Delivering quality products and services

In the simplest of terms, public relations are the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain good understanding between an organisation and its clients – in this case it would be between the hospital and the patients.

Let’s take a look at the main activities that take place in public relations, and as a healthcare worker you might come across such public relations activity.

For anyone to deploy the above activities, one would need to typically understand the following first:

• Ethics - PR professionals must adhere to ethical principles and maintain the trust of the public, stakeholders, and clients
• Research - you have to thoroughly understand not only your company but also your customers and potential customers. What do you offer that is unique or special? What are customers looking for? And how well do you fill those needs? Market research and an internal company audit are the starting points of successful PR campaigns.
• Strategic planning - define each target audience – in this situation they are the patients at your clinic, your marketing objectives for that group, and the messages you must communicate in support of those marketing objectives.
• Communications training - in large corporations, PR specialists may spend a lot of time coaching senior executives in dealing with the media and other communications skills. The specialists may also advise the executives on strategy for day-to-day PR as well as PR crises.
• Internal relations - employees are the internal audience. With the unemployment rate at all-time low, good employees are hard to find, and a good public relations program job can help improve loyalty and retain more of them.

Remember, it might seem similar however public relations and marketing are two very distinct activities. Product promotion, which is typically marketing the product and usually defined by the Four Ps – product, price, place (channels of distribution), and promotion. However, before we could market any products or services to our patients, we need to firstly identify their needs. Let’s take a look at the skills staff should develop in order to deliver quality customer service, afterwards we will then look at product promotion.

Important Skills for customer service delivery

There are certain skills that all staff should develop in order to deliver quality customer service. These skills include:

1. Effective listening - a major contributor to communication breakdown is poor listening skills. It is important that managers and employees understand that carefully listening to a customer will improve an employee’s ability to deliver great customer service. Being a good listener not only helps with handling complaints, but it is also a great way to build trust and confidence. Effective listening helps employees “step into the shoes” of their customers.
2. Product knowledge - many frustrations can occur if staff do not have adequate product knowledge. When a customer interacts with an employee who demonstrates a good understanding of the product or service, then the customer will have more confidence in the organisation and have a higher level of satisfaction. Good product knowledge also makes customer transactions more efficient.
3. Problem solving - delivering good customer service relies on employees being able to solve customer problems quickly and within organisational procedures and policies. Staff need to have the confidence to perform tasks within their power and to refer to management when appropriate.
4. Rapport building - the ability to quickly establish rapport and treat customers in a polite and friendly manner greatly contributes to the customer experience. This can be as simple as acknowledging and greeting a customer as soon as possible, calling them by their name and showing professional courtesy.
5. Complaint handling - successfully handling customer complaints is often thought of as an advanced customer service skill. However, how an organisation handles customer complaints can significantly impact the organisation’s reputation. Therefore, it is important that all staff members feel comfortable and confident in all of their customer interactions and in their ability to handle disputes as they arise.

Additionally, the delivery of quality customer service within any organisation relies on the presence of good leaders who lead by example. Good customer service leaders:

• Exhibit great communication skills
• Reward and recognise team members who do a good job
• Create and maintain a positive work environment
• Efficiently make decisions
• Provide quality and up-to-date training to their team

Staff Training

Staff training is critical for meeting customer service standards. Well-structured training can ensure that staff are fully competent in their roles and understand the customer service standards that they must deliver. Training can take many forms, but can generally be broken into two types:

• Off-the-job training
• On-the-job training

Off-the-Job Training

Off-the-job training involves any training that is not conducted in the work environment. It is used primarily to teach the theoretical aspects of an employee’s role or to train employees in the technical skills required before work can be undertaken. Off-the-job training is often provided via external providers (e.g., training organisations, TAFE courses, etc.) however it can also be developed by the organisation itself.

The advantages of off-the-job training include:

• A wider range of skills or qualifications can be obtained
• Employees can learn from outside specialists or experts
• Employees can be more confident when starting a job

The disadvantages of off-the-job training include:

• Possible added costs (e.g., training facilitators, transport, and accommodation)
• Lost working time for study leave
• Does not allow for training specific processes/skills within the exact work environment

On-The-Job Training

On-the-job training is the most common method of training new employees. This training involves employees learning within the work environment as they perform their roles. The main methods of one-the-job training include demonstration/instruction (this involves a trainer, manager or senior employee showing the trainee how to do the job) and coaching (this a more intensive method of training that involves a close working relationship between an experienced employee and the trainee).

The advantages of on-the-job training include:

• It is generally more cost-effective than off-the-job training
• Employees are actually productive during training
• It provides an opportunity to learn specific on-the-job skills

The disadvantages of on-the-job training include:

• The quality of training largely depends on the quality of the trainer available at the time – bad habits may be passed onto the new employee.
• The work environment is not always conducive to learning (e.g., high-stress or fast-paced environments)
• Potential disruption to the work of other staff members.

Even with adequate training it is not uncommon for employees to potentially struggle to meet customer service standards. Therefore, it is vital for organisations to continually monitor and manage the delivery of quality customer service.

As you are reading through this section, please keep in mind that every healthcare business is different. You might find that some of the strategies that we discuss are applicable to the healthcare facility you may or currently work for and you may choose to adapt these for your own use; however, you might also find that some of the strategies we discuss will not be suitable for the healthcare industry. The point of this section of the Study Guide is not to provide you with a blueprint for your own marketing plan; the point is to provide you with some ‘food for thought’ and hopefully provide you with a few sources of inspiration that you may develop and implicit at your own healthcare practice or the one you are employed at.

