Health Checks: The Key to Customer and Lab Success

What is a Health Check?

A health check is a checkup on the health of the lab’s digital operations and progress using impact-driven metrics.

• The Purpose: Constant productivity improvement – on all fronts!  
• Impact-driven metric examples:
  • % of samples digitized within a period of time (e.g., two freezers by Q2)
  • % of SOPs digitized within a period of time (e.g., 20 legacy SOPs)
  • % of Electronic Lab Notebook entries and reports digitized within a period (e.g., 30% of ELN entries and reports digitized by the end of the year)

The Importance of Healthchecks at eLabNext

If we at eLabNext do not know how our customers are using the system, what features they are underutilizing, which features they wish they had, how effective system deployment has been, and how implementation has impacted the internal lab culture, we are not doing our job! 

The reality is that customers define many of the new features we develop, and we take pride in understanding their needs through conversations and having an actual methodical approach to building our community of innovative and creative users and proactively seeking their opinions. In the world of Customer Success, this process is called a “Health Check.” At the same time, we cannot ensure our customer’s success if we do not establish responsibility and accountability to implement the system sustainably.

Health checks are similar to going to your Primary Care Physician for a physical or taking your car for an oil change. In the tech world, a health check is a periodic check that examines your lab’s/business’ technological and usability health. Depending on the nature of the company and the industry, these technical health checks can cover a wide range of assets, applications, policies, technology, people, or business operations.

When we talk about a Customer Success Health Check at eLabNext, we refer to a comprehensive assessment of your Technical and Usability Health. This allows us to better facilitate successful usage, implementation, and customer satisfaction.

Impact Goals Assessments

Upon contract signature with eLabNext, our Customer Success and Lab Digitization Specialists will meet with key stakeholders to understand the lab’s short- and long-term goals. Specifically, they focus on:

1. Digital Lab Strategy: What is the organization’s Digital Lab Strategy, and what are the short—and long-term goals?
   • How will you assess your success, and what are your internal key performance indicators (KPIs)?
   • What are your one-month, three-month, six-month, nine-month, and twelve-month goals? What percentage of your lab’s operations and physical items would you like to have digitized or automated?
2. Lab Assets: How many storage units, equipment, and supplies should be tracked within eLabNext’s Digital Lab Platform (DLP)?
3. Sample Migration and Strategy: How many legacy samples should be digitized immediately, and what is the lab’s long-term Sample Strategy?
4. Sample Automation: How automated should sample management workflows be, and what does your data structure and standardization look like?
5. SOP Management: How many and which SOPs need to be digitized, edited, and used with version control in the short- and long-term?
6. Project and Report Management:
   • How many projects/programs do you need to track currently?
   • What is the structure and cadence of your Lab Reports?
   • How will the results be tracked and accessed?
7. Automation, Integration, and Customization: What are your digital tool development strategy, what integrations would you like to have, and are there any specific workflows for which you’d like to create customizations?

Having answered these questions, our team helps the customer define a series of impact goals to achieve their lab’s digitization vision. This approach creates an objective framework for measuring the success of the customer’s digitization efforts and identifying underutilized areas of the platform from which the customer can achieve greater value. With each health check call, Customer Success looks at the progression of these goals across three timeframes:

PAST

• What pain points was the customer’s team previously experiencing?
• What digitization impact goals were previously set to address these pain points?
• Were any additional steps or calls scheduled with the eLabNext team to support these goals:
  • Key user training sessions with Digital Lab Consultant
  • New feature releases/demos
  •  Activation of add-ons from the Marketplace
  • Workflow implementation walkthroughs with Customer Success
  • Import templates to migrate Inventory data into the platform

PRESENT

• How well does the customer feel those goals were met:
  • Subjectively: How satisfied are users with their Digital Lab Experience compared to before the last health check call? Have they received new value from the system? Are workflows more streamlined than before?
  • Objectively: How frequently are users logging in to engage with the platform? Are they creating more samples, protocols, or experiments in the system than before? How many experiments have been signed off and completed?
• Are the impact goals still as relevant today as they were when they were set?
• Are there new pain points that need to be addressed?

FUTURE

• What new impact goals does the customer want to pursue going forward? What existing goals still need to be achieved?
• How will the customer prioritize their revised impact goal statement?

It helps to think of your lab in this context: If you take your lab to the doctor, would they say it is healthy or notice symptoms that need to be addressed?

Tools and technologies are great, but they’re only as good as their implementation and the desired success they generate. Leveraging eLabNext’s health check framework, we plan to ensure our customers’ success. To align, reach out to your Lab Digitization Specialist and/or Customer Success Specialist.