Customer Criticises LabCorp for Bad Blood Drawing Experience

Many of the readers of this blog either manage or have some tangential relationship to a blood drawing center or team. Some of them are managed very well and some are not. Flooring the Consumer is a marketing blog written by C. B. Whittemore with a special focus on improving the consumer experience. In a recent note, she takes LabCorp to task about a bad blood drawing experience she shared with her young daughter at a patient service center (see: Hall of Shame Inductee - LabCorp). My guess is that her encounter is probably replicated many times per day across the country. Her list of complaints is long and I won't quote copy the entire note but rather present below a series of short quotes extracted from it:

• The totally bland waiting room is a mad house.
• No reading materials. No toys. Nothing on the wall except for a flat screen TV displaying mini-educational dramas with medical messages: 75% of gonorrhea infections go undetected. I'm grateful that my daughter doesn't understand what is being discussed.
• No one at the glass window. I see lots of hand-written signs festooning the window directing me to sign in and sit down - and fill out another form.
• I see a person and ask what the wait time is: "Two hours," she snaps.
• [We] hear a name [of a patient being] called out from the back. Imagine: a disembodied voice calling a first name. Now, don't you think that using a full name to begin with would not only have been more respectful, but also a more efficient way to process people?
• Phlebotomist's comment to her small daughter: "Little girl, other people are waiting for me and I don't have all day."

She summarizes her experience in the following way:

As patient-consumers, we don't have as many options as we do in the retail world. We are held captive by our insurance carriers, our primary care providers, our medical relationships.... We can certainly change some aspects, but it takes effort [more forms to fill out; identifying alternate options] and time. However, many medical providers have started focusing on the overall experience of their customers. They realize that repeat business and word-of-mouth endorsements matter - as they do in retail! Which makes LabCorp's poor and insensitive service even more unacceptable and its force-feeding of medical marketing messages intolerable.

I can add nothing more of value to her description of the experience and general advice to healthcare providers. I am sure that all of the readers of this blog understand that many of the problems described above can be corrected by better personnel selection and training and perhaps some minor expenditures such as magazine subscriptions. Ironically, this note comes hard on the heals of my recent tribute to the phlebotomists of the country, the vast majority of whom treat patients with respect, courtesy, and sensitivity.

It's risky to extrapolate from a sample size of one, but LabCorp also has a lot of money riding on an urgent need to develop a more welcoming blood drawing experience for their customers --$200M. To quote from the now famous email written by Neal Patterson, the CEO of Cerner: Tick, tock.

::Update on 1/29/2007 @ 5:00 p.m.

This story gets even worse. See: "Sorry pumpkin" - The LabCorp Saga Continues.

Comments

[Maria del Mar]

I,too, had a bad experience at Labcorp. The lady who drew my blood could clearly see that my veins are very small. She stuck in a needle that was 2 times the size of what is appropriate for my vein size. Being that I considered her as the professional(for a brief few moments) I did not say anything. She then pulled the needle almost all the way out and pushed it back into the vein!!! It didn't lead to blood flow. Instead, it lead to a painful experiece resulting in a painful bruise. Next time I go to labcorp (because it seems to be the only choice for labs) I am going to ask for THE professional when I arrive!

[C. B. Whittemore]

Bruce, my LabCorp experience continues. I just posted about it at http://flooringtheconsumer.blogspot.com.

[C. B. Whittemore]

Thank you for picking up this LabCorp story and mentioning Flooring The Consumer. It's fascinating to read about the bigger blood drawing context. One clarification: my daughter is the one who said "squirt, squirt", not the phlebotomist.