Why Blackberry Failed, And Why Traditional Medicine (And Your Medical Spa) Will Too

The Globe and Mail has an article on the fall of BlackBerry which actually has three authors and takes a deep-dive into the Canadian phone makers woes.... but there's information in there for physicians.

The overarching explanation of what happened is something that we already know: RIM (Blackberry's maker) failed to iterate/change/evleove at anywhere near the speed that the market demanded in the post-iPhone era, but the article, which includes quotes from an interview with RIM founder Mike Lazaridis really puts touches the main point with the tip of a pin. Here's the quote:

“The problem wasn’t that we stopped listening to customers,” said one former RIM insider. “We believed we knew better what customers needed long term than they did. Consumers would say, ‘I want a faster browser.’ We might say, ‘You might think you want a faster browser, but you don’t want to pay overage on your bill.’ ‘Well, I want a super big very responsive touchscreen.’ ‘Well, you might think you want that, but you don’t want your phone to die at 2 p.m.’ “We would say, ‘We know better, and they’ll eventually figure it out.’ ”

Hubris is the fall of many frontrunners and works on every business scale, including individual small business.

You may know better than your patients, but if you don't listen to them and execute what they want, they'll go somewhere else eventually; just ask the droves of plastic surgeons how have lost patients to the familiy practice guys who aren't constantly pushing their patients into surgical proceedures.

If You Can’t Lower Prices, Offer Higher Value

Our MedSpa, as most others, is severely limited in how low we can go on our prices. All of us in the industry pay roughly the same amount for our products, whether it be Botox, fillers, or equipment.

However, especially in this tough economic climate, our clients are looking for bargains. Price comparison shopping is a fact of life, and is made much easier for the consumer by readily available pricing information on the internet.

But low prices are not the only way (nor maybe the best way) to attract patients to your facility. To us at Canyon Lake MedSpa, the answer is VALUE: meaning, if we can’t lower prices, we have to offer more value for the money.

In our case, we offer free microdermabrasion/chemical peel (we almost always combine the two together) to any patient who purchases any other product or service. Additionally, if we hold a seminar or any other promotional event, we entice people to attend by offering free microderm/chem peel to all registrants. It takes very little time, and limited resources, to perform these procedures. And it gets people into our facility, gives us a chance to evaluate, speak with, and get to know them. Established and new patients alike can then be assessed for possible further interventions.

Even though these treatments are free, we never want the patient to feel rushed or feel less special just because they’re getting a free treatment. Taking your time now will pay off in dividends later on, when more lucrative procedures are scheduled.

Most importantly, our patients feel like they have received more value for their dollars, and it keeps them coming back.

In summary, service and value will trump lower prices in most markets and situations. Consider if it might be valuable for your facility.

Push Your Medical Spa Overboard With Customer Service

Some of the best marketing for your medical spa is not 'marketing' at all... it's incredible customer service.

(A regular physicians office is probably the very worst customer experience there is... and of course many medical spas are run by physicians who have started a cosmetic practice as an add or or a transition from a regular practice.)

Customer service is probably the easiest way to distance yourself from the competition.

Read the forums and you'll find lots of threads discussing how commoditized the market for Botox or laser hair removal has become, how much to pay your staff, and how Groupon is destroying everyone's margins... but you'll be hard pressed to find discussions about how to deliver service that generates sales.

But delivering great customer service is something that you should think of as driving sales, not lost time and a money-sink.

Our clinic staff operations were designed to provide fantastic customer service to everyone, but to really go above and beyond with selected patients in an effort to wow them, even if it cost us money. In fact, wowing patients had budget set aside from marketing.

 The key is make your customer ecstatic about your business by catering to what they need so they’ll tell their friends about it. In fact the more egregious the demand or the more dramatic the effort needed, the more likely that word about your clinic will spread. As anyone in cosmetic medicine can attest, you don't have to wait long for some stressed out patient who's a candidate. In one case a bride called us in tears on a Saturday morning asking if there was any way that she could get her mother and mother-in-law treated with Botox before her wedding on Wednesday morning... and they weren't arriving until 10PM that night. One of our physicians actually met the wedding party at our clinic on Sunday morning in order to make sure that the effects of the Botox had time to take maximum effect before the wedding. 

Most clinics or physicians would not have done this, they would have scheduled the treatment for Monday if they could fit them in and lost the opportunity to create fanatically loyal clients.

In the above case the physician went above and beyond even what we would ask, but the results were really quite remarkable. Within the following 45 days we had 8 new patient consultations that were directly attributed to that one event. (New patient consultations were something that I tracked carefully since our analytics showed that every new patient consultation was worth approximately $1,300 in revenue within the following 30 days.)

That Sunday treatment drove an extra $10k in revenue at that clinic that month. 

How you deal with your customer service will define your business and your revenues.

Some recommendations for fantastic customer service:

• If you think that any customer is acting in good faith, don't even question what they're asking. Just do it. If they're unsatisfied, make them happy and take extra time to do it. (This is not a recommendation to deal with those who are clearly just trying to take advantage of you.)
• The more hoops you have to jump through, the more likely word will spread. Dig out the really extraordinary ways that you can make a splash.
• Other physicians and clinics aren't likely to offer this level of support. Focus on this and use it to your advantage.  All it takes is a few over the top customer stories, and people will talk, people will post to their Facebook page or Twitter account, and people will tell every friend they have about your clinic.

 Tell me I'm wrong.. or right. Tell your own customer service story in the comments.

One Medical & The Patient Experience: Dr. Tom Lee

The patient experience: so many people talk about improving it, but very few people have actually done something tangible about it.

Dr. Tom Lee is a rare exception: his company, One Medical provides an excellent patient experience in primary care. Here he describes the challenges and pitfalls in delivering a better experience, despite the torturous constraints in the American medical system.