Customer feedback is the lifeblood of any service provider. A business ultimately exists to make money, sure, but it achieves profitability by providing excellent service that customers are happy to purchase. You don’t get there by ignoring your customers; even the smartest people take advice from others. Of course, it isn’t realistic to expect a patient to openly discuss their impressions of a doctor’s performance. There are no exit interviews at the doctor’s office, unfortunately, though a good, honest exit interview would do wonders for your practice. Besides, you’d never get a straight answer from most people in that situation. They’re quick to post a review on Yelp, though.

But Yelp, popular as it is, still ignores a significant demographic – that net-illiterate group which trends curmudgeonly. These older folks have more health issues, visit the doctor more often, and subsequently have more complaints. They also don’t have an effective outlet for their complaints, besides maybe grumbling at the receptionist. Grandma won’t be rushing home to blog about the hour wait, and even if she did, no one would read it. Nope, not even you. You wouldn’t read Grandma’s blog. Just admit it.

On a serious note, there are ways to get valuable customer feedback without putting people on the spot or assuming they’re net-literate. With the patient’s receipts and medical papers, include a small written survey and ask the patient to complete it before leaving (or take it home and return it on the next appointment). Put a few acrylic suggestion boxes out on the counter for the completed surveys, so the customers can respond at their leisure. Keep the survey short and sweet with questions that cut to the important issues. Be cautious about asking the right questions. Heck, consider asking what the customer considers to be an important issue, and then have them give a rating on that issue. After all, because you’re asking for feedback to understand what the customer wants, confirmation that your questions address relevant problems that matter is paramount. Give enough blank space for the written responses, and don’t let the suggestion box fill up before you read any of the surveys. If you respond to a customer’s suggestion, you validate the concept of the suggestion box. The more you communicate with your customers, the more they’ll feel inclined to give you helpful feedback.

And the most important rule: take the advice to heart. We can all learn from each other!

Make the Exam Room Wait Bearable

As you guys all know, going in for a doctor’s appointment is comprised of a series of temporary appeasements. First, you arrive on time, but the doctor can’t see you just yet. You put your name down on the sign-in list, though, so that’s something. It keeps you somewhat satisfied that things are moving along. You’re still sitting in the waiting room, but at least your name’s down and the ball is rolling. Now, you’re thumbing through old issues of “People” to keep busy when the nurse finally pops her head out and calls your name.

Yes! Almost there.

You are led to a small side room and told to remove your pants and sit on the examination table. The wax paper

underneath keeps bunching up and you’re waiting – yet again – but at least you’re at the last step in the process. But soon enough, ten minutes have passed and you’re still twiddling your thumbs. What to do while you wait?

Well, doctors, put yourself in your patients’ shoes. Your appointment is set for 10:30, but you don’t even see the doctor until 11:15. Sounds pretty frustrating, right? You can ease the pain of extended wait times by providing some reading material for the examination room. You already provide magazines for the waiting room in order to alleviate patient frustrations, so why not do the same for the examination rooms? Sitting in a bare room with white walls and that ambient buzzing noise from the lights can be incredibly boring and incredibly stressful.

Instead of providing the same outdated magazines they read in the waiting room, cover the examination room walls with interesting, pertinent medical posters. Maps of the human anatomy, little-known medical facts, easy preventive measures everyone can relate to – these are just a few great topic choices for examination room wall mounted posters. Not only will you keep the patients occupied, you’ll also provide good, useful medical information to people who could stand to hear it. An informed patient is always a better patient.

W and WF poster holders are the two best wall mounted poster holders around. Their acrylic, glossy sheen will both protect and advertise your posters. It’s easy to clean, too, so if a patient gets a little handsy, removing smudges won’t be a big issue. They’re easy to mount on the wall, cabinets, or door, and they give your office a decidedly professional air. Just tacking posters up without a holder looks crude and unprofessional, so use the W or WF poster holders and instill confidence in your patients.

One more piece of advice for all you doctors out there looking to spruce up your waiting room environment and make it more inviting and welcoming to patients: put up posters! People aren’t going to be satisfied with your old, outdated magazines for very long. They can only read about Brangelina and Bennifer news for so long. Patients are people, too, and they have a breaking point! But don’t be lulled into the ugly habit that most offices – not even just doctors – have when displaying posters: those cheap, totally inauthentic posters with pseudo-inspirational terms like “Integrity” or “Persistence” accompanied by some random, cookie-cutter nature scene. People don’t like those and they’ve become a huge parody of themselves, so lose the sunset shots. A better option would be to put up informational medical posters. That way, the patients will have something substantive to look at while they wait and wait for their names to be called.

