Living Your Brand Promise

Kristin Baird, for HealthLeaders News, October 3, 2007

You've seen the warm and engaging television commercials and print ads. The building is new and impressive from the outside. You find yourself actually looking forward to your scheduled outpatient visit in spite of the knowledge that your procedure will be uncomfortable. But after all, the ads all promise high-quality, compassionate care. How bad can it be?

As you drive into the parking lot you are greeted by the valet, who graciously offers to park your car. Impressed by the experience so far, you venture into the building. Moving past the waterfall, sculpture and grand piano, you approach the registration desk, where three professional--looking women are talking among themselves about some "idiot" who doesn't know how to transfer a call.

Upon gaining the receptionist's attention, you receive only a perfunctory greeting and no eye contact from her. When you tell her you are here to check in for an ambulatory surgery procedure, she gestures to the left and says, "Down that hall, turn left and go through the double doors." With that, she returns to her conversation with her co-workers about the idiot.

Once you arrive at the ambulatory surgery area, the receptionist there greets you warmly but then says, "I'm sorry. You were supposed to stop at the lab first before coming here. You'll have to go back to the lab area by the main entrance. Didn't anyone give you your paperwork at the registration desk? They were supposed to give you some paperwork and instructions."

As you enter the lab area, you're struck by the number of people filling the waiting room. You overhear someone complaining that she's been there for nearly 30 minutes and is starving because she's been fasting since midnight. When the phlebotomist calls you for your blood draw, she sighs and says, "Sorry for the wait. We are really short staffed--but that's nothing new. We're like this every morning. You'd think they'd give us more staff in the morning. Oh well."

The blood draw goes smoothly but then the lab tech says, "I think you can go now. Your paperwork wasn't really clear about what you were having done today."

When comparing your expectations based on the ad campaign to this real-life experience, you are anything but impressed. In fact, the entire encounter is not just disappointing, but leaves you wondering if anyone really knows what's going on there and if you should trust them to do your procedure. Where is the high-quality and compassionate care that you were promised? If everyone is so disengaged, do you really want to place your life in their hands?

Every encounter along a patient's experience pathway is a unique opportunity to either instill confidence in your organization or destroy trust. These moments of truth are the points at which the patient is deciding if you are who you say you are. If a brand is a promise, how well are you fulfilling that promise?

Brand management is more than a slick logo with a snappy tagline. Brand management means consistently fulfilling the brand promise with every individual who comes in contact with the organization.

In our company, the slogan for brand management is condensed down to E3, which stands for "Every encounter with every customer, every day." In order to live the brand promise, healthcare organizations must foster a culture of service excellence with unwavering consistency.

During culture development workshops, I routinely ask healthcare participants to recite their taglines and then compare the actual patient experience with what is promised in the tagline. When asked to give themselves a grade on how well their organization lives its brand promise, most participants score themselves a C or below. This disturbing revelation tells me that many healthcare marketing departments are not working in tandem with operations. One is spinning the promise, the other is delivering a service that either fulfills the promise, or doesn't.

One unforgettable experience with a healthcare brand disconnect involved taking my 80-year-old mother for a serried of outpatient cardiac services visits. Each time, she was forced to walk long distances, wait for unreasonable periods, answer lists of the same questions at each stop and stand in line for 15 minutes to register.

This large, academic medical center was trying to attract more "everyday" business, and so had employed a new tagline: "We treat you like family." Their standards for service excellence were proudly displayed in the waiting room on a three-foot poster mounted in a brass frame.

Each moment of truth during our experience was an opportunity for their employees to live the brand promise or fail to live up to the promise. In this case, the experience consistently disappointed us, and what further infuriated us was that they displayed their tagline and standards so prominently. Their grand proclamation put the promise right in our faces, making it glaringly evident that they were not living up to the promise.

In order to help all employees to live the brand, marketing and operations must exist in harmony under shared strategic objectives. When the two operate in silos, trouble begins that will have lasting, detrimental effects on customer experiences--and, ultimately, the organization's reputation.

Often, the taglines are more in line with the vision. They reflect what you aspire to be in the future, but may not be today's reality. In an ideal world, marketers will have firsthand knowledge of the true customer experience and will continually strive to engage the employees in a shared vision for quality improvement. Every aspect of brand management should be an honest reflection of what the organization can and does deliver.

If marketing is about listening to consumers' wants and needs, then the marketing department needs to be closely aligned with organizational culture in order to foster needed change.

Healthcare organizations must foster a predictably positive customer experience. In order to consistently achieve this goal so that the brand promise is aligned with the experience, five crucial leadership practices must be in place. The five P's of culture leadership are:

People: Hire right and develop continuously through accountability, coaching, training and recognition.

Priority: Demonstrate that a culture of excellence is vital to your existence. Make it a priority in the strategic plan, department goals and consistent corporate-wide communications. Talk about it openly and frequently so that it becomes part of the language of the organization.

Process: A culture shift doesn't happen by default; it can only be achieved by design. Specific processes and systems must be put into place to support a culture of excellence.

Have specific processes in place to:

• Turn satisfaction data into action plans
  
• Harness employee innovation (ideas)
  
• Capture opportunities for recognition
  
• Establish clear behavioral standards

Passion: Leaders will do far more to advance the culture if they can speak from the heart. Love what you do and talk about it. Story telling and consistent focus on the mission vision and values is a leadership imperative.

Purpose: Each individual needs to have a clear sense of purpose that connects their individual job to the overall mission vision and values of the organization. Not everyone will automatically make the connection, but a good leader will be able to foster a belief system that helps each individual connect to that purpose.

Leaders who consistently employ these five principles will be more closely aligned with the brand promise, thus living up to--or exceeding--the customers' expectations.

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Kristin Baird, RN, BSN, MHA, is president of Baird Consulting, Inc., in Fort Atkinson, WI. She is a consultant, speaker and author. She can be reached at kris@baird-consulting.com.