Sustaining Business Newsletter

The Business of (fill-in-the-blank)
By Kelly Morton

I feel fortunate to be married to a wonderful man who practices medicine for a living, so when I joined Hendrickson Business Advisors a few months ago, I began looking at how our consulting firm can help businesses (and medical practices) provide an even better customer/patient experience.  Aimed at physicians and office managers, we put together an educational series called “The Business of Medicine” in conjunction with the Cape Area Medical Society. 

But medical practices are not the only businesses that need to know what their customers are thinking and feeling with each interaction.  A few alarming facts:  1)  it costs five times more to attract a new customer than to keep an existing one.  2) as many as one in four customers are dissatisfied enough to begin doing business with someone else; and a quarter of those dissatisfied customers won’t tell you about it – they’ll just leave. 

One way to measure customer satisfaction is through an independent survey.  Now, many businesses conduct their own surveys in-house and are frustrated to find that they still can’t clearly identify strengths and weaknesses.  One reason may be due to the “halo effect” which states that if your customers generally like you as a person, they are much less likely to share their true feelings with you for fear of hurting your feelings or offending you.  The only way to gather true responses and statistically accurate data that you can bank on is to hire a professional firm to conduct the survey for you and have the respondents send the forms directly back to the outside firm for tabulation.

Another way to measure customer satisfaction is to use mystery shoppers.  Here we see some businesses try to find friends and family that will shop their establishment either over the phone or in person and ask them what they think.  Again, we see the “halo effect” mentioned above.  In order to be truly effective, it takes an outside agency to provide accurate information that you can rely upon to make decisions.

Yet another way of seeing how your business measures up is to conduct focus groups. Participants are hired by a third party to answer qualitative questions about how they perceive your firm from either a customer or a potential customer’s perspective.  Sometimes the identity of the sponsoring business is known and sometimes it is “blind”.  The validity of the information relies upon a professional moderator not employed by the subject business.

So whether your business is in the medical field or another industry, the same rules on providing the highest quality customer experience apply.  Hendrickson Business Advisors is offering the Business of Medicine series, and we also offer surveys, mystery shopping and focus group facilitation to all  industries.  If you would like to talk to us about your business strategies, please contact us today.