Gino Chouinard was looking for a little consistency out of his employees at HearUSA Inc. The notion that one customer was getting a different deal from the other, depending on which store the customer visited or which employee helped him or her, did not sit well with the hearing aid provider’s president and chief operations officer.
“I thought it was a credibility issue with our patients,” Chouinard says. “One patient could buy a hearing aid in one place at one price and, depending on the quality of the professional or their salesmanship, could pay a different price at another location. That was a big issue to me when I started, and it was a change I wanted to make.”
The source of Chouinard’s frustration was not with the employees who were offering different deals. It was with the 450-employee company’s leadership team and its inability to set a clear direction for its people to follow.
Chouinard felt employees were doing what they thought was right. And judging by the numbers, the company was growing, from $89 million in fiscal 2006 to $112 million in fiscal 2008. But he still felt that the inconsistency of service, if not addressed, could lead to problems down the road.
“They’re focusing on providing care for these patients,” Chouinard says of his employees. “They are dealing with these patients every day. Their main objective is to help them. But it’s the credibility of the professional if the patient realizes they could have had a discount if they had pushed a little more.”
Chouinard needed to show employees the importance of credibility and how it could affect the image of HearUSA and the people associated with the company.
But it would take more than just one memo to employees to enact lasting change. Chouinard was fighting years of history in trying to get employees to change their actions.
“They are used to one way of doing the business and you start to change things and it’s a little difficult,” Chouinard says. “You need to show that you’ll do whatever it takes to make the change happen.”