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GL MONTHLY e-NEWSLETTER - May 2004

Brought to you by Jeff Thoren, DVM  

Independent research reveals that American consumers prefer Mayo Clinic to any other healthcare institution.  Mayo Clinic meets or exceeds the expectations of its patients by delivering an integrated, thorough service experience.  Patients don't just get a doctor, they get the entire organization.  From exercise physiologists to endocrinologists, Mayo Clinic assembles the expertise and resources needed by the individual patient.

A "brand", in short, is the reputation that develops as a result of customers' actual product and/or service experience.  Great brands, like Mayo, require great products and services.  Dr. Leonard Berry recently spent a sabbatical year at Mayo Clinic studying its service system and performance.  In this timely article he and co-author, Sandra Lampo, provide excellent insights into how Mayo has developed the most dominant brand in human healthcare.

Here’s this month’s feature …

Branding Labour-Intensive Services - by Leonard Berry & Sandra Lampo

From the London Business School's Business Strategy Review Volume 15, Issue 1, Spring 2004.

Highlights from the article:

  • A labour-intensive service brand can be only as strong as the people performing the service.  Service providers' actions with or for customers transform a company's brand aspirations to brand reality.
      

  • There are three guiding principles for developing strong brands for labor-intensive service:

  1. Orchestrate the clues.  Strong-brand service companies tell a cohesive, compelling story through the management of three types of clues, leveraging the opportunity to earn customer’s confidence through functional quality and their affection through mechanics and, especially, humanics quality.

  2. Connect emotionally.  Great service brands establish an emotional connection with customers.  These brands reach beyond a purely rational and economic message, create a personally rich experience, and spark customer feelings of closeness, affection and trust.  Touching customers emotionally through authentic, innovative, caring, generous service experiences elevates a brand beyond price, features and benefits to a higher level of meaning - and customer commitment.

  3. Internalize the brand.  Employees are more likely to connect emotionally with customers if they themselves feel emotionally connected to the company’s purpose.  The more service employees internalize the service concept and values, the more consistently and effectively they are likely to perform their service roles.  The desired brand experience for customers and the employees’ role in providing it should consistently frame company-to-employee messages.

  • The primary reason many service brands underperform is too many managers who don't insist - through their own behaviors, policies, and resource allocations - that service employees provide service.
      

  • Strong service brands earn higher prices.  The research is unequivocal in demonstrating customers' willingness to pay more for great service.  The service they want often comes in human terms - a warm smile, a genuine interest in helping, respectfulness, resourcefulness, competence!
      

  • Offering a labour-intensive service is like opening night for a play.  It's live theatre every time a customer walks in the door.  The customer's critical review is what the brand gets - and so goes the company.  Service-provider performance as judged by the customer shapes the brand reality.

For the full text article, click here.

Distributed to the recipients of this month's Lessons in Leadership e-Newsletter by permission of Stuart Crainer, Executive Editor, Business Strategy Review

Be Distinctive!

To prosper in business today, you have to go beyond the pursuit of excellence (as worthy as that goal may be).  In the veterinary profession, who doesn't talk about "high quality?"  Our clients can't easily evaluate the quality of the medical care their pet receives but they can easily evaluate their experience with us as service providers.

The killer marketplace strategy is to be distinctive - to go beyond excellent to offer something distinct and unique to your practice.  That way if clients ever go somewhere else, they'll miss the distinction you represent and return.

Three marks are common to all organizations that achieve distinction: engaged people, perpetual innovation, and strategic execution.

  1. Engaged people.  Engaged people are involved with their work and compelled to do what they do with panache.  They are both passionate and focused.  The challenge is to get people as engaged about their work as they are about their outside interests and hobbies.  Engaged people work smarter, serve better and come up with new ideas.

  2. Perpetual innovation.  This includes both incremental and revolutionary improvements.  The status quo is a myth.  You're either getting better or you're getting worse.  Innovation must be applied to everything: services, operations, and even how we think and lead.

  3. Strategic execution.  You can write a million lines of computer code, but until you add the four characters ".exe", the code is worthless.  Business success isn't about how much you know, but how well you apply and execute what you know.  It's a matter of IQ (i.e. "implementation quotient") which is the difference between common knowledge and consistent application.

Source: Leadership Wired - May 2003 (www.injoy.com)

           

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