Customer responsibility

Good eyesight throughout life
Synsam’s ambition is to contribute to good eyesight for everyone throughout their lives, with the smallest possible carbon footprint. The Group is actively engaged in offering products that allow its customers to have good vision while maintaining good eye health. This preventive work is an extremely important part of the Group’s efforts in the pursuit of good eye health. Therefore, offering eye examinations and visual aids from an early age should be a priority. Synsam knows that the continual development of products and services is what enables the Group to meet the eye health challenges of today and the future in order to contribute to better public health.

High clinical quality eye examinations
Regular eye examinations are the basis for good eye health and eyesight. Increased screen use, especially among children and young people, is making eye health an increasingly important public health issue. Additional factors such as a growing elderly population mean are also resulting in an increasing need for eye examinations. This is where Synsam wants to be at the cutting edge, contributing to the development of technology and equipment that improve access to high clinical quality eye examinations.

Hiring instead of owning
Synsam’s spectacles subscription service allows customers to rent spectacles rather than buying them. The Synsam Lifestyle subscription service gives customers the opportunity to have their vision checked regularly and, if necessary, to replace their spectacle lenses or contact lenses, and/or to return spectacles for reuse or recycling. The subscription also allows Synsam’s customers to learn about innovative new products, while at the same time contributing to a circular flow where the products can be reused by other customers.

Eye health centres contribute to better eye health
High-quality eye examinations require highly trained opticians. Opticians are the hub of the operation, and an important resource that can help relieve the burden on the health service. Synsam has approximately 900 qualified opticians and just over 60 eye health centres around the Nordic region.

One of the procedures performed at the Group’s eye health centres is fundus photography, which can help detect and prevent eye diseases such as cataracts and glaucoma. Customers are referred to ophthalmologists if necessary. The first clinic specialising in eye health for children and young people opened during the year. Eye examinations, treatment of myopia and more in-depth examinations such as binocular vision assessments are performed at the new clinic, located at Hötorget in Stockholm.

Jessica Lindqvist, optician at Synsam Hötorget:

“Regular visits to an optician should be just as obvious as going to the dentist, especially since screen time is drastically increasing. Many parents don’t necessarily connect their children’s headaches and difficulty concentrating with vision problems. This could also be the reason behind a child avoiding reading and writing, or even quitting leisure activities. This is why it’s so important to have regular vision checks.”

“Everyone should see!” initiative continues
Sedentary behaviour in childhood is one of the biggest public health challenges of our time. Therefore, Synsam has engaged in its “Everyone should see!” initiative, which promotes physical activity among children, for four years. Poor vision should never stand in the way of equal opportunities to be active. Synsam offers children with vision problems aged 5–12 a pair of activity spectacles free of charge through the initiative. The work of “Everyone should see!” continued throughout the year, and since the initiative began in 2019, Synsam has distributed close to 43,678 pairs of activity spectacles to children across the Nordic region.

Always a focus on customer satisfaction 
Synsam always endeavours to offer its customers the best possible assistance based on their needs, and has set a target of at least 90 percent of its customers being “satisfied” or “very satisfied” by 2026.

Synsam is able to guarantee safe, high-quality customer interactions by always following rules and guidelines to ensure clinical quality. The use of certifications is an important part of ensuring an offering of high clinical quality. As an example of clinical quality, the Swedish stores are certified according to the quality standards of the optical trade association Optikbranschen. This certification is based on the rules governing the clinical aspects of the optician’s activity and summarises the National Board of Health and Welfare’s regulation for opticians and the Patient Data Act (PDL) in a certification that is regularly checked/audited via instore visits. Processing customers’ personal data in a safe and secure manner is extremely important to Synsam. Therefore, Synsam works actively to ensure compliance with data protection legislation such as local patient data laws and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Read more about Synsam Groups customer responisbility in our Annual and Sustainability Report 2022