customer Centeredness in medical laboratories: A necessity or an option

In today's competitive world, laboratories with traditional perspective to concepts of customer, quality, competition, advertising, and diversity of tests, not only have made no success but also have had a plethora waste of time, finance, and energy. Today, "customer" is considered as a primary goal of laboratory services and "customer-centeredness" is remained to be the crucial cornerstone of laboratory activities, that is, the quality of lab services is defined based on customer's needs and expectations. Medical laboratories are obliged to satisfy their customers and to manage relationships with them, regardless of any of their own aims. This necessity is arisen from factors including divine orders related to observing human dignity, social rules, individual's incentives(demands desires), as well as requirements of fulfilling profits of medical laboratories. Customer-centeredness is a must for survival of a medical laboratory in a competitive market that requires valuing humanity and providing customers as human beings with their demands. The present study aims to examine types of customers, a variety of customer's needs and expectations (as appropriate behavior, speed of services, implementation of the rules, reliability and validity of tests, decorations done on physical environment), customer satisfaction and its impact on laboratory processes, as well as impression of winning customer's support on survival of medical laboratories.