An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
Measure — You must measure something to know what to improve. If you don’t use measurement tools, then how do you determine if you’re getting better or worse? For Beltone, we have several measurement tools including our Net Promoter Score (NPS), growth in the business, and turnover among employees.
As part of our series about the five things a business should do to create a Wow! customer experience, I had the pleasure of interviewing Beltone President, Mike Halloran.
Mike Halloran is the president of Beltone, the nation’s leading hearing care retailer recently named Best in Customer Service for Hearing Care by Newsweek. An industry veteran with approximately 20 years of experience in the hearing industry, Halloran joined Beltone in May 2020 after severing as Chief Financial Officer and general partner with Audigy Group for almost six years. Prior to this, Halloran was VP and CFO for Action Target, Inc., and VP and CFO for Sonic Innovations, Inc. Halloran has helped lead, grow, and position the Beltone brand as America’s #1 hearing care retailer by implementing innovative technology systems and platforms that help optimize support to Beltone’s expanding network of owners while enhancing patient care.
Thank you so much for joining us! Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?
I used to work for a big manufacturing company in Salt Lake City that was a Fortune 500 company on the NYSE. A buddy of mine left the company to work for a little startup called Sonic Innovations. Sonic was a private equity backed startup in the hearing industry and one of the very first ones to come out with a digital hearing aid as up to that point they were all analog. They were very quick in becoming a technology leader in the industry and wanted to do a public offering but needed someone with lots of accounting experience, so they hired me to be their Controller. We did a public offering about a year later growing the company from $10 million to $150 million before it was sold off to Oticon over a 10-year period. I started as Controller, then I was a VP, and ultimately became their CFO by the time the sale was finalized. I left the industry for a few years but got back into it when Audigy, a management services company based in Portland, wanted to sell and since I had experience with that process and knew the space and players, they called me to help give them the support they needed. They ended up selling to GN Hearing, which also owns Beltone, and I worked at Audigy as CFO for serval years before becoming President of Beltone in 2020.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘take aways’ you learned from that?
It’s more of a series of events over my career where I learned to accept criticism much better by knowing it’s really being said to make me better versus not actually “criticizing” me. If there is one thing that most people do, including myself, they tend to take everything personally. So being able to handle criticism is a skill and something you learn from. It’s okay if you get criticized, it’s part of life and you get better from it. I find that if I get defensive about it then it doesn’t go well, and I don’t learn anything from it. So, a takeaway I learned and say to everyone is that by accepting criticism you will get better but by being defensive and not listening to it, you won’t be able to improve.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?
The CEO of Sonic Innovations at the time I was working there taught me to be a good businessman and a good operator and not just an accountant. He took me from an accountant who focused on numbers to one who also focused on business and operations and eventually promoted me to CFO. He taught me not to just do the numbers but to actually make a change in the business and be a good business partner with someone versus just being their accountant.
Thank you for that. Let’s now pivot to the main focus of our interview. This might be intuitive, but I think it’s helpful to specifically articulate it. In your words, can you share a few reasons why great customer service and a great customer experience is essential for success in business?
People have choices and they are multiplying so to stand out in a very crowded field you must have something whether it’s price, product, or service. I think about Beltone, and we have a great product, but I really pride myself on our service and our Net Promoter Scores and that we are taking care of the patient because, in the end, we change lives. It’s really about that experience, not just about the “widget”, as the service and experience are what change people’s lives so they can be more engaged at home, at work, and with life in general. Great service is what’s essential to making sure customers are happy.
We have all had times either in a store, or online, when we’ve had a very poor experience as a customer or user. If the importance of a good customer experience is so intuitive, and apparent, where is the disconnect? How is it that so many companies do not make this a priority?
A lot of the disconnect is with the people that are hired. It all starts with hiring the right people who are service orientated and developing a process and providing training.
Do you think that more competition helps force companies to improve the customer experience they offer? Are there other external pressures that can force a company to improve the customer experience?
