Workplace Wellness Providers: Laying The Foundation For Profitable Growth

Sound familiar?  As part of a large new contract, you plan to have your customer's employees log wellness-related activities using desktop PCs. Then you find that factory employees can only access a shared PC kiosk, raising HIPAA and PC availability concerns. Your profit margin will suffer if you collect data manually. How will you renegotiate your commitments and pricing with your customer?

 

How about this one?  An existing customer asks you to develop a major new wellness program - without committing to purchase it. They ask for more frequent counseling of high-risk employees. Your costs and performance requirements increase. But when you propose a program development fee or price increase, they accuse you of nickel-and-diming them.

 

Our view:  computer outsourcing companies like IBM have built successful businesses around highly-customized contracts for large customers. Their experiences can help you respond to your customer and protect your business.

 

1) Develop a written scope of work to define your relationship with your customer.  Specify their requirements and your commitments.  Specify the resources they must contribute (for example, training rooms). Specify key dates and deliverables. Document key assumptions (for example, all employees have secure PC access).

 

2) Plan for change by including a formal change management process in your contract. This structured process for handling major changes in your scope of work (including pricing changes) helps protect you from the unexpected operational and profit consequences of ad-hoc changes.

 

3) Establish performance measures to document your success in delivering promised benefits. Establish measures of of your customer's commitments as well.  Examples include before/after absenteeism rates for employees in a specific wellness program, or the rate of employee cancellations for scheduled classes.

 

4) Document, document, document. Often key knowledge about specific accounts resides undocumented in the company's collective memory. What if a highly knowledgeable person quits?  How will you quickly train new staff? Document key procedures for each customer in a  "playbook" that serves as a guide for your employees.

 

5) Avoid surprises by assigning a trusted senior employee to each important customer relationship. This advocate should meet with the customer 2-3 times each year. This role supplements the day-to-day account manager as an escalation point if your customer feels that the usual processes for resolving issues aren't working.

 

(c) 2004