This is marketing tip #2. (By the way, the reason I am offering these tips is because they make you think more deeply about how your EAP can help the business customer. More specifically, they allow you to both educate the customer, debunk myths about EAPs, improve the likelihood that the customer will acquire a more effective model, and deprogram the customer from the brainwashing they have thoroughly received via their trade journals and benefits consultants and financial advisors. Hopefully you and especially new staff witll acquire a new appreciation of value of your own product.
MARKETING TIP/DISCUSSION WITH YOUR CUSTOMER #2:
Discuss and provide information and contrast about the experience of your EAP staff, their turnover rate, workload, and pay?
POINTS: Experienced EA professionals are difficult to find and recruit. Have you kept good ones on your staff for awhile? That's a big plus. This stability is a selling point and a product advantage. Certified Employee Assistance Professionals with master's degrees in mental health disciplines are particularly hard to come by, but represent the best pick of those who should be servicing your company. Add a mental health license and/or alcohol and drug counseling certification, and you got yourself a rare find. A recovering alcoholic and addict with any of the forgoing can be worth their weight in gold if their diseases are well-managed.
Most managed care cubicle workers delivering EAP assessment by phone are not experience EAP pros. Many, even if CEAPs, may have no experience outside the phone cubicle on the 14th floor of an office building sitting on the outskirts of town. Most are poorly paid, overworked, and mimic the guy on the Ed Sullivan show you may have seen who spun plates on the top of 24 sticks dashing from one problem to the next with a few smashing to the ground periodically. That is likely to be your EAP customer if they don't choose an effective EAP provider.
Solid and professional EA staff turnover fast in managed care companies leaving quickly when not adequately paid. Such turnover is deadly and risky to the well-being of employees and family members who tend to not only use an EAP service but "connect" to the staff member's personality because of their need to bond with the helper. This is an important dynamic to explain.
Most private EAP providers and managed care companies are notorious for paying low salaries to their line staff. They need to be adequately paid so the stick around.
So, just when everyone in the host company knows the employee assistance professional by name, they leave for few thousand more dollars in their paycheck! This is a serious consequence of commodization. Everyone suffers especially employees.
