Customer service through leadership: The Disney way

In its effort to reduce employee turnover and enhance the patient experience, University of Chicago Hospitals and Health System spent seven years benchmarking service-based organizations, including the Walt Disney Company. Although Disney may not seem to have much in common with a health-care system, both organizations make a strong commitment to customer satisfaction, and both serve a diverse audience with high expectations UCH sent representatives to Disney Institute to learn about customer service from a recognized leader in the field. Disney taught UCH reps to treat the people they serve as individuals, making them feel welcome and creating the personal touches that Disney calls "magic moments." New UCH employees are now oriented to the service-based culture and their important role in it. One UCH strategy is to provide continuous learning opportunities for employees through the UCH Academy, UCH's corporate-quality university. That initiative resulted in a 33 percent reduction in employee turnover over six years. Another key factor to the success of the new initiatives is the empowering of leaders to support the frontline staff and set them up to succeed. Leaders are directed to remove barriers and free up resources so that employees can perform their jobs to the best of their ability. Additional aspects of UCH's customer service strategy include: providing continuous communication to patients visualizing the "ideal patient encounter" and working to make that happen adding a greeter who sets the tone for the patient experience developing a process for rapid feedback and rapid response.