Thursday, October 4, 2007
By Mary Ellen Godin, Record-Journal staff

MERIDEN - Stew Leonard Jr. can recall shoppers returning a Christmas tree in February, turkey bones after Thanksgiving, and demanding a doughnut sample 10 minutes before the store opened.

But the king of kitschy supermarkets and noisy cows doesn’t waiver from his mantra for good customer service.
Rule 1. The customer is always right.

Rule 2. If the customer is ever wrong, reread Rule 1.

Leonard, the president and chief executive offi­cer of Stew Leonard’s, was invited to MidState Medical Center Wednesday to share his secrets of solid customer service with an unlikely audi­ence - about 80 health care managers.

“You’re never going to be perfect at this,” Leonard said. “If you ever feel like you’re good at it, you’re not good. We’re constantly working to make the customer happy and want to come back.”

Then he catches himself.

“Oh, as a hospital, they might not want to come back,” he said. “But yours would be the hospital they would want to come back to.”

Leonard recalled his father’s early operation in Norwalk, when delivery trucks with mooing cow heads would deliv­er milk, and drivers put it in people’s refrigerators.
“There was no such thing as a consumer,” Leonard said. “These aren’t just people com­ing in, they are families.”

Leonard used a slide presen­tation and joked with the crowd about the need to keep the hospital fun, and them­selves committed to putting the patient first.
“Some doctors, you feel like you don’t exist, you’re just a chart.”

But there was some resist­ance to his message.

“We are not in retail,” said Fred Tilden, director of emer­gency services. “We do a hic­cup when we think of our pa­tient as customers. There is a difference between our busi­ness and yours.”

Leonard compared the doc­tor’s concerns with the way store professionals are re­moved from the back rooms to see the results up close. Cus­tomer service is a collection of good stories about happy expe­riences, he said, like saving somebody’s dinner.

But the doctor wasn’t fin­ished.

“That end result, that’s really a nurses’ thing,” Tilden contin­ued. Nurses have it really …” “You’d better duck on your way out of here,” Leonard said with a laugh.

Event organizers said they could have hired a speaker from another health care center or other facility to speak about customer service, but Leonard brought a unique perspective, said Cassandra Crowal, the di­rector of access services for MidState.

The presentation fits with the hospital’s service recovery program that emphasizes the value of a good patient experi­ence and salvaging the experi­ence when things go awry.
“I thought it was great to in­troduce the idea that patients and families are customers. It is important for us medical peo­ple,” Tilden said later.

Leonard and his wife, Kim, have written several children’s books, the first two on water safety after the drowning death of their 2-year-old son in 1989. They also wrote a book on healthy eating, after their 16­year-old daughter was treated for anorexia.

MidState ordered 375 copies of nutrition books to read to school children at John Barry School and put in city libraries. Leonard reminded the health care supervisors to remember their patients are victims of cir­cumstance.

“Don’t let them get you en­gaged in their thing,” he said. “Because they’re really nice people. They are just having a bad day … And remember, this week, strip steaks $3.99.”