Customer service
Feb 25th, 2008 at 11:28 am by Dr. S
You gotta be kidding me. Here’s $800,000 of taxpayer money at work.
Fifty medical workers — doctors, nurses, therapists and administrators among them — sat in a room at Walter Reed Army Medical Center gazing at a slide of Donald Duck on a screen.
The oft-cranky Disney cartoon character, wearing his blue sailor jacket and cap, was in a palpable rage. His webbed feet had lifted off the ground, his beak was gaping, and his white-gloved hands were tightly clutching an old-fashioned two-piece telephone.
“We can clearly see he’s frustrated,” said Kris Lafferty, a trainer for the Disney Institute who was leading workers at the Northwest Washington hospital last week in a four-hour seminar on customer service. “Why do we think he’s frustrated?”
But I guess anything is better than this.
Gee, now Walter Reed employees need training to care about their patients! I have two suggestions: 1) get rid of minimum wage contractors and 2) spend enough money so that all physical aspects of the place are not totally deteriorated.
Next week they have to watch a Porky Pig cartoon so they can learn how to properly say, “That’s all, Folks” as they roll patients out the door.
With respect, I thought when I read the story that it was pretty cool. Disney has earned a reputation for being ahead of the curve in paying attention to customer satisfaction in the theme parks. You don’t have to love them, but for someone to say, hey, we’re in a mess at Walter Reed, let’s go bring in someone from best-in-class to buff us up … that’s a respectable impulse on the part of the management of that organization.
If they don’t get the support from above to spend enough to deliver, yeah, that’s a different problem.
This is classic Rethug MBA superficial bullshit.
Don’t bother fixing the substandard buildings, broken-down equipment or overworked and undertrained staff; because that might indicate that shitty management was responsible for something.
Just bring in puerile smiley-face training for the staff. Yeah, that’s the only problem here, that the working peasants aren’t Disney-plastic Stepford employees.