Page 14 - Mobility Management, January 2018

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“Win-Win”: Numotion Ramps Up Remote Service Program
Service has always been notoriously challenging for complex rehab technology (CRT) providers, due to the complexity of the power and manual chairs in this segment, and how urgently consumers need those repairs to be made.
Even as CRT has advanced, service and repair processes have been slow to keep up, said Bud DeGraff, COO of Numotion.
“In general, our industry really hasn’t kept up with advances in technology and for servicing a chair,” he noted. “It’s far too time consuming and cumbersome. Our customers expect their chairs to be xed quickly, and that’s a rightful expectation.”
A Remote Solution
Last September, and after testing
it in one region of the country, Numotion of cially launched a remote service program, designed to make the entire process not
just faster, but also more ef cient. DeGraff said Numotion did 30,000 remote assessments in 2017;
this year, the company expects
to conduct 100,000. Remote service has obviously become a Numotion priority.
“When we started down this path and started investing in it,” DeGraff said, “we talked about having large service areas and limited numbers of technicians — and the urgency on our customers’ side. How do we put those things together and come up with a solution?”
The answer starts with a free-to-use app that can be quickly downloaded by customers who call Numotion to ask for a service visit.
“You can open up [the app], and we can immedi- ately start looking at your chair along with you,” DeGraff said. “The technician has the ability to snap still photos, drop arrows and landmarks [into the photos] and show features on the photos, so they can actually share back and forth — Here’s the picture you just showed me, here’s where this connector goes. It’s an extremely exible
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application that helps us to trouble- shoot immediately and diagnose.”
Unlike Skype and FaceTime, the Numotion app is HIPAA compliant. “From there,” DeGraff explained,
“typically, [the remote technicians] can diagnose, and we can start the order process. If something’s needed from a prior authorization standpoint from your payor, or we need medical documentation, or we need to order parts, we can start immediately, on day one, which is a big time saver.”
In some cases, the remote service call is all that’s needed.
“There’s a percentage of times we can x what’s wrong right up front — loose connectors and things like that. How frustrating if you’re down and it takes you a day or two to see a technician, and the technician comes in and says, ‘Oh, this plug was unplugged.’ We get a lot of very good reactions when we’re able to help people on the spot and no parts are needed.”
In those cases, DeGraff said, “We tell payors: If we get somebody on
the application and we see it and can x it right there, we won’t even start paperwork on that. We’ll just x it for free.”
Customer Satisfaction Tied to Service
Even when a repair will require an old-fashioned house call, DeGraff said a remote technician can streamline the process by zeroing in on the most likely causes of the problem before Numotion sends a service van to the consumer’s location.
“Even if it’s a complex x,” he said, “the fact that we’ve had somebody look at it means we probably know what the issue is or can narrow it down to a couple of possibilities. We can also send that technician out a lot more prepared when they’re out there doing the rest of the assessment.”
DeGraff said Numotion is investing in remote service because service is so important to its end users.
“Our customer service scores are highly driven by
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