Customer Telephone Information Support As a Product Stewardship Tool. J. Fox, D. Gordon, B. Kroening, E. Renner, D. Richardson, and F. Yanno, Eastman Kodak Company, 1100 Ridgeway Ave., Rochester, NY 14652-3615
For over 50 years, Eastman Kodak Company has provided a 24-hour telephone information service to respond to emergency and routine customer inquiries on health-related issues involving KODAK products. The KODAK product line has included several thousand professional and consumer photographic films, papers, and processing chemicals; copier/duplicators and their associated products; laboratory and bulk chemicals; batteries; and clinical diagnostic products. Emergency inquiries usually involve incidents where acute exposure by direct skin or eye contact with a chemical, accidental or deliberate ingestion of a chemical, or inhalation of a chemical has occurred. Routine inquiries for information include requests for interpretation of health-hazard or precautionary-measures information on Material Safety Data Sheets or product labels and requests for numerical hazard-communication-information codes. As well as providing immediate direct support to customers, information from these calls is entered into an electronic database which is used to identify and track potential health-related issues on company products so that we may respond to customer needs in a proactive manner. Repeated customer inquiries on specific products may indicate a need to reevaluate product labels, MSDSS, or safe handling recommendations. We have observed a two-to-three-fold increase in total inquiries since 1985. This increase in customer calls is most likely due to increased customer awareness of health and environmental issues and to a large increase in the number of health, environmental, and right-to-know regulations. An overview of the information line, including numeric trends and types of calls received from 1985-1994, will be presented.