A Global Success Story

Posted by Pamela Wong

Organizations that have won the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award are an elite group, no doubt about it. But there is an even more elite group—the handful of those organizations (just five) who have won the award twice.

The most recent of these is MEDRAD, which won the Baldrige Award first in 2003 and again in 2010. Part of Bayer Health Care, MEDRAD is a global company recognized as the number one manufacturer worldwide of injectors used in radiology and cardiology. Since 2003, MEDRAD has doubled in size. At the end of 2010, it had generated $690 million in revenue. It holds about 70% of the global market share.

Obviously, MEDRAD must be doing a lot of things right. President and CEO Samuel Liang has attributed its success to the firm “embracing all of the key dimensions of Baldrige.” One dimension that really stands out to me is MEDRAD’s customer focus.

MEDRAD truly listens to the voice of its customers. It has created the Customer Satisfaction Advisory Board (CSAB), which works cross-functionally through all areas of the company. Whenever a customer touchpoint occurs—thousands of them each year—the CSAB surveys and measures the experience.

To measure customer satisfaction, MEDRAD uses the net promoter score (NPS) methodology, which asks customers just one question, on a 10-point scale: How likely is it that you would recommend MEDRAD to a friend or colleague?

The responses fall into three categories, from highest to lowest: promoters, passives, and detractors. The NPS is determined by subtracting the percentage who are detractors from the percentage who are promoters.

Using the NPS, the CSAB benchmarks MEDRAD’s performance against other Fortune 100 companies. Then, it provides the feedback directly to the MEDRAD executive committee’s monthly meeting, where several hours are devoted to customer satisfaction.

MEDRAD takes the customer feedback and translates it into operations in a way that leads to improvements in customer interactions and/or to product improvement and development.

“The fact that net promoter scores have gone up means also that we’re meeting customer needs; they’re satisfied with us,” says Liang.

“We have a group of individuals who wake up every day thinking customer satisfaction,” he says, speaking of the CSAB. “But it’s not just them. [Customer satisfaction] is ingrained across the entire company.”

The NPS works for MEDRAD. What customer satisfaction metric does your organization use? How has it worked for you?