Definitely. Whether it’s an existing competition or even an outside one trying to get in. For the hearing industry with over the counter (OTC) hearing aids coming into the mix, you need to figure out how to differentiate yourself not just from the competitors of today but also from the ones coming in tomorrow. You should also measure internally and have competition within yourself to get better while setting standards within the company and holding people to them.
Can you share with us a story from your experience about a customer who was “Wowed” by the experience you provided?
A Beltone patient named Harold Kroll recently visited our Mobile, Alabama office and left a glowing review of his experience stating, “As always, your attention and service to your clients is superb! I would highly recommend to anyone who might ask me about getting hearing aids to come and talk with you before buying anything else. Thank you for what you do for your customers!”
Did that Wow! experience have any long-term ripple effects? Can you share the story?
Yes, as we were recently ranked #1 for Best in Customer Service for Hearing Care in America by Newsweek, have 30,000 5-star Google reviews, and consistently have outstanding Net Promoter Scores.
Ok, here is the main question of our discussion. Based on your experience and success, what are the five most important things a business leader should know in order to create a Wow! Customer Experience. Please share a story or an example for each.
1. Measure — You must measure something to know what to improve. If you don’t use measurement tools, then how do you determine if you’re getting better or worse? For Beltone, we have several measurement tools including our Net Promoter Score (NPS), growth in the business, and turnover among employees.
2. Hire the right people — It’s all about hiring the right people and making sure they are service orientated and providing them with a consistent process and proper training.
3. Training — Set up a process and train employees. And whatever that process is, if the company is consistent in the process, it will be a good experience and can always get better. If you don’t have a consistent process, then you really don’t have a baseline to get better. You really need a consistent process with customer service such as your approach and what you say. When you do that and train everyone on it then you can measure and become better and better.
4. Culture — Establishing a culture around customer satisfaction is key. Be urgent to take care of your customer and go out of your way to help them and make sure to reward employee successes.
5. Take the view of the customer — For example, when you walk into your store, view it as if you’re a customer viewing it for the first time. Walk through with an eagle eye and open eye and see what it looks like and what needs to be done. Realizing what you may be comfortable with may not be comfortable to others is the difference between stepping up your game and being complacent.
Are there a few things that can be done so that when a customer or client has a Wow! experience, they inspire others to reach out to you as well?
We have 30,000 5-star Google reviews as we encourage our patients to post reviews about their Wow! experience at Beltone and send a survey to those who buy hearing aids from us to get their feedback on their experience and if they recommend any improvements.
My particular expertise is in retail, so I’d like to ask a question about that. Amazon is going to exert pressure on all of retail for the foreseeable future. New Direct-To-Consumer companies based in China are emerging that offer prices that are much cheaper than US and European brands. What would you advise retail companies and eCommerce companies, for them to be successful in the face of such strong competition?
In the hearing industry, I believe it isn’t about the product, it’s about the service. The more service and interaction customers have with a professional, the better the experience will be as they will have a better understanding of the product they are purchasing which leads to customer satisfaction. Beltone’s customer satisfaction scores are really high because we have that personal interaction. For example, with the new FDA OTC hearing aid ruling, if you’re just selling a product and you don’t have that personal interaction and experience, there will be a lot of disappointed people which could also lead to returns on products they don’t understand how to use on their own. This in turn, will motivate customers to seek the help of a professional to increase their satisfaction.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
To get people started on their hearing care journey sooner. Studies show that people with hearing loss tend to wait 7–10 years before starting their hearing journey, however, during that time they begin to miss out on interactions and connections with loved ones and at work because they waited too long. So, if I could start a movement, which I am hoping that OTC hearing aids help a little with, is that people start their hearing care journey a lot sooner so they don’t miss out on the important connections and relationships in their lives as that can potentially lead to other health risks including depression, cognitive decline, and social isolation.
How can our readers follow you on social media?
They can follow Beltone on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
Mike Halloran of Beltone On 5 Ways To Create a Wow! Customer Experience was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
