What 150 samples a day taught me about customer success
I spent four months as a junior lab technician before I ever worked a ticket queue. Most of what I know about customers comes from there.
At Energon Health my day was around 150 blood samples on an ERBA EM200 biochemistry analyser, plus complete blood counts on a HORIBA Yumizen. Nobody in a lab talks about customers. You talk about samples, runs, controls and turnaround. But every tube on the rack is a person waiting for a result, a doctor waiting to decide, and a collection centre that promised a time it now has to keep. The lab is a customer operation that has never called itself one.
Speed is not the number that matters
A lab is judged on how many reports go out and how fast. That is the visible number. The number that actually runs the place is how many of those reports were right. One wrong result in a day of 150 is not a 99.3% success rate. It is a phone call, a repeat test, a clinician who trusts the next report a little less, and a patient who may have made a decision on bad information. The day's speed gain is gone by lunchtime.
I carried that into operations. Closing a hundred tickets a day is only worth something if each one is closed properly. The audited quality score is the real number. The count is what you get when the quality holds.
The rejection call is a customer conversation
Samples get rejected. Haemolysed, clotted, under-filled, wrong tube, unlabelled. Someone has to call the collection centre or the ward and ask for a recollection, and that call decides two things: whether the patient gets stuck a second time, and whether the next sample from that centre arrives right. Say it badly and you get a defensive phlebotomist and the same problem next week. Say it well, with the reason and what to do differently, and the error rate from that centre drops.
That is customer success without the title. The technician making that call is doing onboarding and retention for a client who never signed a contract.
Turnaround is a promise someone else made
The front desk tells the patient "by 6 pm". The lab inherits that promise without being in the room when it was made. A delay is never a technical event to the person waiting; it is a broken promise from a named organisation. When a reagent runs out or an analyser needs recalibration, the lab's real job is to find out who was promised what and tell them before they have to ask.
This is the part I think software companies selling into labs most often miss. "Report delayed" is a status in a dashboard. On the floor it is a queue at reception and a doctor's clinic running late. If your customer success team has never stood in that queue, they will keep treating a delay like a ticket rather than like a promise.
Why I'm writing this down
I moved from the bench into operations and I am now looking at customer success roles at healthtech and life-sciences companies, because I think the most useful person on those teams is the one who can hear what a lab manager means before they finish the sentence. Four months of samples is not a long time. It was long enough to learn that the customer was always in the tube.
Written by Mohammed Roshan, who has worked in operations at Assurant and on the bench at a diagnostics lab. Email or LinkedIn.
If this is the kind of thinking your team needs, the CV is one page.