I would suggest using a poster detailing all the segments of the human anatomy; that one’s good with the kids and it actually teaches them something useful. If you’re, say, an orthopedist dealing with knees, put up a poster with the interior view of the knee, including tendons, joints, bones, ligaments, with an explanation describing each part. Or this could even work for you dentists. Get a nice poster with comprehensive cross-sections of the teeth from all angles, including what a cavity or decay might look like, and put it up. You could even take it a step further and include some brochures with even more information to clarify just what the patients are looking at on the poster.

Whatever you decide, it’s a good idea to put your posters up in poster holders. That way, you can protect your possessions while presenting them in a professional, distinguished manner. Just slapping some bare posters up on the wall makes your waiting room look like a ten year-old girl’s bedroom; you want to inspire confidence in your patients, not ridicule. Your best bet is to use the style A acrylic sign holder. It’s angled and fits perfectly on a desk or table, so you can display your poster to align with the patients’ eyes. They won’t even have a chance to get bored and annoyed – your style a sign holder will leap out at them! And even better, use a style A with brochure pockets to hold your information brochures and expand on the info presented in the poster.

Last time, I spoke glowingly of my doctor’s inspired use of wall mount business card holders to promote good patient relations. His impressive mosaic of business cards may have increased his business profile, but more basic and utilitarian usage is just as effective. In fact, by using wall mount business card holders with the proper placement, orientation, and location, professionals looking to promote themselves can maximize their cards’ effectiveness.

The basic business card is, for our intents and purposes, a two-dimensional object. Without support, it lies flat. The business card holder not only supports the business card, it also improves its appearance. Instead of shrinking away, a business card in a holder presents itself to the eye in an attractive package: a protective, glossy sheen that streamlines the card’s appearance and draws the eye more than does a dull, matte finish. People, after all, love shiny things, and they’ll be more likely to pick up and keep a business card that they notice. At the heart of everything, we’re still animals with subconscious instincts. A nice-looking business card holder simply taps into those instincts.

Location and placement are absolutely key elements to a successful business card holder implementation. If your business cards are displayed in the wrong venue, no amount of artful placement will get you any significant levels of callback. Likewise, if you fumble business card holder placement in the perfect venue, you’ll have squandered your chances at a ton of business. Say you’re an immigration lawyer looking to get the word out, and you’re trying to decide where to display your business cards. Displaying your cards at an immigration office will likely yield optimum results, but you also have to consider market saturation. There were likely dozens of immigration lawyers with the same idea, so you could be competing against them all for ad space. You could try displaying the cards where your target demographic is likely to frequent: among manual laborers, for example.

You must also be mindful of business card holder placement. The basic business card holder rests on a table, desk, or other flat surface. These tabletop holders mostly count on people looking down. And I suppose that’s a pretty fair assumption; most people are accustomed to finding business cards on tables, so it’s not out of the realm of possibility. But if you also use wall mount business card holders, you effectively cover all angles. The customer looks down, sees a card. If he glances up, the wall mount holder greets him. Cards everywhere. He’s almost compelled to take one.

It’s worth a shot, at least.

Hey, folks. I’m still not done with my doctor’s office rant. While I was waiting around, thumbing through the terrible magazines and trying to avoid making eye contact with the people who were also waiting, I noticed something very strange about the doctor’s office.

All over the walls – every single wall, in fact – were hundreds of business cards like so many little pieces of advertising wallpaper. I was puzzled, to say the least, and had never seen anything like it. But my interest was piqued and, being a marketing and ad buff, I had to investigate.

There had to be over two hundred cards in all, attached to the wall with the help of a wall mount business card holder, something I’d never actually seen before. Let me rephrase that – I have seen business card holders before, but never used to create a wall-mounted mosaic of adspace. And in a doctor’s office, no less, which makes it even more impressive.

After talking to the doctor about it, I came away extremely impressed at his business acumen and sense of civic duty. The man supports local businesses by agreeing to display all of his patients’ business cards on the walls using the wall mount business card holders at absolutely no cost. He charges nothing for this service, and judging from the steady flow of happy, satisfied patients in the office, I somehow imagine his own business doesn’t suffer at all for this gesture. On the contrary: it’s apparent that this gesture has proved to be mutually beneficial for all parties involved.

Seeing the way that doctor used the wall mount business card holders made me hopeful, but it also made me a bit sad. As much as witnessing his example of civic goodwill that really paid off puts a smile on my face, its rarity – the fact that I so seldom happen across a positive example of good business practice – can be disheartening.

