Every hospital will have disgruntled customers from time to time.  But instead of letting the situation create bad ill and tarnish the brand, the situation can be used to show how your hospital cares and even build brand loyalty.

Based on consumer satisfaction research, an article in The Financial Brand listed the expectations of customers once they have issued a complaint.  The list is important for hospitals to understand and use as a guideline for dealing with angry customers.

Customers who have issued complaints expect to:

• Receive an explanation of how a problem happened
• Be told how long it will take to resolve a problem
• Be given progress reports if a problem cannot be solved immediately.
• Be given useful alternatives if a problem cannot be resolved.
• Be allowed to talk to someone in authority.
• Be contacted promptly once the problem is resolved.
• Be called back when promised.
• Know whom to contact in the future.
• Be told about ways the customer’s situation might be used to prevent future problems.

It’s important hospitals address customer issues and fulfill the expectations listed above.  Unsolved problems have a particularly negative impact on both continued loyalty and word-of-mouth recommendations to others. Dissatisfied customers tell far more people about their experience than do satisfied customers.

So it’s imperative to deal with customer complaints and use the opportunity to turn a negative situation into a positive one.  One that can actually build customer loyalty.

Every hospital has unhappy customers.  The question is not if you have them but what will you do with them?

Every hospital makes mistakes.  With as many patients that come through our doors and with as many varied points of contact, it‘s inevitable there will be unhappy customers.  Plus, many customers are not in the best frame of mind to begin with, which means they are often easily agitated.  No matter how much customer service is stressed, there will be screw-ups.  There will be disgruntled customers.

Instead of looking at such occurrences as a disaster, it can become a positive branding experience if handled properly.  Instead of an upset customer who becomes a noisy distracter, the goal is to convert him into a brand loyalist who sings the hospital’s praises.  The unhappy customer should not be viewed as the enemy but as an opportunity to characterize the brand as responsive and caring.

So what do you do when you make a mistake?   Four simple steps:

1.  Apologize.  Disarm the angry customer by apologizing upfront.

2.  Listen and empathize.  Listen and don’t try to defend the hospital. Let the customer know your hospital cares.

3.  Address the problem.  Try to fix the problem and satisfy the customer as much as possible.

4. Offer to correct the problem.  The customer wants to know the hospital will do everything possible to prevent the problem from happening again.

5.  Follow up.  Contact the customer and let them know what has been done to fix the problem.  This is essential for customer satisfaction.

Research indicates it costs five times more to get a new customer than it does to keep an existing one.  So it’s important to keep customers, even the ones that have bad experiences.  Solving customer problems not only keeps customers, it also helps build brand loyalty.

The typical family, a man married with kids, now represents only 20% of households in America.   The 2010 US Census indicates that households with married couples make up only 48% of households and married with children are only one in five.  In contrast 45 million women are heads of households, which is double the number in 1980.

Women are more in control in American households than ever before.  Women are heads of households and women earn much more money than just a few years ago.   In 37% of married households, the woman makes more money than the man.  In the last 30 years female’s income has risen 59% while men’s income has increased only 4%.  One reason for this increase is only 14% of women had a college degree in 1980 compared to over 30% today.

And also contributing to these numbers of women who are heads of household is that as the population ages, women who live longer than men, will become an even larger majority of all adults.

To hospital marketers, women have always been the primary targeted audience.  With these rapidly changing numbers the importance of targeting women is even greater.   Women are heads of more households, they make more money than ever before and they make healthcare decisions.  Therefore it’s imperative we understand women, what motivates them and how they make healthcare decisions.

It’s also important that as women take on a more active and stronger role in American households we must tailor our healthcare services to meet their needs.  We must deliver healthcare in ways, places and times that fit their needs.  And we must market in mediums that effectively reach this influential market.

