It's been a while since I send any updates to my blog....well there's no particular reason, except I don't have any real content to write except the same work that I've been doing.
As I mentioned in my previous blog, one of the most important business issue that keeps me awake is: so called the "referral bonus/fee"....this is very nasty.And you can't believe, this amount ranges any where from 25% to 75% of the price you charge in the market.
To my small business mind, any business that needs to give ~50% as a referral bonus, is doomed to fail....how in the world does any business can afford to give this huge amounts and survive ?? And what it looks to me, majority of our competition in the market does is, compromise on the quality they give.
And TOP QUALITY being my absolute ground that Sneha Diagnostics should always stand on, it's very brutal for us to keep the show going on since we started....but I see a ray of hope that after all these years, people slowly but surely start recognizing our uncompromising quality....they're slowly trickling down hearing from their friends/relatives etc.
I feel absolutely proud when I personally hear the stories that they've been very impressed with our quality and very happy with what we're able to give them in these markets. When I'm there working on the ground, I absolutely make sure that each and every patient leaves our center satisfied.
And I believe there's still lot of room for us to bring in more quality and more customer care.
One of the major areas I see we're failing is, at the reception desk.
We've been taking very inexperienced persons and they don't have a clue what a customer service means. While I was on the ground, I spent lot of my time educating these people at the reception and making sure they treat the patients nicely...it's been a struggle to make them realize how important their job is. Next time, when we take any receptionist we should first train them appropriately at one of our older centers ,under an experienced receptionist for a month or two before placing them at the new center....we need to have a good game plan of 'training' the manpower, which at the very best is 'on the job from day one for eeverybody'..
This brings to my mind a wonderful topic about the HR activities in the business and how we've been dealing with this important activity...I will discuss in one my next blogs.
Hopefully these numbers should increase, which will make us an absolute winner in this game.
And it's so pathetic to see and know the facts that : Doctors in all the places that we operate, if it's their own or their loved ones' sample, they send to Sneha Diagnostics and if it's their patient's, they send to where they get "good referral amount"....or if they can do it in their own shabby lab will do it there itself to enjoy 90% returns...
It's not that we're fighting against all the local medical community...we want to make it a fair game.
I'm very hopeful that these things of shadow business practices will very soon end. In this social networking and internet age...where everybody knows everything in the world.
I believe we just need to keep doing what we've been doing and able to survive for a while...with a hope that Govt will also bring in quality guidelines for labs (like in most developed countires ) to protect the patient, which will help players like us who incur huge costs to maintain top quality and trying to compete with no-quality competetion.
That's all for now...Happy Pongal !
Mohan
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