Our Definition of Great Service
Today is Thanksgiving 2021 and I want to start by giving thanks that you are trusting us with something so valuable as your hearing health care needs.
And it is our passion and goal to live up to your trust and do the best we can to serve you. We do not take this lightly and are so very humbled. So I am writing to you today, on Thanksgiving 2021, 6 months after launching our new store, Hears Hearing & Hearables on what we consider great service and we hope to live up to this standard.
First let me say, I often hear people say that a warehouse has great service and I think, perhaps people have a very basic low level of definition of what service includes.
We want to take our service to a level above what Dayton’s (People in Minnesota will know this company) used to do back in the day.
We want to WOW you with what we can do if you need us to do it.
Not everyone needs a high level of service. I feel like I need to define what it is so I can set expectations for all of us. We like the transparency of what we say we can do for service and to walk the walk, not just talk the talk. You are welcome to call us on it if you feel we are not producing up to what we strive to do. Please keep in mind, the product is not service. I address this below.
Note: Who I am? I am an audiologist with 25-plus years in the industry. I own a brick-and-mortar clinic in Minnesota and pride myself on service and giving best practices to my patients. I know what it takes and I have the experience to help you. Our goal is to offer you a lower-cost product for accessible and sustainable hearing and separate out the product from the service. The more members we get the better the price of the product. Anyway, I digress as I tend to do. 😊 We have many more reasons why we started this store so feel free to explore our missions.
Patient Testimonials from Hears to U
I am also realistic that to really offer you what my patients get in Minnesota, you need to have a service provider that you can also see in a brick-and-mortar environment that will provide you with best practices in fitting and caring for your hearing.
Service on a Basic Level :
• Responding to an email, an order, or a comment by you.
• Taking your order, packing up the correct product, filling out your address, and walking it to the post office to get a tracking number for you.
• Taking the serial number of a product that comes with a warranty and registering it for you.
• Returning the product for you if it is not what you wanted.
Service on a Behind-the-scene Level:
• Ensuring we are picking products that are safe, offer value, and are of good quality. Sometimes a product fails or has a technical issue.
• Providing products that you will need to maintain healthy happy hearing or to support other products you bought.
• Getting the best price of the product we can negotiate from the manufacturer. As we get more members, we will negotiate to get better pricing!
• Offering a membership so that if you are a frequent buyer you can get discounts, rewards, and more.
• Offering our employees a healthy working environment and treating them well to serve you. This is important as you need service but they need to be paid so this does add some costs.
• Hiring the right employees to offer this level of service!
• Providing definitions and content, blogs, videos, and more to help you with what you need or how to help.
• Providing you with a working store that is easy to navigate and find what you need.
• Training for our employees and owners so they understand all the products in the store to help you.
Service on a Deeper more Clinical Level- This may or may not cost extra depending on the service:
• Providing customized support on a product you are looking for to meet your needs.
• Providing remote support for some technical service with a product.
• Helping troubleshoot a problem with a product if the manufacturer does not offer technical support.
• Connecting you to a local service provider near you who can help you audiologically with your hearing needs. We believe this is critical to your success with many of our products! We will help you find an amazing provider near you who we can all trust and who provides service to our standards. If they don’t, we will find you another provider near you.
• Offering you the ability to test drive a hearing device to see if it is something you will like if there is not a provider near you to offer you a similar choice of events. We are still working to perfect this process through remote work. We believe this can be done with zoom calls and other methods of communication and the mail.
• Offering you the ability to lease a product. We are working on how to perfect this process as well through remote work.
• Counseling you on realistic expectations for a product and how to best use the product.
• And other service events I am not thinking of right now. Haha
What you must understand and know about service is that SERVICE is NOT the product and is NOT always free. On a basic level, service is free. On a deeper level, great service does cost some. On the deeper level, service is time, and people must be paid for their time. We promise not to charge more than what is necessary. We don’t plan on flying to the moon with the money or buying fancy cars. We want to stay in business plus take home a paycheck to live a quality life hopefully like you. We are thankful to be able to have food on our tables and to enjoy life with friends, family and some travel to explore other areas than Minnesota.
Service to me is helping you be successful to what you need from us and to such an extent that you will come back again, become our friends, and even meet with you some day when we take a little travel to your neck of the woods.
We are truly humbled that you are taking your hearing needs seriously and allowing us to help. THANK YOU!
Kim E Fishman, Audiologist
#HearingWithKristine One of our best friends who loves hearing better! Thankful to know Kristine with all my heart.