You read about them almost everyday.  Somebody makes a mistake and posts something that’s inappropriate or is potentially damaging to the brand.  From the Red Cross, Chrysler and Southwest Airlines companies face uncomfortable situations.  Some handle it well and some don’t.  More damaging than the original blunder is when a company doesn’t address the issue or doesn’t handle it well.

Michelle Ponto with News10 in Sacramento  wrote a story quoting Josh Morgan of Edelman Digital  and Lori Bertelli of Augustine Ideas about steps to take to help minimize the damage if you are faced with a social media nightmare.  The steps are very applicable to healthcare marketers who face such critical issues.

1. Before you say anything on social media, take into account everyone who could be in your audience, not just the people you know for sure are in your audience. Remember, not everybody thinks exactly the same way you do.

2. Before you open up any type of social media forum, have a policy in place that lets people know that certain types of speech aren’t going to be tolerated and that the platform is being moderated.

3. If you find yourself getting emotionally involved in something online, take a step back. Don’t let commentators get you riled up as you could end up saying something that you regret.

4. Think about who is doing your social media postings. An intern may be comfortable using Facebook and Twitter, but are they the right person to be representing your brand online? It is easier to teach someone who knows your brand/business about social media than it is to teach someone who only knows social media about your company.

5. Set up multiple administrators on all social media accounts just in case you can’t get in touch with someone when you need to – or they leave the company.

6. Make it easy to do the right thing when you are setting up your policies.

7. Own a mistake and do it quickly. Don’t try to hide from it. It’s not going away.

8. Have a friend or an editor check things out. It might seem funny to you, but it may not be to everyone.

9. Understand that you can’t control social media. Instead, be ready to react and take ownership when something does happen.

10. Don’t be insulting or come off defensive. All it takes is one bad post to create a social media nightmare.

Very sound advice.  Advice that could be very helpful if your hospital or healthcare organization faces social media missteps.

Are moms important to healthcare marketers?  If so, then you better get social.  Moms use social media to communicate, stay in touch with family and friends, exchange information, be entertained and a host of other reasons.  eMarketer estimates that 23 million US moms are on Facebook…moms with children under the age of 18 use the site at least once a month.  That’s well over two-thirds of all online moms in the country compared to just over 50% of all online users.

Overall 26.5 million moms use some sort of social media.  That’s almost 20% of all social media users.

Females are the primary decision makers when it comes to healthcare decisions, and moms are usually the chief decision maker for their family’s healthcare needs.  That being true, healthcare marketers need to get social.  Moms are on social media sites interacting and gathering information.  And of course they are extremely interested in health information for themselves and their families.

So we need to be engaging those moms where they are.  On social media sites.  It certainly requires work.  And it requires more than just setting up sites to post ads or promotions for the hospital.  It requires engagement.  It’s not easy.  It requires quality content.  It requires responsiveness.  And it requires the efforts and cooperation of more than just the marketing department.

Moms are definitely social.   They are proving it everyday online.  And it provides great opportunities to connect and build brand loyalty.  Healthcare marketers should take notice.

Online advertising has proven to be effective as a direct response medium but not so much for brand building. 

More eyeballs are turning to the web.  No one can argue that.  And they are spending more time looking at the web.  So does it make sense to follow those numbers and try to build a brand with internet advertising?  Probably not.  Online advertising is great at direct response.  We all look at the web to find where to buy something or where a business is located or how to contact a business.   That’s why the yellow pages are now on the web and is replacing the printed book.   But is it effective building a brand?

Alan Pearlstein, president of Cross Pixel Media wrote in Ad Age that the “internet sucks as a branding medium.”  And he makes some compelling arguments.  He argues that brand building is an emotional endeavor.  The desire for every brand is to build an emotional connection with the consumer.  Television does that very effectively.  Print can do it.  But not internet advertising.   Because online advertising is limited in size and format, it’s not effective at brand building.   He argues that no advertising medium has proven to be effective at both direct response and branding.  And online is no exception.