So I had a doctor’s appointment the other day. I got my knee checked out. Everything went well, I guess. At least, the medical stuff went okay. MRIs and X-rays are coming up, but nothing serious yet. I had quite the time waiting around, though. Screaming kids, a smelly old guy who kept falling asleep on my shoulder, and the world’s crappiest collection of magazines, ever.

What is it about doctors never updating their magazine collections, anyway? I don’t get it. You own your own private practice, you’re presumably raping the public and the insurance companies with your extravagant prices (I see that Mercedes parked in your spot outside, doc) and yet you can’t keep your magazine collection – perhaps the most crucial part of the doctor’s office, besides the medical care – up to date. You just fill your wire rack magazine holders with the most impossibly outdated, irrelevant fare anyone could ever imagine.

Okay, guys, tell me something. What’s the best part about going to the doctor’s office? What do you look forward to most of all?

No, no, not the turning and coughing.

It’s the magazine section, right? There is nothing better than plopping down in a comfy chair in the waiting room and selecting your choice from a whole slew of random magazines. You never know what you’re going to get, either, which is part of the fun. You could luck out and get the latest issue of “GQ” or “The New Yorker”; you could also fail miserably, which is what happened to me. Of course, I got a “US Weekly” from 2003 (Oooo, Brad and Jen are on the outs!) and a “People” that’s even older. Tom Cruise is forty! Wow… I can’t believe how good he looks for forty! Amazing! Too bad it isn’t the “World’s Sexiest…” issue.

That was my situation. Facing a long tedious wait, I was armed only with bad reading material. “Gun and Rifle”? “Sportsfishing”? What am I, an NRA member?

Plastic Products is fully aware the state of the music industry is wildly different than what it used to be even ten years ago. Since the digitization of music from tapes and records to compact discs in the 1980’s and 1990’s, the manner in which music has been distributed to the masses has been slowly switching from physical copies to digital files. This has obviously been equally beneficial and detrimental to the music industry. On one hand, some bands and artists have seen decreases in sales because revenue no longer comes from just CDs - instead they come from both CDs and various websites (iTunes, Amazon) that sell either their whole album, or just a couple of single tracks. On the other hand, the era of digitization and the Internet has been beneficial in that it’s become the single most important avenue of advertising.

Pivotal to bands and artists advertising their name are music blogs. Music blogs review new material and post parts of that material (with permission from the artist) for readers to download. There are thousands of reputable music blogs for essentially every musical genre, the only problem is – how are you supposed to find them? Also aggravating is the fact that there’s not a “Google” type of website out there that would aggregate all the music blog articles on your search query.

Well, actually there is, and it’s called The Hype Machine. The Hype Machine, or hypem, allows users to type in a band or song title, in which they then receive an entire list of every music blog article on that band or song. Once you have your list, you can either just listen to the track reviewed by the blog through hypem’s website, or you can visit the actual article (you have to visit the actual blog article to download the track).

The Hype Machine is a revolutionary middleman that many of us are pleased to have around. It’s beautiful because it allows you to become completely up to date with new and upcoming artists by learning everything that’s being said about them in the “blogosphere.” Hype Machine has, as it’s name implies, been incredibly beneficial to artists because not only do users who already know a band’s become acquainted with them, but users who don’t know that band’s name become introduced to that band when they type in another band that is similar to theirs (inhale, exhale)

The Hype Machine is most commonly known for it’s advertising of recent artists, and this is because most music blogs were created to review, well, new artists. Also important to note is Hype Machine’s music blog database. If you own a music blog, and you wish for your articles to appear in Hype Machine’s search results, you need to have been a reputable blog that’s been established for many months.

So, take a look at The Hype Machine next time you hear a band you like on the radio, or see a band on television – you’re sure to learn a lot more about that band, who they tour with, and who has done any reworks or remixes of any recent tracks. We here at plastic products sure like it.

Until next time, ta-ta.

(Photo courtesy The Hype Machine main web page)

Even if you reside in one of the many smoggy (or frequently overcast) areas of America, you’ll always be lucky enough to have at least a couple of clear nights – leaving you looking up in amazement at the enumerable celestial bodies. The night sky is full of stars, planets, satellites, asteroids and meteorites – but how are we supposed to differentiate between them? Today we’ll be talking about Sky View Café, one of our favorite office supplies – you know, those “supplies” that help us take a break from our everyday tasks at work (YouTube, College Humor, The Onion).

Sky View Café is a no-cost user friendly Java applet that allows you to browse a map of the celestial bodies. Because you can see different stars and planets depending on your location here on Earth, Sky View Café allows you to type in your zip code, city, or coordinates (if you’re that fancy) to show you exactly what you’ll see at an exact moment in time.

