Service Guarantees Have A Place In Healthcare

Many hospitality, retail, repair, and other businesses offer their customers service guarantees. If the service is substandard, the customer doesn’t pay.

In his article “Service Guarantees Have a Place in Healthcare,” appearing in the Jan. 15 issue of Annals of Internal Medicine, Marketing Professor Leonard Berry proposes that healthcare organizations should consider guaranteeing the quality of services they provide that are important to patients and controllable to the organization.

Well-designed and executed service guarantees will strengthen the organization’s culture of service excellence while bolstering its reputation with patients and other stakeholders. Healthcare organizations can—and should—commit to being good enough to guarantee the quality of its services.

This is the first time the concept of service guarantees will be featured in a top medical journal. Annals of Internal Medicine is ranked in the top five of all general medical journals in the world.

Berry is University Distinguished Professor of Marketing, a Regents Professor, the M.B. Zale Chair in Retailing and Marketing Leadership, Presidential Professor for Teaching Excellence, and Senior Fellow of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. He has been at Texas A&M since 1982, is a guest lecturer internationally, and has written 10 books, including Management Lessons from Mayo Clinic; Discovering the Soul of Service; On Great Service; Marketing Services: Competing Through Quality; and Delivering Quality Service. He is a pioneer in the field of services marketing and is making a significant mark on the healthcare industry.