Strategic Value Analysis In Healthcare
|
Strategic Value Analysis In Healthcare |
|
|
|
|
STRATEGIC VALUE ANALYSIS NEWSLETTER |
|
Home Weekly Strategic Value Analysis Newsletter ValueNet Central TM Value Analysis Software
|
 |
SPANNING THREE DECADES OF VALUE MANAGEMENT LEADERSHIP JANUARY 29 , 2003
“Exceeding Customer’s Expectations Is A Costly and Flawed Strategy In The 21st Century
Robert T. Yokl - President - The HCP Group, Ltd.
“Our Goal To Exceed Our Customer’s Expectations” Has Become A Mantra For Many Healthcare Organizations Who Don’t Understand The Cost and Qualitative Implications Of This Strategy.”
I recently visited my car dealership for an oil change and to have a burned out light bulb replaced in my clock. The dealerships motto is, “WE ARE HERE TO EXCEED YOUR EXPECTATIONS”. They not only didn’t exceed my expectations, but only infuriated me! Here’s why. My expectations or requirements from any car dealership’s service is to give me QUICK -- NO HASSLE service at a REASONABLE cost, however, this is not what I got. To start my “DELIGHTFUL EXPERIENCE”, since I hadn’t been to the dealership in six or seven months, I found that they had changed their repair parking zone at the dealer-ship, so I had to drive around in circles before I found a parking slot. This is about the third time this dealership CHANGED their parking rules in about three years, which had always made me CRAZY, since I had to be a mind reader to figure out what their next parking scheme would be on every visit! Next, while signing up for my service, the customer service rep told me (before I told her what my service requirements were) that they weren’t giving FREE care washes that day, because their car wash was BROKEN! This FEATURE of the dealership service always made me CRAZY, when I needed my car washed they either forgot to give one to me or extended my visit by a half hour to wash my car. GO FIGURE! Moving on with my experience, my dealership could only give me an APPOINTMENT at 2:15 P.M., not 7:30 A.M. as I requested. Secondly, I had to wait almost two hours to have an oil change and light bulb replaced, while no service representative came within 500 hundred feet of me to update me on my service delay. In fact, I had to ask the service manager TWICE how my service was coming along, since he and his other service representatives were laughing and joking with other employees and understandably didn’t have time to see that my expectations weren’t being met. The only thing that met my expectations about this service experience, BUT DIDN’T EXCEED THEM, was that the cost of the service was ONLY $24.23, which seemed reasonable to me.
You Can NEVER Hit The Target You Are Aiming For With Your Customers, If Your Strategy Is To Overshoot Your Target As my service experience with my car dealership points out, it is a real CHALLENGE just to meet your customer’s expectations, let alone to consistently exceed any customer’s expectation, because THINGS CHANGE AND PEOPLE CHANGE. IT’S JUST NOT GOING TO HAPPEN (exceeding your customer’s expectations) in this Topsy Turvy world we live in and the cost to do so is PROHIBITIVE, as Toyota found out a few years ago with its reinvented Camry! Toyota’s Camry was the best selling mid-sized family car in the 90’s, so Toyota decided to EXCEED its customer’s expectations by adding $5,000 dollars worth of aesthetic functions (more bells and whistles) to the Camry. Their mantra was, IF YOU BUILD IT BIGGER, BETTER AND FANCIER, THEY WILL COME. Guess What Happened! Toyota’s Camry sales dropped drastically, due to the fact that their customers weren’t interested in paying $5,000 more for a Camry, THAT DIDN’T MEET THEIR EXACT EXPECTATIONS or functional requirements. The Toyota lesson should teach us all that: “We Can NEVER Hit The Target We Are Aiming For With Our Customer’s Satisfaction, If Our Strategy Is To Overshoot Our Target And Hope We Got It Right The First Time.” It makes more sense (and saves dollars too) to meet our customer’s exact expectations or functional requirements consistently and reliably at the time of each product, service or technology experience. THEN WE WILL SATISFY ALL OF OUR CUSTOMERS ALL OF THE TIME.
It Saves Dollars And Makes Sense To Meet, NOT EXCEED Your Exact Customer’s Expectations The secret to meeting your customer’s exact expectations or functional requirements ALL of the time is to CUSTOMIZE their experience. This experience will truly DELIGHT THEM, since it RARELY happens to them! For example, my car dealership started to ask me if I wanted my CAR WASHED each time I went for service, rather than wash it automatically without asking my service preference for that day. This was very IMPORTANT to me to have a good service experience, because believe it or not I DON’T want my car washed if I am in a hurry that day and can’t afford to spend the extra time it takes to wash my car. This new policy of my dealership was EXACTLY what I was looking for in my service experience with them; therefore, my dealership met my exact requirements or expectations, without it COSTING them any MONEY (just a simple two second question)! On the reverse side of the coin, by washing every car that was scheduled for an appointment at their dealership for service every day, my dealership was spending UNNECESSARY dollars to meet their COSTLY AND FLAWED strategy of “We Are Here To Exceed Your Expectations”. LET’S GET REAL with the concept of EXCEEDING our Customers Expectations! It’s not going to happen OFTEN. And if it does – IT’S A FLUKE of nature or an ACCIDENT. If you want to REALLY exceed your customers expectations, just get their FUNCTIONAL REQUIREMENTS right the first time and they then will TRULY be delighted with their product, service or technology experience with your organization.
Robert T. Yokl, President, The HCP Group, Ltd., has over 35 years of experience as a consultant and manager in the field of Supply/Value Chain Management and is one of the country's leading healthcare experts in value analysis, value engineering and materials management. He is the developer and program leader of the award winning Certified Value Analysis Practitioner Training Program™. Mr. Yokl is also the developer of the healthcare industry's leading ValueNetCentral™ Value Analysis Software. Over the past two decades he has trained thousands of healthcare managers in his patented Strategic Value Analysis™ and Team-Based Project Management™ processes and has assisted scores of organizations in developing their own value management programs. He has published six books, videos and audios on supply/value chain management. His latest book being, “ Strategic Value Analysis™: The #1 Smart Strategy for Taking Cost Out of a Healthcare Organizations’ Supply/Value Chain”.
|
|
 |
|
|
|