If you were among the 450+ attendees at our recent NPS conference in NYC, you had the treat of hearing Steve Bonner, CEO of Cancer Treatment Centers of America (CTCA), explain how his organization targets what he calls the “Mother Standard”—the kind of care you would want for your own mother. By using the Net Promoter Score as its primary gauge of that standard, CTCA has been able to make steady progress. Steve explained that his Board of Directors reviews NPS trends for each of CTCA’s hospitals near the beginning of their meetings. In fact, these are the first numbers that get reviewed by the Board, before any of the financial reports.
Only one thing happens prior to the review of NPS data, and that is a visit from a current patient who describes his or her experience at a CTCA facility. The Board rotates the location of its meetings so it can learn about the full range of facilities.
Hearing from a current patient helps to center the Board on its true mission: taking such good care of patients that they would recommend CTCA to a friend or relative. Board discussions could easily lapse into PowerPoint graphs full of numbers, as they do at many companies. But when a customer is standing in front of you, it’s a little easier to remember that the numbers that count most are those that reflect the customer’s experience.
I noted to Steve that I was puzzled at the slow adoption of NPS among health care providers. The sluggish pace is especially puzzling since so many of their important vendors and partners—including Sodexho, Philips, Medtronic, GE, and Siemens—have already adopted Net Promoter systems. Steve replied that, as healthcare becomes more competitive and consumer choice expands, more healthcare leaders will realize that the old-fashioned approach to measuring customer satisfaction (long surveys, low response rates, slow cycle times, no closed-loop feedback) are severely inadequate. But today, health care is just not as competitive or as consumer-focused as it needs to be.
In the meantime, forward-thinking organizations such as CTCA have been utilizing cutting-edge tools such as NPS to create a competitive advantage that will be difficult to overcome. By taking customer loyalty seriously—and by turning customers into promoters—CTCA has driven its Net Promoter Scores well above 80% and sometimes above 90%. The company is leading the way toward customer-centered healthcare by treating customers the way everyone feels their dear mother deserves to be treated.
I wonder what the NPS would be at the hospital where your own mother, father, or child will next be treated? Don’t you deserve to know?