It’s important as healthcare marketers, to understand that each advertising medium has their own strengths.   TV creates an emotional impact, magazines provide the environment for stunning images and print provide the opportunity for long copy and storytelling.   Direct mail is great at direct response.

So what are the strengths of online advertising?  It is great at building name recognition.  It has a low cost for exposure.  It reaches a very wide audience.   It’s great for supplementing a campaign with reach and frequency within a target audience.  But branding is not one of its strengths.  Online advertising, limited in size, not very engaging and usually within a cluttered environment is not strong for brand building.  It is complimentary to more emotional and engaging mediums.

QR Codes are becoming more and more popular but they aren’t appropriate for every use.

QR codes are everywhere.  And aren’t they cool?  They are great at providing additional information and for engaging consumers.  Brands like Starbucks and Lady Gaga are using QR codes very effectively to build loyalty and many retail brands are using QR codes to provide additional product information.

In fact, worldwide usage of QR codes is growing at more than 20% annually and barcode usage in North America is growing at a 42% clip.

But despite this rapid growth and the usefulness of QR codes there are some uses, which make no sense at all.  B.L. Ochman writing for Ad Age  gave some examples of some poor uses of QR codes.

1.   QR codes on billboards, too high ad too far away to get a clear scan.

2.   QR codes in subways and places where there is no cellphone reception.

3.   Barcodes in TV spots when by the time you can grab your phone and find the scanner the spot is over.

4.   QR codes with no instructions.  Not everyone knows how to use a QR code. 

5.   Using a proprietary code so you need a specific type of QR reader.  Most people will not bother to download a scanner just to read one particular scan.

There are many other bad uses of QR codes.  Some that don’t make sense at all.  You probably have seen some yourself.

So the point for hospital marketers is that QR codes can be very useful. But it is not something to use just because everyone’s doing it.  Not just because it’s a new fad. Its use should be strategic and it should be easy and useful.   Clear instructions and the benefits of accessing the scan are imperative.

QR codes is a technology that should be used and can be extremely useful in healthcare advertising.  Perhaps in more than any other industry, within the healthcare arena, QR codes can be the mechanism to deliver very valuable information that can’t be delivered in an ad or flyer or poster.

Do we use QR codes in hospital advertising?  Of course!  But make sure it makes sense and delivers a true benefit to the user.  Not just because it’s cool.

As we mourn the death of Steve Jobs, there is much being written about him.  He was a visionary.  He was brilliant.  He was a genius.  He understood people.  And he had a keen understanding and sense of marketing.

Steve Jobs taught us about digital and how it can effect, impact and change our lives.  Jobs was on the forefront of technology.  He was always one step ahead.  Maybe more.

So isn’t it ironic that this visionary who understood how to communicate and connect with people was a huge traditionalist when it came to his approach to advertising?  Look at Apple’s media buying.  With a budget of $420 million in 2010, over 90% was spent in traditional advertising. Television, newspaper, magazines, circulars and outdoor made up the majority of Apple’s media expenditures.   Apple in fact, was in the top 10 in the nation for expenditures in outdoor.  Less than 10% of their advertising was digital.  And what little digital advertising Apple utilized, the majority of it was an extension of their television campaigns.

And equally as ironic, is the man who understood and connected with the consumer had almost no presence on Twitter and Facebook.  Apple only recently established a YouTube channel but has comments turned off.

So what does this say to healthcare marketers?  The principle thing is obvious, traditional media is not dead.  In fact, to build a strong brand traditional can be extremely effective.  This is not to say digital advertising or social media efforts are useless.  But it is to say traditional advertising methods are still workhorses.

Steve Jobs taught us that success consists of simplicity, clarity and a big idea.  Sounds old school doesn’t it?  But the genius of our generation used old school to change our lives and our culture.    When it came to advertising, the man who taught is to go digital went very traditional.

