According to The American Customer Satisfaction Index, hospitals' customer satisfaction ranks no better than middle of the pack, slightly ahead of energy utilities and the U.S. Postal Service, and well behind major appliances and pet food manufacturers.
So what does a hospital saying "We're in the 99th percentile...!" really mean? Usually, it means "We scored pretty well within some peer group." Ah, a peer group. There's the rub.
Hospitals are great at benchmarking themselves against other hospitals. It's like 14th century astronomy, where the entire universe consisted of the few thousand objects in the night sky visible to the naked eye. It was easy to believe that nothing else existed, certainly nothing that mattered.
But if our "peers" are other hospitals in our health care universe maybe we should set our sights a little higher, adjusting for the fact that, across all industries and the full range of consumer experiences, none of us rise very far above average. How does that 99th percentile feel now?
I can hear the branding tag lines now: "We're the best of a bad lot!" Or, "We're no worse than anybody else!" (As a fan of truth in advertising, I like that last one.)
But since when is competitive advantage built from doing things a LITTLE better than our peer group? Why not do what nobody else IS doing, or better yet, what nobody else CAN do? How about building a new, best-in-class-anywhere peer group as we redefine an industry? Is it any wonder hospitals spend so much time talking about "competitive advantage" and have so little to show for it?
The ACSI's top-ranked industry is "Personal Care and Cleaning Products." What are their processes? What do they know that we don't? What are they doing that we're not? What do they understand about customers that we've missed? I don't know and you probably don't either. I do know that "competitive advantage" is built on finding out.
Now you know why so few hospitals talk publicly about their patient satisfaction scores. It's hard to spin "we're at the top end of mediocrity" even for the most seasoned of PR flacks.
So what does a hospital saying "We're in the 99th percentile...!" really mean? Usually, it means "We scored pretty well within some peer group." Ah, a peer group. There's the rub.
Hospitals are great at benchmarking themselves against other hospitals. It's like 14th century astronomy, where the entire universe consisted of the few thousand objects in the night sky visible to the naked eye. It was easy to believe that nothing else existed, certainly nothing that mattered.
But if our "peers" are other hospitals in our health care universe maybe we should set our sights a little higher, adjusting for the fact that, across all industries and the full range of consumer experiences, none of us rise very far above average. How does that 99th percentile feel now?
I can hear the branding tag lines now: "We're the best of a bad lot!" Or, "We're no worse than anybody else!" (As a fan of truth in advertising, I like that last one.)
But since when is competitive advantage built from doing things a LITTLE better than our peer group? Why not do what nobody else IS doing, or better yet, what nobody else CAN do? How about building a new, best-in-class-anywhere peer group as we redefine an industry? Is it any wonder hospitals spend so much time talking about "competitive advantage" and have so little to show for it?
The ACSI's top-ranked industry is "Personal Care and Cleaning Products." What are their processes? What do they know that we don't? What are they doing that we're not? What do they understand about customers that we've missed? I don't know and you probably don't either. I do know that "competitive advantage" is built on finding out.
Now you know why so few hospitals talk publicly about their patient satisfaction scores. It's hard to spin "we're at the top end of mediocrity" even for the most seasoned of PR flacks.
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