After just the first full year of implementing our Delightful Service initiative, our customers are already seeing the difference. Driving this improvement is our commitment to deliver customer orders on time and complete – not “mostly” complete. In the second half of
fiscal 2006, we delivered 98.4 percent of orders complete.
This is significant improvement, but we are still
targeting 100 percent. Steve O'Hara Angelica President & CEO
We recognize that patient satisfaction is the most
important issue to healthcare providers, so we have
increased the quality of our rental products and are
uncompromising in our processing of these products.
We’ve enlarged our standard bath towels, moved to
higher thread count pillowcases and sheets, redesigned
“patient friendly” gowns and launched a premium
washcloth. The 2006 customer satisfaction survey was
conducted when we were in the midst of rolling out these
improved products, so we expect these initiatives to be
reflected further in our customer ratings in 2007.
Delightful Service also means identifying customer
needs and providing them with innovative, new solutions.
In fiscal 2006, we introduced our exclusive Angel Slider™
launderable, patient repositioning product to reduce back
strains among nurses. Testing at Georgia Tech showed
that the force required from a nurse to move a 200
pound patient was reduced by 41 percent when using an
Angel Slider™. While raising their laundering costs only
slightly, our customers can significantly reduce nursing
injuries and worker’s compensation costs.
Along with striving for 100 percent complete on time
delivery, and gaining the full benefit of fiscal 2006’s
improved and new products, we plan further product
initiatives, with more product upgrades and additional
new products to better serve our customers in 2007.
We will also work to achieve even tighter tolerances
in our cleaning formulas, and increase inspections of
finished products to insure top quality. We hope that the
combination of these initiatives will result in even more
delighted customers, and therefore higher customer
satisfaction scores in our fiscal 2007 survey.
In the meantime, how has this Delightful Service
initiative translated into our business results so far?
We are pleased to report they are having the positive
impact we anticipated.
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