Category: Marketing

Categories
Customer service Marketing Training & Development

“Management Lessons from Mayo Clinic” That We Can All Learn

Every service provider is challenged with engaging employees and creating systems to deliver a positive customer experience, but none more so than those who work in healthcare. So what can be learned from the Mayo Clinic? This excerpt, from the book Management Lessons from Mayo Clinic by Leonard Berry and Kent Seltman, explains it best:

“Imagine what can be learned from an organization that serves customers who:

  1. arrive with some combination of illness or injury, pain uncertainty, and fear
  2. give up most of their freedoms if hospitalized
  3. need the service but dread it
  4. typically relinquish their privacy (and modesty) to clinicians they may be meeting for the first time.

“Mayo Clinic and other well-run healthcare organizations serve just these kinds of special customers who are called patients and still earn high praise and fierce loyalty from them. Yes, indeed, a successful healthcare organization offers important lessons for most business organizations.”

Inside Mayo Clinic

There’s quite a story behind the powerful and enduring brand that is the Mayo Clinic with its emphasis on patient-first care, medical research and education, an integrated approach to healthcare, and a strong partnership between physicians and administrators (an adversarial relationship in many hospitals). Co-authors Leonard Berry, Distinguished Professor of Marketing at Texas A&M (one of my mentors), and Kent Seltman, former Marketing Director at the Mayo Clinic, studied Mayo Clinic’s service culture through in-depth interviews and observing patient-clinician interactions.

Their book paints a fascinating picture of the history and culture of Mayo Clinic, including how it engineers its internal systems to support its patient-first mission. Best of all, the book contains great lessons on creating and managing a brand that has achieved incredible growth in a difficult and challenging industry while staying true to its core values. The story is even more amazing given ongoing medical technological advances and the financial and political pressures placed on the healthcare profession.

Listening to the Voice of the Customer

Berry and Seltman share numerous quotes and testimonials from patients, their families, doctors, nurses, administrators, and their families, to illustrate the Mayo Clinic story. (Some of the anecdotes brought me to tears.) Even with Mayo Clinic’s unique position in healthcare, the authors do a great job discussing lessons applicable to other service firms in the “Lessons for Managers” section throughout the book.

One of my favorite chapters describes how Mayo Clinic manages the different types of clues that positively impact the customer experience:

  • demonstrating competence to instill customer confidence – e.g., with a collaborative team approach to patient care and integrated & timely access to medical records.
  • influencing first impressions and expectations – such as the design of physical space to convey a sense of healing and calm to reduce the stress of patients and staff.
  • exceeding customer expectations – including extraordinary sensitivity to patients and their families.

I recommend Management Lessons from Mayo Clinic to all service management, marketing and branding professionals … and everyone who works in healthcare.

Caution: the only downside after reading this book is the possible dissatisfaction with most healthcare institutions. If my family or I need critical care, my first choice would be Mayo Clinic!

Categories
Engagement Marketing

Employee-Customer Care Podcast Now Available

My podcast interview from my recent virtual book tour with Phil Gerbyshak is finally up following some audio glitches.

To my readers – thanks for your patience.

To Phil – thanks for your diligence in fixing and posting the audio file!

Categories
Customer service Engagement Marketing

“Punching In” Delivers Knock-Out Insight

For a fascinating look at life as a front-line employee in some well-known retail and service companies, read Punching In by Alex Frankel. Frankel spent two years working undercover as a frontline employee for UPS, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Gap, Starbucks, and Apple Store.

 

His adventure was prompted by his interest in discovering how these well known companies selected and trained employees and melded them into the corporate culture to deliver on the brand promise. Frankel’s experience provides insight into the hiring process (ranging from online psychological tests to The Container Store’s in-store group interviews) and the impact of formal as well as informal training and sharing of corporate values & norms.

Note to all who oversee their organizations’ orientation programs and/or are involved in trying to codify the employee and customer experience, including helping employees evolve into brand ambassadors – read this book and consider how your organization would have fared if Frankel wrote about you. (Better yet, ask your own employees … )

Punching In explores the human role in retail and service operations. Given my bias for positive employee-customer care, I loved one of the critical lessons Frankel learned from his frontline adventure:

” … I found that many of the best companies have not only realized that humans matter but have also moved ahead of competitors by finding, hiring, and training great people to work for them. People have become as much of a competitive weapon for many companies as the actual products they sell.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories
Engagement Marketing

Engagement Can Be Tricky in Association Management

A colleague recently wrote about not taking employee engagement for granted based on his experience working for nonprofit associations.

Here’s another reason to be concerned with staff engagement – loyal members who have strong ties to their professional associations, particularly those who are strongly committed to and passionate about their participation. These members tend to work closely with the association’s professional staff and develop strong collegial relationships with them. As a result, they become concerned with – even protective of – how staff are treated in the organization.

For association management, the staff-volunteer relationship can be tricky, especially in instances where volunteers overstep their bounds to interfere with personnel issues. The relationship works both way, however, as many professional staff enjoy working with the members and volunteer leaders; it’s one of the perks that compensates for working in a professional association at nonprofit wages.

For association management, the bottom line is that internal issues regarding staff engagement can also impact (and be impacted by) member engagement.