1. “In early March, Google removed from its Android Market more than 60 applications carrying malicious software. Some of the malware was designed to reveal the user’s private information to a third party, replicate itself on other devices, destroy user data or even impersonate the device owner.”

2. “Groupon is on track to bring in between $3 billion and $4 billion in revenue this year alone. Facebook’s 2010 sales were reported to be only around $2 billion in its sixth year of existence.”

3. “A study of 24,000 consumers across the 16 largest countries found that those who are most connected, living on the cutting edge of social media tend to be more ‘prosocial’ than average, being more likely to do volunteer work, offer their seats in crowded places, lend possessions to others and give directions.”

4. “99 percent of Android devices are vulnerable to password theft.”

5. “Recent estimates put less than 10% of the population using Twitter, far less than other social sites.”

6. “More than 3.34 million mentions were recorded over a one-month period of people making social asks.”

7. “David Poltrack, CBS Corp., announced that, based on a new research study, ‘age and sex don’t matter when it comes to increasing TV ad effectiveness.’”

8. “An average of 40 percent of the traffic to the top 25 news sites comes from outside referrals, the study found, with Google Search and, to a lesser extent, Google News the single biggest traffic driver.”

9. “Almost one-in-four South Africans use social media as a tool to look for work, but are concerned about the potential career fallout from personal content on social networking sites.”

10. “The percentage of US parents who allow their children between ages 10 and 12 to use Facebook or MySpace more than doubled from 8 percent a year ago to 17 percent now.”

11. “33% of Facebook posting is mobile.”

12. “Fully 69% of visitors to news.google.com ended up 3 places: nytimes.com (14.6%), cnn.com (14.4%) and abcnews.go.com (14.0%).”

13. “85% of media websites now use online video to cover news.”

14. “”Social media advertising spending will increase from $2.1 billion in 2010 to $8.3 billion by 2015.”

15. “Facebook is approaching 700 million users and Google handles over 11 billion queries per month. World-wide there are over 5 billion mobile subscribers (9 out of 10 in the U.S.) and every two days there is more information created than between the dawn of civilization and 2003.”

16. “Twitter reported that the network saw more than 4,000 tweets per second (TPS) at the beginning and end of Obama’s speech [re: death of Osama Bin Laden]“

17. “65% of all social media related to the royal wedding has come from the U.S. in the past month [April]. The U.K. has been responsible for just 20%.”

18. Re: the Royal Wedding: “911,000 wedding-related tweets were tracked in the past 30 days. That’s about 30,000 per day and accounts for 71% of all social media.”

19. “According to NPR’s internal usage data covering January 1 through mid-April, users who request audio — maybe a station stream, a national newscast, or NPR Music content — view twice as many pages as those who only read the apps’ content. On average, audio streamers rack up 4.2 pageviews per visit versus 2.4 for the text-only crowd.”

20. “Twitter penetration rates in Canada are among the highest in the world, according to new data from online tracking firm comScore Inc., which suggests that nearly one in five Canadian Internet users over the age of 15 regularly visit Twitter.”

21. “Traffic from social media has highest bounce rate. [...] If you’re looking for ‘hyper-engaged’ readers, those that click through five or more pages on your site, forget the guy who came from Twitter. A link from another content site is three times more likely to be engaged, and someone coming in from search, is also above average.”

22. “”Digital services accounted for an estimated $8.5 billion (28%) of the $30.4 billion in 2010 U.S. revenue generated by the 900-plus advertising and marketing-services agencies that Ad Age analyzed.”

23. “Total Facebook spent on lobbying, Q1 2010: $41,390. Total Facebook spent on lobbying, Q1 2011: $230,000″

24. “Nearly seven in 10 tablet owners reported spending at least 1 hour per day using the device, including 38% who spent over 2 hours on it. And while just 28% consider it their primary computer, 77% are spending less time on desktop or laptop PCs since they got a tablet.”

