Rotateller Rotary Club of Owego, NY
Tuesday, April 24, 2007 Gary Williams, Editor

VISITORS AND GUESTS:

• Greg Poffenbarger, guest of Steve
• Bill Russell, guest of Steve
• Joan Davis (from the other end of the “bar” it was hard to hear some of the introductions)
• Carol Cavataio, who is a former member and served as Club Secretary
• Tom Davis, from OFA Interact
• Rebecca Hernendez, Terry’s secretary
• Suzanne

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO STEVE!

MUSIC:

R-O-T-A-R-Y led by Carl

FINES: Judy

• All those who did not bring a guest
• All those who did not read about Bill Cadwallader

Richard raised $500 on his walk and gave his first sermon this weekend.

Tom Milligan will be missed by all of us. Jan Nolis shared a story about Tom who contributed so much to our Club – amongst so many other contributions to the community. I think of Tom every week. When he was Club Secretary, after seeing me carry my worn Rotary brief case to each meeting (which was a birthday gift from Bob Merrill’s administration) he gave me a new one which comes to each meeting with me.

DISTRICT CONFERENCE:

May 4-6 and it is sold-out!

PRESIDENT’S MEETING:

Last Friday, Al and Matt attended a meeting and reported back that the JC Club is getting back on its feet.

BOARD MEETING:

I will add the minutes to next week’s bulletin.

STRAWBERRY FESTIVAL:

June 16. Please mark your calendar.

Suzanne had another busy week including working a Pancake Breakfast, shopping for a prom dress, watching a basketball game, and going to the Lounsberrys.

ADOPT-A-HIGHWAY:

Will be on Sunday, May 12. Carolyn Galatzan and I would like to start earlier than 9:00 AM, but we will try to leave at least a few items for the rest of you.

PROGRAM:

Karla introduced Penny Bartlow who spoke on video communication. She predicts that it will be the future, and she may well be correct. (No one wants to hire me to predict the future.) There are currently 1 billion internet users world-wide! The changes in technology have made using video for email, conferencing, blogs, instant messaging, and pod casting much easier. Anyone can receive it without any special software. It is all web based and can be accessed anywhere just like a yahoo account. There isn’t any software needs and the media vault will enable you to store music, videos, and photos without taking up space in your computer. To get started, the monthly fee can be as little as $10 a month. (Have no fear. Merl and I discussed it and I will not be sending the bulletin via video!) A web cam can be purchased for as little as $30. The video is completely integrated into the message and does not come through as an attachment.

Merl and I also agreed that Penny did an outstanding job presenting under very difficult circumstances.

50/50 Suzanne

– watch out for the fines! The winnings weren’t enough for her to do much shopping.

I am attaching another book review that I did for a journal. It will not interest everyone, but I think that a number of you will find it to be interesting.

The Ultimate Question

by Fred Reichheld

The Ultimate Question is not written specifically for optometry or healthcare but is directly applicable. As stated in the Preface, “The real issue is how a company knows what its customers are feeling, and how it can establish accountability for the customer experience.”

The primary message in the book is to treat patients as you and your staff would like to be treated. “Bad Profits” are short term and come at the expense of the patient. “Good Profits” are those derived from true growth in which a high number of patients are “enthusiastically satisfied” (Ralph Barstow’s term from decades ago), repeatedly return to your office, and make numerous referrals for your care.

The system which Fred Reichhold has developed (he gives numerous examples of its success in the book) divides patients up into detractors, passives, and promoters based on their answer to the question: “How likely is it that you would recommend our care to a friend or colleague?” The question is answered on a scale of 0 to 10, with 10 “extremely likely”. Those answering 9 or 10 are promoters. Those answering 7 or 8 are passive and those answering from 0 to 6 are detractors. The Net Promoter Score is obtained by subtracting your detractors from your promoters. Their research indicated that this score had the highest correlation with long-term growth. The success-stories they report are of companies who have grown by word-of-mouth, not from advertising, and have been able to sustain their growth..

“We also realized that two conditions must be satisfied before customers make a personal referral. They must believe that the company offers superior value in terms that an economist would understand: price, features, quality, functionality, ease of use, and all the other practical factors. But they also must feel good about their relationship with the company. They must believe the company knows and understands them, listens to them, and shares their principles. On the first dimension, a company is engaging the customer’s head. On the second, it is engaging the heart. Only when both sides of the equation are fulfilled will a customer enthusiastically recommend a company to a friend.”

Instead of lengthy questionnaires which people resent and tend not to provide the critical information, they recommend adding only two additional questions to “would you recommend”. “What is the most important reason for the score you gave?” And, “May we contact you about this?”

One of the book’s assets is its candor. When we are thinking “how much can we do?” and “how far can we go?”, he acknowledges that: “To understand the connection between customer relationships and growth, begin with a simple fact: in business, every decision ultimately involves economic trade-offs.” In our offices, it may be increasing staff size and/or compensation, enhancing staff training, certification, spending more time with patients, or additional communication, all of which have associated costs.

To guide practice development, we need more than attitudes, we need quantifiable behaviors. Small samplings are not adequate. Large samplings are needed, the best being a complete census. We then need to act on the information we obtain. One challenge of providing quality care which can be overlooked is the necessity of the entire staff to be enthusiastically organized and pleasant and to maintain this freshly patient after patient, day after day. We cannot have patients who are promoters if we don’t have staff members who are promoters. Research by one of their most successful service companies determined that 70% to 80% of customer disappointments were the result of communication failures. Promoters generate more than 80% of referrals. Eliminating screwups and bad policies only gets us up to zero, it does not promote practice growth. What would it take to turn a passive into a promoter?

At last year’s Practice Management Symposium, Nancy Torgerson shared an excellent approach to determine how you have been satisfying your referral sources. The message and system in this book is can be implemented relatively easily and has the potential to significantly benefit your patients and your practice.

Addendum: “A talk was given recently by the personnel director of one of New York City’s largest department stores, a woman of keen mind who has charge of the training of sales staff. This woman told about a questionnaire that was sent out to all their customers. The purpose of it was not to find out why these customers presumably enjoyed shopping in this particular store, but what most displeased them in their business relations with it. The responses were surprisingly uniform. Nothing, it appeared, irks a customer more than indifference to their desires, expressed in curt, and often caustic, answers to their questions. This unpleasantness could, perhaps, be traced to the absence of a smile from the sales person, for who can do or say an unkind thing while smiling? It’s a shame that there should be such a scarcity of smiles when they cost nothing!

The above is from Many Happy Returns which was written in the depression year of 1937 by Binghamton, NY, optometrist Robert Foster Ash. Perhaps things do not change as much as we think.

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