Interviewing Ken Dykes, the executive director of the Bismarck Cancer Center, for a magazine story recently, he described one of the best models of customer (patient) service I ever heard. He gave me permission to share it:

“To be effective as a professional there needs to be an element of personalization and caring. Every patient deserves personal contact. We’re doing a lot of work to provide an individualized, personalized plan of treatment. But we’ve got to go a step beyond that. I want every (staff) person to reach out to the patient and the patient’s family and make a connection with them, human being to human being. I don’t want them treating the cancer that happens to be located at some site: breast cancer, colon cancer, lung cancer. That’s not what we’re treating; we’re treating a person, a human being, who happens to have a cancer. The difference in focus cannot be overstated. We tell our department heads that when they hire somebody to not just hire somebody who’s looking for a job. They may have the greatest credentials in the world—that just gets them through the door for us to look at them. I want staff to ask them if they can demonstrate in some meaningful way that they have a calling, like a calling to a religious order, that they have some sense of personal mission that causes them to want to treat the people who have cancer. If they can say “yes” to that and we can believe them, then this is a person who will fit in well and do what we need done at this center.”