Patient Experience Starts with the Hiring Process

It’s 6:45 am on a Sunday morning and I’m sitting in an airport waiting on a Southwest Airlines flight to Chicago. The flight is running a little late, and bleary-eyed passengers bemoan the extra half hour of sleep they could have had. Meanwhile the Southwest gate agents, who look much too rested and energized for such an early hour, begin the lighthearted banter for which they are known. Pretty soon, the delayed passengers are laughing at their goofy repartee of corny jests and bad-rhythm rap. Once on board, the pilot apologized for the delay and joked that he’d just had a low-carb, high energy drink to help get us there in record time.

While some might see these gestures as silly, they are part of the airline’s legendary culture – one that turns customers into loyal followers. Southwest’s vigorous hiring process assures they have a better than average track record of selecting good-natured individuals that love to serve others but don’t take themselves too seriously. It makes for a great customer experience on an otherwise no-frills aircraft.

With all the talk about customer experience in health systems today, I wonder how many organizations have hard-wired their HR systems to weed out those applicants who just don’t have customer service in their DNA. Why try to train the surliness out of people that shouldn’t have been hired in the first place?

So many of our healthcare employees truly enjoy serving patients and customers, and do so admirably – often under trying circumstances. But those that don’t, hijack your brand – and break the covenant of trust between the brand and customer. That’s a marketing problem.

Marketers Shifting Resources to Support Social Media Marketing

Seems like marketers everywhere are reallocating budgets and restructuring marketing and public relations teams to embrace social media marketing. The implications are big - and require a thoughtful approach to redesigning the marketing operation in order to reinvent our approach to engaging consumers . . . How are you addressing this in your health system?

This article from UTalkMarketing.Com describes the shift:

Businesses Own Their Audience Through Social Networks, Not Traditional Paid Ads

Business marketing teams are switching from paid ads to social networking advertising in 2010 to gain more control because… well, they can.

Marketers shelled out more than $1.2 billion on social networking advertising last year, and that figure will only rise – to $1.3 billion this year – as advertisers aim to leverage their existing social media infrastructure in 2010, according to a new report from eMarketer.

In its social media outlook, the research firm found that advertisers plan to devote their social media resources this year on maintaining their social networks rather than growing them through paid ads. Many marketers made the investments last year in creating fan pages on Facebook, running ads on MySpace and developing the overall strategy for social media, said Debra Williamson, the eMarketer senior analyst who wrote the report. Now, they’ll look to nurture those audiences.

This shift points to a broader philosophical change, as marketers create their own audiences, rather than rent them. Brands want to invest money in building out audiences rather than just renting through TV, radio and magazines (the old way.) Example … Pepsi pulled out of the Super Bowl after 23 years to develop its own audience through its Pepsi Refresh Project online.
Marketers are looking for better ways to quantify and measure social messaging that surrounds their brands is a summary of what Williamson said. “Whenever you do a paid online campaign, you guess or estimate how many impressions you are going to get, and now they are trying to figure out how much earned media they’ll get,” she said.

Marketers are eager to apply metrics to Facebook posts, Twitter comments, viral marketing and others times and areas when and where people share or interact with a brand online, even if it’s as simple as a consumer replying to another consumer with a brand recommendation. A number of firms track and analyze earned media, such as Listen Logic, Converseon and Networked Insights.

Brands also want to understand how social media eafects the rest of a marketing plan.
“They’re realizing you don’t have to track every single metric, but you should track the ones that make sense for your business,” Williamson said. “If you want to use social network marketing for branding, then you’re going to follow different metrics in terms of whether they are looking at your fan page or passing along to friends. But if you’re looking to do a promotion, such as downloading a coupon and getting a discount at a store, then the metrics are getting better to understand that, too.”

When marketers do spend money on social media this year, they’ll be opening their wallets for Facebook with its 350 million worldwide users. Facebook spending in the United States will jump to $450 million this year, up 34% from $335 million last year.

Read more at Businesses own their audience through social networks, not traditional paid ads.