Topic: customer service

Exceeding — not just meeting — a particular customer’s expectations is the key to happy customers. You don’t have to be perfect. You just have to be better than the customer expects, at that moment in time.

Some will be the sort of folks who insist on using the latest and greatest. Others will represent large purchasers, searching for something that might work on patients who haven’t responded to other methods.

It requires a certain personality type – patient, reassuring, unpressuring – to engender trust and establish this sort of relationship in a business context.

A government or insurance buyer needs to make certain that a provider offers a particular service and meets particular standards of performance. They won’t necessarily require you to exceed those standards, or provide extras. They understand that we get what we pay for.

Addiction treatment is never just a business. It’s a public trust. Our goal must be to fulfill that trust by providing the very best service we can to the people who need it. That doesn’t mean we can’t do very well from a business perspective.

Even among programs with a fine clinical program, dedicated staff, good administration, some are more successful at attracting customers than others. Marketing offers a key to understanding why.

In most cases, our only pre-admission contact with prospective patients and families is by telephone.