Great customer service is something that we can expect from restaurants and hotels, but rarely do we expect it from hospitals or emergency rooms. Today’s guest is on a mission to change that.

Stowe Shoemaker has served as an advisor to numerous hospitality service providers over the course of his career including IGT, British Airways, Accor, Hilton, Landry’s, and Hyatt. He has published two marketing textbooks and his newest book, Hospitable Healthcare: Just What the Patient Ordered! introduces hospitality principles to the healthcare industry.

Hospitality matters in every industry. Consider the last time you needed medical care. Did the customer service enhance your experience, or did it only make a hard situation worse? Healthcare needs to be fixed in more ways than one. Stowe and his coauthor aim to address the changes that need to be made in their new book.

Hospitality customer service standards are currently much higher than in the healthcare industry. A survey Stowe conducted indicated that healthcare ranks last in the hospitality experience when compared to restaurants and hotels. What can be learned from the hospitality industry that could be used in healthcare?

There are five principles that create an exceptional customer experience and systems that can be implemented to make these principles an effortless part of the customer experience.

Prepare, anticipate, engage, evaluate, and reward.

When each of these principles is achieved, a patient begins to feel less like an inconvenience to the company and more like a loved family member. And loyal customers will become lifelong, repeat clients who spend more money and create positive word of mouth for the business.

Interview Links:

Stowe Shoemaker

Hospitable Healthcare: Just What the Patient Ordered!

Resources:

20,000 Scaleups

Scaling Up Summits (Select Bill Gallagher as your coach during registration for a discount.)

Bill on YouTube

Recruiter.com Short List (use code scaleup)

Scaling Up is the best-selling book by Verne Harnish and our team for Scaling Up Coaches (formerly Gazelles). We share how the fastest-growing companies succeed where so many others fail.

Bill Gallagher, Scaling Coach and host of the show, is an international business coach who works with C-Suite leaders to achieve breakthrough growth.

We help leadership teams with the biggest decisions around People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash so that they can Scale Up successfully and beat the odds of business growth. Scaling Up is based on Verne’s original best-selling business book, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits.

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Exceptional Customer Experiences — Stowe Shoemaker, PhD

Scaling Up Business with Bill Gallagher