What Marketing Can Do For Hospitals (Forbes)

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Before booking a hotel room, the first stop for many consumers is to check websites like Expedia or TripAdvisor to read customer reviews. Now, writes the Tuck School of Business’ Punam Anand Keller in Forbes, “hospitals are facing the same world of transparency and competition, and they would do well to consult the marketing playbook hotels and other service businesses use to enhance their customers’ experience.”

Keller, the Charles Henry Jones Third Century Professor of Management at Tuck, says, “In the past customers did not have the expertise, or access to information, to judge service professionals. What a lawyer, teacher, or doctor said was taken at face value. Now the efficacy of that information is checked online and experiences are shared with other customers.”

She explains how the RATER model for customer satisfaction—which stands for reliability, assurance, tangibles, empathy, and responsiveness—is a marketing framework that would benefit hospitals and health care organizations. For example, writes Keller, “Patients want their health care provider to be reliable. And that necessitates specific and continuous employee training on how to provide reliable care and attention to detail, even at the end of a long day.”

Read the full story, published 9/15/14 by Forbes.

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