about where we are going as a company and then act on them. I can say that support has increased in the last six years - at least by a body count, but I can't say that support has improved in my customer's eyes. I think that the product line is becoming more demanding and the customers are becoming less educated and need more from us. I think that a new support person cannot be expected to master all the product lines is a reasonable time and perhaps its time we specialize field support personnel. Thanks for listening. (Editor's note: No, thank you Mr. Adams for writing!!!)