McKinley Marketing, Inc.

Sharon Hantman
Director of Membership
American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA)

ASHA recently developed a "Member Centric Team" and, in fact, just rolled out a comprehensive road-map for our staff dealing with the question of customer-centricity. We spent 2004 crafting a plan that encourages a commitment to members. We hope this new emphasis on the member takes ASHA to the next level.

The team's first task was to define "member centric". For ASHA, being member centric means providing programs and services that are important and useful to members, and providing high quality service that meets member needs in a timely manner. Member centric also means reviewing ASHA processes that impact members to ensure that they are user-friendly and hassle free.

We identified five focus areas and developed desired outcomes in each of these areas along with strategies that support each outcome. The focus areas are:

1) Member Contacts (connecting with members)
2) National Office Internal Communications (what staff need to know about programs and services to share with members
3) Data Collection (information we need to become more member-centric)
4) Staff Training (the knowledge and skills staff needs)
5) Customer Service Performance Indicators (policies and /procedures for interacting with members).

The Member Centric Implementation Team is now responsible for achieving the desired outcomes outlined in our road map. We anticipate that the Member Centric Implementation Team will be with us until member-centricism becomes an integral aspect of our culture.

Sharon can be reached at shantman@asha.org.

Tom Quash
Director of Marketing & Communications, Women in Cable & Telecommunications (WICT)

To create a more member-centric environment at our association, we are enhancing the way in which we communicate with our members. We recognize that our members fall into far more specific categories than the demographics typically found in most databases and that they each have varied expectations of our organization.

WICT has embarked on an extensive "brand essence plan" and, in an effort to learn more about the challenges and needs of our membership, we have invested in a comprehensive research project. Concurrent with our research activities, we are segmenting our membership into meaningful domains and improving our communications and 1:1 marketing to speak more directly to our members' professional and personal characteristics.

Tom can be reached at tquash@wict.org.

Todd Fuller
Public Relations Manager, Missouri State Teachers Association (MSTA)

We are an independent education association that competes against nationwide teacher unions. We are the largest teacher organization in our state and we contribute a portion of our success to our dedication to personalizing the association experience for each member. For instance, we have field representatives interspersed throughout our state that can drive to see a member face-to-face, providing a high level of personal connection to our association.

Our dedication to face-to-face interaction does not, however, take away from our ability to respond to standard member inquiries (phone, web, email). In an effort to become more customer-centric we are creating an all-new customer care center. Our goal is to respond to questions without transferring the member between departments. Our members have very little time to make phone calls during the day and little tolerance for being placed on hold. Consequently, we hope to offer a service that is respectful of our member's time and needs.

Todd can be reached at tfuller@msta.org.