Smart Moves

CEO’s are pushing harder than ever for results; demanding creative approaches to help them cut costs and increase customer referrals. In this issue of Taking Action I am going to highlight a few “smart moves” that you can reapply to your business.

• An insurance company (tough marketing environment in this industry) enjoys an 87% policy renewal rate, but had no process to ask renewing, satisfied clients if they would refer a new client to the company. They implemented the “ultimate question” into a formal telephone client satisfaction survey and when clients were “active promoters” they asked a follow-up question; “would you be willing to have management contact you about your potential referral?” Application of this referral technique yielded a monthly call list of potential new clients. If you have never heard of the “ultimate question” please contact me at doug@thedougwilliamsgroup.com to request a complimentary copy of the Harvard Business Review article about this topic.

• Prospective patients with non-critical medical emergencies can now view ER wait times for all twelve HCA East Florida hospitals via their website: www.hcaeastflorida.com. The time posted is the average wait time from arrival to being seen by a physician. The postings are updated every 30 minutes. Prospective patients can also access the wait time information via cell phone by entering an access code and zip code.

• A non-profit was looking for ways to reduce costs by improving the efficiency of their accounting processes. They applied BPR (business process mapping) to document the inefficiencies of their current processes. As the workflow was mapped, our improvement specialists got staff input about how the processes could be improved. To see an example of a process map click here. Application of this technique revealed an opportunity to reduce $62,000 in annual cost, not counting the value of the subsequent reduction in errors. This little project, which only took a few days to complete, generated a 16 times return on their investment in our services.