Categories
Engagement Marketing

Who’s on First: Customers or Employees? (continued)

In contrast to the clueless company mentioned in my last post, I’m going to again cite Marriott.

Check out what Mike Jannini, Marriott International Executive VP, had to say about his company’s employee-centric approach in a recent address at the Creating Value through Service Symposium.

Companies that are employee-focused are inherently customer-focused. Being customer-focused alone is not enough (and a poor strategy) when employee value is only lip-service.

Categories
Engagement Marketing

Who’s on First: Customers or Employees?

In his June 24, 2008 article “If the customer comes first, where does that leave employees?”, Steve Crescenzo shares a story about a company whose approach is “Customers First, Employees Last.” [Updated note: access to Steve’s article is for Ragan.com Select Members. Ragan offers both free and select membership options on Ragan.com. It also offers My Ragan, a free social network for corporate communicators.]

This ‘customers first-employees last’ approach may not be what management intended, but it became the reality of the corporate culture as experienced by employees.

What’s especially disturbing is that an internal communications professional within the company tried to bring the situation about employee frustration to management’s attention – specifically in a proposed article entitled “Does ‘Customers First’ Mean Employees Last?” for an online employee publication. But management nixed the idea; they didn’t want to hear it and/or didn’t want to deal with it.

Unfortunately, the company described here isn’t unique. There are too many firms with customer problems – evident through constant complaints and customer churn – where the solution is to come down hard and put pressure on employees without actually engaging them to assist with solutions. (Why bother asking the employees who have daily interaction with the customers? If they were so smart, they’d be in management instead of on the front-lines!)

Hint to managers who think this way: customer dissatisfaction doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Besides worrying about customer retention, take a look at your employee retention.

Categories
Engagement Marketing

Internal Marketing Spotlight: Mustang Engineering (Part 2)

This post will continue my spotlight on Mustang Engineering, a company truly committed to all its stakeholders.

It’s also one of the few companies I know that has a dedicated internal marketing department.

I asked Liz Stevens, Mustang Marketing Communications Specialist, about the purpose and scope of their internal marketing function. Here’s what she shared with me:

“The purpose of internal marketing is to promote Mustang’s unique, people oriented culture and to keep Mustangers happy. We strive to provide a place people actually look forward to coming to every day and where they can enjoy who they are with and what they are doing. Fun, fun, fun! The scope is ALL Mustangers, worldwide. No matter where they are located in the world, we want all Mustangers to feel connected to the Mustang family.”

This reflects and reinforces the company’s vision: Our quest is to embody a culture that inspires super-motivated people to make heroes of Clients, Partners, Vendors and Mustangers.

In my internal marketing workshops, I suggest companies ask their employees the question, “Would you refer a friend to work here?” as a way to gauge the quality of the corporate culture. I can only imagine a positive response to that question at Mustang Engineering.

Categories
Engagement Marketing

Sometimes the Obvious Isn’t

When I talk about recognition in my internal marketing workshops, I share an example of a company that sends birthday cards to its employees. The value of this practice (especially compared to excellence-in-service and sales type recognition programs that single out exceptional performers) is that EVERY employee is recognized and acknowledged once a year.

At a recent workshop, one attendee had an “AHA!” moment when she talked about how her company sends birthday cards to its customers, yet it didn’t do the same for its employees. (I’m sure she’ll remedy the situation.)

Of course customers are valuable … and so are employees. Is your organization missing an opportunity to tell employees they’re just as important?

Categories
Engagement Marketing

Catch Me on “Women in Business Radio”

I’m excited to be a guest on the Women in Business program on wsRadio, hosted by Dr. Gayle Carson, this evening (April 15) at 7:30 PM EST/4:30 PM PST, where I’ll be interviewed about my book, Taking Care of the People Who Matter Most: A Guide to Employee-Customer Care.

Dr. Carson (aka the “Wiz of Biz” and a “Spunky Old Broad”) has built her career on advising and coaching CEO’s and entrepreneurial managers, so I’m really looking forward to talking with her.

Hope you’ll tune in tonight for tonight’s broadcast!

Categories
Engagement Marketing

Bad Bosses – Good Teachers

This isn’t an April Fool’s joke – bad bosses have a lot to teach us (especially by example). And you don’t have to go very far to learn from them.

Bad bosses are a hot topic these days. Witness the best selling book, The No Asshole Rule, Zane Safrit’s “Worst bosses of the Year … so many choices” and Management-Issues’s “The Search for World’s Worst Boss.”

I’ve had my share of bad bosses. Fortunately, none would have been contenders for the World’s Worst list. In retrospect, I learned some valuable lessons from them – mostly about how not to treat employees.

Here are my top three lessons learned:

  1. Do not treat employees as minions whose sole function is to bolster your ego.
  2. Do not give employees assignments without all the proper information they need (either because you’re into power trips or because you really don’t know what you want, but you’ll figure it out as soon as they finish the assignment – at which point you’ll change your mind and direct them to do it differently.
  3. Do not assume your employees have no life outside the office and are available to help you 24/7. (I had one boss in particular whose mantra could have been: lack of planning on my part will constitute a constant emergency on your part.)

If you’ve worked for a bad boss, please share what you learned as a result.