If you’re already thinking ahead to next Sunday’s Super Bowl, you might be thinking about Domino’s, because, as everyone knows, pizza and football go together like mom and apple pie. I’m thinking about Domino’s too, but not because I’m planning my order. It’s about their new program to reward customers who do more of their own work.
Ahem, healthcare: pay attention.
Credit: Domino's
Last week Domino’s announced
that customers who picked up their own orders, rather than using delivery,
would earn a $3 tip. Art D’Elia,
Domino’s executive president and chief marketing officer, explained:
It takes skill to get pizza from a Domino's store to your door. As a reward, Domino's is giving a $3 tip to online carryout customers who take the time and energy out of their day to act as their own delivery drivers. After all, we think they deserve it.
The program – Domino’s Carryout Tips –
isn’t quite as rewarding as it might sound.
The $3 is actually a credit on your next order, and that credit has to
be used by the following week. There’s a
$5 minimum to qualify, and orders have to be online. The program was announced in time for the
expected Super Bowl surge, and is scheduled to end May 22.
But still. I
don’t like waiting for deliveries, I do like pizza, and if I ordered a lot of
Domino’s (which I don’t), the $3 tip would be decent discount, even if I had to
order even more Domino’s to actually get it.
Domino’s once was famous for it’s “30 minutes or it’s
free” delivery guarantee, until
it lost a $78 million lawsuit in the early 1990’s,
as the court agreed the promise resulted in reckless driving (and even, it was
claimed, multiple fatalities). Still, during
the 1980’s that promise catapulted the chain to be the biggest pizza chain in
the U.S., a position it
still holds (it now is also the largest
in the world).
Although the tip initiative was portrayed as a
customer reward program – Mr. D’Elia is, after all, the chief marketing officer
– most analysts believe it is more about labor shortages. Domino’s, like many companies and especially those
in the food service industry, is struggling to attract/retain enough workers,
including those delivery drivers. So if
customers want to be their own delivery driver – Domino’s ad literally shows
that – hey, that’s worth a $3 credit, right?
In 3Q 2021, Domino’s suffered its first decline in same store sales in over a decade; initially the pandemic had been very good for pizza sales, but the combination of of fewer workers, higher supply prices, and ongoing competition took its toll. At the time, Chief Executive Richard E. Allison, Jr. noted: “The carryout business will continue to be a focus of ours, given the significantly lower amount of labor involved in those transactions, We’re going to continue pushing there.”
Thus, Carryout Tips.
----------
Healthcare has its own share of pandemic woes, most of
which exacerbated existing problems. Healthcare
workers are burnt out, and many are simply leaving – about one in five, according
to some estimates. Patient data continues to be siloed
despite huge gains in electronic health records; not only do different EHR
vendors not
communicate well, different health systems using the same
vendor have problems. Patients not only
often don’t
have good health habits but a surprising number don’t
follow their doctor’s orders, including medication
adherence. Health
inequities abound.
Somebody needs some $3 tips. Well, actually, given health care prices, there
better be a lot of zeros after the number, and I’m not talking decimal
points. We’re doing way too much of the
work, for free. For example:Credit: Mighty Casey Media
· Have
you ever filled out a form in a healthcare office that you’d already filled out
previously, either there or in another office?
You get a tip!
· Have
you ever had to carry some of your health care records (either on paper or on a
CD) from one healthcare office to another?
You get a tip!
· Have
you ever had to take time off work to sit in a healthcare office or facility,
waiting long past your scheduled appointment?
You get a tip!
· Have
you ever had to fight with a healthcare organization about incorrect bills, or
with an insurance company over incorrect payments? You get a tip!
· Have
you ever been a caregiver for someone with acute or ongoing health care
issues? You get a tip!
You get the idea, and you probably have your own
suggestions. We’ve all had encounters
with the healthcare system that felt way too hard, during which we felt we were
doing more of the work than we should have had to. Frictionless, it is not.
The healthcare industry would say, well, nice idea,
but there’s no money for that. We could
do that, it might say, but, of course, we’d have to charge more in order to pay
for all those tips. I would say,
balderdash. There’s plenty of money; it’s
just going to the wrong places.
----------
I’m not naïve.
Domino’s is not offering its tips because it truly wants to reward its
customers. It’s doing it mainly because
delivery drivers are scarce and too expensive.
If it can persuade more customers to be their own delivery drivers by
offering a $3 credit, better for Domino’s, and if the $3 engenders some extra
customer loyalty, better still for Domino’s.
Similarly, healthcare workers are expensive and becoming
increasingly scarce. There weren’t
enough of them before the pandemic, and there certainly aren’t not enough of
them now. Given the way they’re leaving
the industry, there aren’t going to be enough of them once the pandemic becomes
endemic and things reach a “new normal.”
Healthcare better find ways to incent patients to take
on more of the work. Appeals to “more self-service”
or even to “managing your own health” aren’t going to be enough. Healthcare organizations need to be thinking
about financial incentives. Call it a
tip, call it a credit, call it a customer loyalty reward, but they should find
some way to acknowledge, and reward, patients for the various ways they provide
unpaid work in our healthcare system.
A healthcare “thirty minutes or its free” promise
wouldn’t be a bad start either.
Maybe healthcare organizations could at least order
pizzas for patients…although they’d probably expect them to pick them up.
No comments:
Post a Comment