In a newborn screening lab, the result is not a number. It is a baby. When the lab catches an inborn error of metabolism early, the condition can often be managed with a change in diet or the right medicine, and the child grows up healthy. When it is missed or caught too late, the same condition can do permanent harm.
That is the world Grace van der Gugten knows from the inside. She has spent about fifteen years at the bench running clinical mass spectrometry, newborn screening included, across hospital and provincial labs. So, when an instrument goes down, her first thought is not about what her vendor considers a reasonable response time for repairs. She is thinking about the babies and patients whose results are waiting.
I wanted her perspective on what earns a clinical customer’s loyalty to a particular lab product or vendor, and I approached the question from several directions. She kept returning to one word, and to one idea beneath it. The word was partnership. The idea was that the vendors who earn her trust are the ones who understand what is at stake on her bench and act like it.
The difference she feels when a vendor gets it
She has felt that difference.
She described one company whose salesperson stopped by about once a month to simply check in. She brought a notebook. She asked how things were going, wrote down the problems the lab was experiencing, and came back having tried to solve them.
When something broke and the service person could not get there that day, they got on the phone and worked the problem alongside the lab until it was running again, or they had exhausted every troubleshooting option.
“It felt like we were a priority,” Grace said.
It was not one heroic save. It was a steady stream of small signals that the work that lab was doing mattered to them as much as it mattered to her.
This is not always the case.
There have been times, she told me, when a service visit left her feeling like the service team did not fully appreciate the problem they were there to help solve. The work got done, technically. What often did not happen was anyone treating her instrument’s performance as their top priority and her results as though a person were waiting on the other end of them.
She noticed something about the vendors who tend to get this right.
The vendor that impressed her most built its entire business around the kind of patient testing her lab performs. For them, clinical testing was not a line in a brochure; it was the entire company. The vendors selling the same instrument into clinical, environmental, and academic laboratories alike were the ones who seemed most likely to lose sight of the fact that, for a clinical lab, the instrument on the bench could make a difference in a patient’s life.
Service is the thing, not the spec sheet
This is why, for Grace, service is not a footnote to the product her lab is purchasing. It is the product.
She told me she would overlook particular pain points about a system that she dislikes, because the service that vendor provides is more consistent than the alternative. In her experience the major platforms are all capable of producing excellent data, so “the thing that is going to differentiate them is their service.”
A great instrument with poor support, she said, slowly stops being a great instrument.
Done well, service also makes her better at her job. She lit up, describing a software specialist who spent an entire week onsite during a system upgrade simply teaching her. He sat beside her, explained each step as he went, and let her do the work while he coached her through it.
“I learned so much,” she said.
Even though it was a service her lab had purchased, she still considers it one of the most valuable things a vendor has ever done for her. Like this one, the most positive experiences have been those where service teams are willing to invest in the partnership, treating the goals of the lab with respect and leaving her feeling more equipped and empowered.
What partnership means to her
When Grace said partnership was the quality that mattered most and would be the hardest for a competitor to copy if done well, I asked her exactly what she would tell a vendor that meant.
Her answer was remarkably concrete.
Partnership is a service team that understands the type of testing the lab performs and why it matters. They know the types of problems that tend to come up and then help prevent those problems before they even happen. It means being reachable, answering email, and getting the ball rolling.
Underneath all of it, partnership begins with the vendor caring enough to have the conversation in the first place—to ask what her lab is trying to do.
That is what a clinical customer means by partnership. Not warmth for its own sake, and not a better spec sheet. It is the feeling that her work is understood, and that the problem in front of her is not hers to carry alone.
Grace is not the person who signs the purchase order. But she is the one who lives with her lab’s choice of vendor every day, so she is the one colleagues call to ask about which vendor they should trust.
The scientist who feels their work is understood and their problems are shared does not just stay. They carry that vendor’s name into every room where the next decision is made.
Grace van der Gugten is a mass spectrometry lab scientist. The thoughts she shares here are her own personal opinions and observations and do not necessarily represent the views of her employer.