Yep, you can type in any date, hour, minute, and second – and view exactly where the celestial bodies were (or where they will be!).

Sky View Café offers 13 different viewing options – the most applicable being the horizon view (which would imitate what you’d see standing outside your house). As you learn the interface (which should not take any more than a couple of minutes), one might change the viewing option such that it is centered on the Sun or the Moon. From here, you can change the time slowly and watch as the Sun and Moon flow amongst their set paths!

Have you ever wondered when the next lunar or solar eclipses are going to be? With Sky View Café, one of our favored new office supplies, with a click of a button, you can find out when every single one is going to happen for the next however many years – as well as if you’ll be able to see these eclipses from your location.

We implore everyone to give this fun & free applet a whirl, but trust us – it’ll get time consuming!

What do evolutionary biologists, fourteen year olds in high school biology, twenty-something year olds in college, and investors across the country have in common? They’re all up in arms about a new video game called Spore. Spore is a massive multiplayer on-line role-playing game that follows the evolutionary life cycle of a user created species – from its single cellular origins to its widespread inhabitants amongst the universe. Since its September 4th 2008 release, players have been designing new species and making their ways amongst the virtual world – eating, fighting, and getting stronger.

If you walk into an electronic store today, you’ll see plenty of sign holders with cute little blue creatures advertising this new game.

Spore is vastly different from the widely popular MMORPGs released in the last couple of years (World of Warcraft, Age of Conan, Warhammer Online) in that the essence of Spore’s game play, the way you progress through the game, is scientific relevant – instead of fantasy based.

The game’s creator, Will Wright – most popularly known for his previous “Sim” game series (Sim Earth, Sim Ant, The Sims etc), said this game was a little bit more difficult to create than the others. He wanted this game to be both graphically revolutionary, as well as in line with the current paradigm of evolutionary biology. The ladder portion of his aspirations were so important to him, that much of his time was spent with actual biologists, in quest to become scientifically literate enough to make the game play mimic that of the current theories of the origins of life.

The theory he ran with places players starting their game play in the vast oceans of a planet, swimming around to find food and mates. As you eat, fight, and reproduce, players earn points which they can allocate to better their chances of survival in a given environment. For example, if you wanted to be a creature more accustomed to water life, you’d allocate your points to your flippers – making you swim faster, or your jaws, allowing you to eat bigger things.

The possibilities are virtually endless – and that’s what Wright was trying to accomplish.
Electronic Arts, the producer of Spore, strategically released the game near the end of the 4th quarter in hopes to raise hype and to work out any kinks or bugs in the game before the 1st quarter - always popular for video game earnings because of the holiday season.

Whether or not we continue to see sign holders containing advertisements for Spore come the holiday season is unknown. EA Spokesman Jeff Brown is optimistic, and thinks that “… [they’re] headed into a heck of a holiday.”

photo courtesy Spore Official Website

Watch out Wikipedia. Google, like always, might be here to steal some of that thunder of yours. One of Google’s latest projects is called Google Knol – a user driven informational database. After users write articles on virtually any topic, they can then leave it open for editing, or allow that requests for edits be sent to them for verification. The breadth of information contained in Google’s Knol database since it’s July 23rd, 2008 release is astonishing, though not comparable to the amount and eclecticism of Wikipedia.

In fact, there are some very interesting differences in terms of reputability when it comes to these online literature displays Google Knol and Wikipedia.

Google Knol doesn’t require its users to write truthful articles, nor does it even require that its users correctly spell their words or write grammatically correct sentences. There’s very little oversight. When you look at Knols in relation to Wikipedia articles, you find that the Knols are much more conversational – they’re not structured, formulated, or voiced like a scholarly article. Honestly, they have a blog-type feeling to them.

Some think that Google’s introduction of its Knol database is an attempt to advance its reputation as an entity whose chief aspiration is advocating, at no cost to the user, the transfer of knowledge. Take for example Google Docs, and Google Sites which replace Microsoft office and domain registers respectively – Google offers for free (and some would argue more efficiently) what others would have you pay a fortune for. Google’s spreadsheet function (within Google Docs), which has Microsoft office’s functions down to a t, is absolutely free – while some versions of Excel retail above $400.00.

Others think Google is going to use its Knol database as a scheme to make AdWords advertising revenue in the future, placing advertisements along the boarders of the articles that are triggered by the content of that article.

No matter Google’s intentions, this new online literature display is giving you information for free. It’s advised, if you are to use Google Knol, that you use it as a supplement to your more reputable (edited, footnote heavy) sources of research – like Wikipedia.

photo courtesy knol.google.com