25. “According to a Network Solutions survey, the use of social media among SMBs has grown over the years, rising from 12 percent in 2009, to 24 percent in 2010 to 31 percent currently.”

In her social media and PR blog, “Commentz“, Sarah Evans and her staff compile a lot of interesting stats. She cherry-picked the most relevant for marketers and recently shared them with Ad Age. They can be quite useful to healthcare marketers.

1. “Social media accounts for one out of every six minutes spent online in US.”

2. “Seventy-seven percent report that they use social media to share their love of a show; 65% use it as a platform to help save their favorite shows; and 35% use it to try to introduce new shows to their friends.”

3. “Facebook users are overall more trusting than non-internet others. Pew reported, 43% of survey participants were more likely than other internet users to feel that most people can be trusted.”

4. “22% of all grandparents in the UK are using social networks, according to Mashable. The study, which collected results from 1,341 grandparents from the UK, showed that 71% of grandparents who use a social network use Facebook, 34% are on Twitter and 9% use the business social network LinkedIn.”

5. “In the first four months after its January 2010 launch in Russia, Facebook use grew by 376%, and today more than 4.5 million people use the site regularly.”

6. “The ‘Weinergate’ scandal caused a significant drop in tweeting politicians. According to VentureBeat, after the scandal ‘the number of tweets by Republican members of Congress dropped by 27 percent, while those of Democrats dropped by 29 percent.’”

7. Instagram “currently has a user base of 4.25 million in only seven months, with ten photos being posted a second.”

8. “It only takes 20 people to bring an online community to a significant level of activity and connectivity.”

9. “Nearly twice as many men (63%) as women (37%) use LinkedIn.”

10. “In the last election Google was the largest player — the Obama campaign directed 45% of its online campaign dollars to the search site.”

11. “59% of adult Facebook users had “liked” a brand as of April, up from 47% the previous September. Uptake among the oldest users appears to have been a major factor in this rise.”

12. “In 2010, 29.3 million readers read some 270 million pages of Post journalism each month, a record for The Washington Post. Of that, 28.1 million did so online and, while [Washington Post] brought in 4.2 million new readers on average each month compared to the previous year, [they] also lost some 35,000 print subscribers in 2010 alone.”

13. “25% of hotels [are] still ignoring social media.”

14. “Businesses are paying Twitter $120,000 to sponsor a promoted trending topic for a day. [...] That’s up from $25,000 to $30,000 when the feature was launched in April 2010.”

15. “AOL’s newsroom is now bigger than The New York Times’.”

16. “Mobile is one of the fastest-growing platforms in the world. With 40% of U.S. mobile subscribers regularly browsing the internet on their phone and a projected 12.5% of all e-commerce transactions going mobile by the end of the year, it’s a channel that you need to be aware of. According to Google, mobile web traffic will surpass PC traffic by 2013.”

17. “Twitter is 6-7 times smaller than Facebook.”

18. “There are now 54 million active Mac users around the world.”

19. “130 million books have been downloaded from iBooks.”

20. “Users say they’re more likely to buy if a business answers their questions on Twitter.”

21. “Nearly half (42%) indicated that if they’ve already allocated a portion of their marketing spend to social media, they would increase this spend over the course of the year. Only 8% of those surveyed indicated that they would decrease social media spend.”

22. “13% of online adults use the status update service Twitter, which represents a significant increase from the 8% of online adults who identified themselves as Twitter users in November 2010. 95% of Twitter users own a mobile phone, and half of these users access the service on their handheld device.”

23. “According to HubSpot, small businesses plan to spend 19 percent of budgets on social media vs. only 6 percent in larger businesses. A similar gap is shown for blogging with 10 percent of budgets for small business vs. just 3 percent for large.”

24. “33 percent of its worldwide traffic is inside the United States.”

25. “Facebook has three times as many accounts as Twitter, and 20 percent of Twitter’s users produce at least 80 percent of the site’s content.”