Tag Archive | Customer service

Public Health Booster – Project which brings startup thinking into health care

Nov3

I took part in a Public Health Booster Workshop held in the Laurea Tikkurila Campus – a project formed together by the Laurea University of Applied Sciences, City of Vantaa and HealthSPA – the Finnish health ecosystem booster, a non-profit association for health startups, with its main aim at placing Finland among the top best in healthcare. HealthSpa creates events, like this workshop, which matchmake healthcare professionals, students and startups and make it possible to improve the customer experience in healthcare and create new opportunities in cooperation.

Hanna Vartia, HealthSpa

Hanna Vartia, HealthSpa

First we heard the opening words of Hanna Vartia from HealthSpa who introduced the main purpose of the workshop. This autumn, Laurea healthcare students have taken part in the Public Health Booster Project by interviewing startups, City of Vantaa healthcare professionals and their clients. With knowledge of the existing problems that needed to be tackled they tried to find solutions to the challenges. After the HealthSpa introduction, Laurea’s V.C. Kyösti Väkeväinen explained that annually 30 startups were formed among Laurea´s 7,000 students, making Laurea a cradle of innovators and innovations. The next speech was held by vice-mayor Jukka Salminen who said that the health care system “is not healthy” and should undergo a comprehensive innovation process with startups taking ideas to the next level and creating the kind of services the citizens would be willing to pay for and to buy straight from them.

Petteri Hirvonen, Klinik

Petteri Hirvonen, Klinik, http://www.klinik.fi

Next, Petteri Hirvonen introduced the project Klinik, which enables us to take better care of our health. Together with patients, doctors and other experts, they have developed an easy-to-use health service with which it takes just two to three clicks to get a proper understanding of what´s worrying a patient. Klinik changes the way we look for and find the right health care professionals. Klinic has filled a niche in the health service market because according to the statistics, 80 % of adults want an immediate answer to their health-related questions. Klinik uses simple language on their pages without any latin explanations which makes the text easy to understand for just about anyone. The Klinik service has made a breakthrough with as many as 100,000 visitors to its websites in a single month. Petteri Hirvonen proves how important an electronic evaluation of the need for treatment is because the modern healthcare

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Knocking on your shoulder

Feb24

Knock knock… Hi, could we ask some questions from you? This is how we started to gather customer data.

Picture by Satu Pakkala

I have the pleasure to be a part of a service design project that aims to improve Laurea´s student services. The head of the project is a design agency Kuudes Kerros. Other team members are Laurea´s staff members and a group of students including me.

In a first meeting we made a plan how and where we could gather data from customers. Customers are in this case students. The environment should be natural and neutral from the student’s point of view. To get good insights it is important to make observation and interviews in a place and situation that are authentic and comfortable. We decided to make the interviews at Laurea building´s lobbies, cafeterias, libraries and corridors.

It was easy to start a conversation with students. Almost everyone agreed to answer to our questions. We gathered data from different campuses for example at Otaniemi, Leppävaara and Hyvinkää.

Especially one method was effective in every campus. Answering to questions while you are eating might sound disturbing but it was not. We had great chats with students at lunchtime. Another effective way to get good answers was to first observe different kind of situations and later on ask about the situations from students. We used structured questionnaires and also more open and informal ways to start the conversation.

One thing that disturbed conversations was hurry. You could see this through people’s body language and short answers. I noticed that at the beginning the answers were quite cursory. But after few conversations it was more natural to dive deeper in subjects and get more relevant insights. It was also nice to see different kind of styles to reach and make the conversation among our team members. The project continues so you can read more blog posts of the subject later on.

Text by Laura Rinta-Jouppi SID student 2014

Community Managers Appreciated

Jan30

“Brands have to consider the conversation itself as the canvas, without the comfort of knowing what the response will be.” Dick Costolo, CEO, Twitter6c121db6879611e3b10d12bfd5de2428_6

Four years ago, in 2010 digital media strategist Jeremiah Owyang said out loud that the hard working community managers ought to be appreciated. He proposed that every fourth Monday of January would be dedicated to the practitioners of this new, forming profession. On that day, community members should thank their managers. Bit like Mother’s day but for Community managers.

CMADs in Finland

Many heard Owyang’s call. Community managers started organizing events and gatherings around the world. Gladly Finland was no exception.

Just like many great modern stories, it all started with a tweet. A social media specialist, trainer and entrepreneur Johanna Janhonen http://www.hiddentreasure.fi/ tweeted about celebrating the Community Manager Appreciation Day (CMAD) also in Finland. The message resonated among social media enthusiasts and Community managers. The first ever CMAD event in Finland was held in Tampere in 2012. It was a small gathering but the interest was clearly building.

In 2013 the event was organized in much larger scale. It gained big interest in social and digital media circles and got attention in media too. In 2014 the event attracted even a larger audience. Some 200 people were attending in person and many more following the live stream and steady flow of tweets with the official hashtag #cmadfi. The amazing thing about the event is that it’s organized pro bono by volunteers. The main organizers have put a lot of effort to make it happen.

Why Community Managers matter?

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Book review: Fischer T., Gebauer H. and Fleisch E. (2012), Service Business Development: Strategies for Value Creation in Manufacturing Firms,

Nov1

Cambridge University Press, UK

The book gives a comprehensive overview of the service business development in the business environment of capital goods and brings together years experience on how manufacturing companies can create value through services. It also discusses the challenges of how to generate revenue of the services itself (along with products) and what kind of strategies can be used in different stages and types of the manufacturing companies in global business.

1 Challenges and common questions

When developing services in manufacturing firms it is a change in value creation and leap from production minded one-off sales culture to long-term customer relationship building culture that creates value to customer in broader scale. Continue reading →