I am typing this from the waiting room in the hospital where my wife is in the operating room having major surgery for lung cancer.
I hate hospitals and pretty much despise the healthcare industry in general, but today I’m going to talk about the great customer experience I’ve had here at Cleveland Clinic in Weston.
If more businesses operated like this, they’d have customers for life.
Where Do I Go?
Hospitals are full of people who are confused, sick, old, anxious, worried or lost. Nobody wants to be there.
When you walk into either entrance to this hospital, you are greeted by volunteers (or employees?) at an information desk who smile, ask how they can help and direct you to where you need to go.
Make it easy for your customer from the start. If you know that they all have common questions, address them from the start.
What Happens Next?
After check-in we are directed to the surgery desk. They ask if I am waiting in the hospital or leaving. I’m waiting so they hand me a pager and tell me they will page me with instructions. (If I was leaving, they’d keep the pager and would text or email me with status updates.)
They hand me a card with a 6 digit code on it telling me I can check any monitor in the waiting room for this code to see my wife’s status. Naturally, I immediately check. Her status is “waiting for pre-op”. Nice. I figured they’d be late in updating this and I was proven wrong.
We get directed to the waiting room and are told to wait for a page.
Tell your customer what to expect. Over-communicate. Make it easy for the customer to get updates.
Follow Through
A few minutes later the pager goes off directing us to come to the Surgery desk. We go to the desk. They take Ellen back for “pre-op” prep and tell me they will page me when I can come to see her in a few minutes.
The pager goes off again. This time it says, go to Room XXX. I go there and my wife is in the surgery bed, all IV’d up and ready to go.
Do what you said you would do.
6 Different Staff Members All Tell the Same Story
We see the operating room nurse, the prep nurse, the surgeon, the assisting surgeon, the anesthesiologist and a medical student. Each one introduces him/herself, confirms why Ellen’s here, asks a few questions and finishes with “Do you have any questions for me?”
I have lots of questions. I ask each one how long the procedure will take. I ask where she’ll go after the surgery. I ask about the anesthesia. I am trying to pin them down to specifics.
Each one patiently answers our questions. Unlike most hospitals, nobody seems in a hurry to rush away. They smile a lot. They make eye contact with my wife, speak up so she can hear and don’t cut her off mid-sentence. They are kind with her, me and her brother.
Be kind. Treat your customer like a friend.
Do What You’ll Say You Will Do
I was told the prep would take an hour. The surgery would be 2-3 hours. Then depending on how it goes, I’ll be paged to come see my wife in the ICU, the Recovery Room or the Step Down Unit.
I check the monitors for Ellen’s code. It says “procedure started”.
I am confident I’ll see this change to “procedure complete” and then “post-op recovery” eventually. My wife has had two other procedures here already and that’s exactly what happened then.
Do what you said you will do the first time and your customer will trust you to do it again.
You notice that I haven’t talked about the costs. I haven’t mentioned the quality of care. I haven’t talked about wait times, insurance, medical credentials, or the surgeon’s capabilities.
These things all matter. Some more than others.
But you know what? I have a very limited ability to evaluate a surgeon’s skills or credentials, to impact insurance rates or to control medical costs.
I am hopeful that the surgeon can save my wife’s life and cure her cancer.
I am confident that he and the other people here will do their best. I have already seen that they care.
Do you think I would even consider going somewhere else for treatment based on this experience? Not on your life. Or in this case, my wife’s life.
Most of us are not dealing in life and death situations.
If Cleveland Clinic can show they care about the customer and over-communicate in a busy hospital setting, it should be easy for those of us in software and hardware sales to do it.
And yet most of us do not.
We’re too busy adding customers to our SPAM list, asking for a referral, calling to make the next sale, and moving on to bigger prospects.
Here’s my challenge for you:
Make your next customer’s experience 1000x better by doing the little things right, like Cleveland Clinic did.
Maybe you will win a customer for life too.
Good luck and good selling,
Steve