CSI: West Palm Beach…

Posted by HearingAids on May 13, 2011 under Hearing Loss | Be the First to Comment

A Customer Service Highlight

By: Suzanne Younker

Occasionally, our patient’s get “robbed” of their amplification benefits due to unexplained, unidentified, chronic malfunction problems that go unresolved. The symptoms of the malfunction cleverly disguise themselves as a component issue, when, in fact, it usually is something entirely different. Some detective work is required to prevent these cases from ending up cold.

Case Study: Patient has severe hearing loss and is a long-time user of monaural In the canal hearing aid. He purchased one in October 2009. In September 2010, one year after favorable results, patient complained that the “volume goes up/down by itself…” There were no leads on the reason for the malfunction; could not be duplicated in the office. From September – November, several “stings” were pursued to replace components, remake with different length canal, and re-plate entirely; the culprit was untraceable. Subsequently, patient became extremely frustrated and requested justice or a refund.

C    Interview with Professional on Program Settings: Kneepoints are 69-75dB, dual compression, 16dB VC range, minimum S/N reduction
C    Interview with Patient on Specifics of Crime: “I always turn the wheel all the way up and then back down a little to hear well, however, with radio and TV, voices are good, then, volume goes up and go down for seconds and sometimes minutes and I miss the words…Very frustrating!”
C    Interview with Siemens Audiologist: Possible issues are battery surges due to high-VC drainage, if need more gain, recommend change receiver to make it “hot” with max gain/output, turn off the input compression, change the VC range to 8dB, make a music program his primary program

Upon reviewing all of the evidence and interviews, the professional pursued the recommendation to change the VC range to 8dB and to change input compression to “off”.  Outcome? The programming changes eliminated the “malfunction” and patient is, once again, a content citizen. It seems that with patient’s high volume need and wheel setting, the TV/Radio voices were being compressed causing the softening of the voices. The evidence from the detective work led to the culprit’s arrest. CASE SOLVED!