Customer support at GenDx goes far beyond writing emails or answering calls. Our team ensures that all products and software are implemented correctly, enabling our customers to achieve the best results. 2024 was an eventful year, filled with interesting cases, new data, and the launch of new products like NGS-Pronto and NGS-Turbo. We spoke with our Support Manager, Yvonne Dorland, to learn more about the work of GenDx’s support service this year.
Yvonne, in your opinion, why are support services essential in the molecular diagnostics industry?
Customer support in transplantation diagnostics is important because we are invested to make sure that our products contribute to a positive outcome for transplant patient. Therefore we support our customers by answering all their questions ensuring that they are able to generate high quality results. In addition, we offer webinars and training courses that help to share our knowledge with a broader audience. By doing so, we help our customers to obtain the best possible results for their patients.
Can you share one of the most interesting customer support cases from 2024?
A while ago a customer reached out to us because they had difficulty interpreting their data generated with NGSgo-MX11-3. Goal of this method is to type the HLA genes of, for example, a patient or potential donor. Based on the specific HLA type, a suitable match may be found. Therefore, it is important that the typing results are very accurate.
To help this customer, we asked them to share their data with us and we analyzed the data using NGSengine. Our support team is quite experienced in analyzing data and we immediately noticed that the sample shared by this customer was special. We noticed that this sample contained a putative new allele; An allele that was not reported previously and therefore not known in the general database (IMGT/HLA database) that is being used to describe alleles. The HLA gene is highly polymorphic and it happens more frequently that we encounter an allele that was not described yet.
Thus, we helped this customer to generate a file that they can use to register this new allele to the IMGT/HLA database. By doing so, other customers will be helped as well. When other customers will find this exact same allele, they will know how to describe it and they might get information about the frequency of this allele within a certain population or area in the world.
We also helped this customer to recognize putative new alleles in the future by describing how to verify if an allele is truly a new one. This enables the lab to handle similar cases in the future by themselves. However, they are of course still welcome to ask our support team for help or a confirmation in the future.
How would you summarize customer support at GenDx in key facts for 2024?
We were in contact with customers in over 60 countries.
Top 3 products customers asked about:
- NGSengine
- NGSgo-MX11-3
- NGSengine-Turbo
What types of support do GenDx customers receive?
Our customers often reach out to us through email. Email provides a good platform to share detailed information and to guide our customers through complicated analysis steps for example through screenshots. Having a written reply can give our customers some time to read and translate our support to their native language.
We also have a website chat that is monitored by our support team and customers may also reach us via phone. In addition, we regularly schedule online meetings and on occasion visit our customers in the lab to support them directly. In exceptional cases, when we feel the result may contribute to the field of transplantation, we may even offer to sequence a sample at GenDx.
In return, we sometimes ask our customers if we can use their question or case for our own internal training or sometimes even a webinar. This way, our support team keeps learning and our customers can learn from each other as well.
For example, our last webinar was an advanced case study based on a customer question addressed by our support team. In this case, a customer also found a putative new allele. However, the sample also contained 3 alleles whereas normally we expect to find only 2. We offered to sequence this sample at GenDx using Longread sequencing to gain more insight and to help this customer interpret their results.
How do customers describe our services in their own words?
We are proud of our GenDx Customer Support Team and hope that our customers are happy with the support they receive. Based on the responses we get from our customers, we would say this is the case.
“The GenDx support team always provide thorough and well explained answers to any questions we have, from the simplest query to the most complex cases”.
“Fantastic support team at GenDx, reply promptly and are highly skilled in their fields”.
Yvonne Dorland PhD, Support Manager at GenDx
