It’s Not a Trick Question.
Experiences & Consumers
Have you ever wondered about the easiest way to create a memorable experience? The answer is simple: poor service.
Let that sink in for a moment.
We tend to remember the times we were treated poorly or with indifference in our dining or shopping encounters. They stick with us because they were just so bad. In the era before the internet, the rule of thumb was 3:10, meaning you would likely share a good experience with 3 people and a bad one with 10. And while that word-of-mouth could hurt business, it was not likely that it would spread very far.
That ratio got thrown out the window with the mainstreaming of review sites. Positive and negative reviews get amplified to a much wider audience and have a far longer shelf life if one is willing to filter and sort through the data.
Unless your strategy is to be rude to customers, as is what happens at The Lazy House in Nagoya, Japan, you want to do more than simply “try” to provide good service or “do our best” to avoid poor service. You want to be intentional and have planned what is going to take place.
I like to think about staff interactions with customers as benefiting from choreography; The Experience Economy describes the staging of the experience. Authors Pine and Gilmore (who were kind enough to write the foreword to my book) helped the world understand that experiences can be measured and provide higher value to customers.
Experience & Staging
Staging is a highly specific word that involves planning, executing, and analyzing to figure out what works. My colleague Kevin Dulle illustrates this distinction between service and experience.
Just the thought of what it means to “stage” implies that an encounter should involve more than the expected service. The goal is to figure out what resonates with customers so much so that the experience becomes inherently personal as well as memorable.
While goods and services of all types continue to be commoditized and harder to distinguish one from the others, experiences provide memorability that helps a business stand out from its competitors.
Differentiating Your Patient Experience
As you look for ways to differentiate your medical practice from all the others offering similar services, look to the realm of experience:
How do you make patients feel welcome?
What are you doing that shows you value patients’ time?
Which aspects of the visit are likely to get the “poor service” rating and need to be addressed?
These are 3 of 20 questions I use with the PX-minded who want to elevate their game when it comes to how they do what they do every day. It can be applied to nearly every aspect of a patient’s visit: phone calls, arrival, testing/history, the precious few minutes with the doctor, and departure.
Too many medical practices are known for their poor service. Unlike The Lazy House, it’s the result of not being thoughtful and intentional when it comes to figuring out what patients want when they visit the doctor. We know what they don’t want: indifference, rudeness, or excessive waiting that is viewed as a waste of time.
Practices that take PX seriously understand what’s at stake. They want to be known not only for delivering great service but for staging a memorable experience. These practices will have a competitive advantage going forward as they stand out from the pack!