Assessing product mix and pricing opportunities

Let’s briefly take a look at the product mix which is generally defined as the number and types of products and/or services that a business offers to its customers. For example, the healthcare business might offer multiple lines of services such as pathology, physiotherapy, radiology and a wide variety of specialists to take care of patients’ needs. For each product line, you offer different services, e.g., a patient who visited a GP and needs some blood tests can still access this through the clinic itself. The different healthcare services a clinic provides is the business’ product mix.

Other than determining your product mix, you must also understand the pricing for the products and services offered. This is one of the crucial steps that you should get right when you start your business – with an appropriate price, you would be more likely to attract potential clients and retain them as your client base. If your services are priced too high, you may lose potential clients; if your services are priced too low, you may not earn enough profit to cover your costs.

When considering your marketing strategy, you may wish to assess and adjust your product mix, and pricing according to the marketing and business objectives. For instance, you wish to increase the sales at the clinic by 10% in six months’ time, your marketing focus would then be to increase the visibility of the healthcare business to increase potential patients. When evaluating your product mix, you could consider the types of coaching services your business offer: does it offer a variety of coaching services, or does it only offer healthy eating coaching services? If it’s the latter, you may wish to increase the number of services offered to attract a broader range of potential customers for your business.

Another aspect you can assess is the pricing of your services. For example, you could assess your services’ pricing and whether they would be competitive and attractive for potential customers to receive the clinic’s services. This does not mean that you have to lower the price you have already set for an appointment, e.g., new patients receive $20 off their first appointment or a discount for patients who sign up for a medical/wellness package. The changes you make to the different aspects of your business, if any, would differ depending on your marketing and business objectives. But of course, if you wish to attract more customers, you will not want to increase your product price! To give you a clearer idea of how to adjust various aspects of your products, we will now look at marketing mix in detail.

Promoting the service

Promotion is the process of informing potential patients about the clinic and its products and services and then influencing them to purchase what you're selling. Promotional activities include word-of-mouth advertising, networking, media advertising, online communications, and publicity. You'll undertake some promotional efforts to generate sales; other tactics you use will aim to educate, inform, and plant the seed for future sales.

To put everything in one sentence – know your audience which in this case are your patients, your objectives and craft your messages accordingly. Let’s look at some possible promotional activities that you may implement at your healthcare facility.

• Networking - try and connect with people in order to make good things happen. It gives you a great opportunity to promote the products and services that the clinic has to offer. This can be done easily via a telephone call or a flyer in the mail around the community
• Referrals - if you take care of your patients from the moment they walk into the clinic and provide an easy feedback mechanism, the referrals from satisfied customers should take care of you and the clinic in the future. Every time you serve a satisfied customers, follow up on their visit by calling them or asking them to fill out a feedback card. Additionally, when you have a new patient try and ask them how they hears about the clinic. If they mention that they were referred to by client A, give a call to client A and sincerely thank them.
• Email notifications - try sending e-mails to lists of current and potential patients who have given you permission to communicate with them via this medium. Using e-mail allows you to do a number of marketing-related tasks that are directly related to building relationships with both current customers and potential customers.
• Media advertising - this is a program of paid messages designed to inform large numbers of prospective consumers on the features and benefits of your product or services. This can be done via newspapers, radio and community pages.

Take a look at the next video. This video does relate to the hospitality industry but it is a great example of knowing your product, how to sell the product, and how to offer an overall good customer service experience to help endorse your product and customer retention.

Organisations should ensure that they have some form of customer service manager in place to monitor the team’s performance against the organisational plans and customer service standards. Monitoring team performance involves a manager getting involved with employees. Managers need to interact with the team and find out how they are going, ask if they have any problems or feedback, and help team members who may be struggling with any aspect of their job role.

Some possible ways a customer service manager can monitor and manage their team’s performance include:

1. "Checking–in” with each team member - checking-in with employees is one of the easiest and most effective ways of monitoring performance. Checking-in with employees can be as simple as the following examples: “Morning Sarah, how did you go with Mrs Smith’s order yesterday? Were we able to deliver her products on time like we promised?” or “Hi Jack, I know you have a lot on your plate today. Can we sit down in an hour together and talk through how to best prioritise what needs to be done?”
2. Reviewing Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) - KPI’s are metrics used to help an organisation define and measure progress towards achieving its objectives or critical success factors. They are quantifiable measures that can be expressed in either financial or non-financial terms. Financial indicators can include things like sales figures, revenue growth rate, and net profit margins. Non-Financial Indicators can include things such as customer satisfaction scores, customer feedback, and customer retention rates. Customer service managers should consider the organisation’s overall performance as well as the performance of individual staff members.
3. Customer feedback - paying attention to customer feedback is a valuable tool in monitoring employee performance. If a customer reports that they’re pleased with the product, or that the sales staff were exceptionally helpful, this is a good indication that the team is probably on-track. However, negative customer feedback indicates that there are issues to resolve. Such feedback provides managers with an opportunity to pinpoint areas that require further training. Some organisations also chose to employ ‘mystery shoppers’ to perform transactions and then report back on the level of service they received. The advantage of this monitoring technique is that the mystery shopper provides specific, measurable information about the transaction.
4. Regular team meetings - team meetings are a great way to manage team performance, check and redistribute workloads, and increase employee motivation. Time should be taken to ensure all staff are aware, and motivated to meet, customer service goals and standards.
5. Monitoring customer interactions - customer service managers should also regularly monitor individual staff members and how they interact with customers. Monitoring staff performance in this way can reveal if any additional training is required.

If monitoring reveals that an employee is not meeting their customer service delivery standards, then it is important to act quickly to resolve the underperformance. The methods a customer service manager should use will depend upon the nature of the underperformance. For example, if an otherwise exceptional employee missed one minor point on a ‘mystery shopper’ checklist then it would be appropriate to simply give the employee feedback about the missed point and remind them of its importance. However, if an employee is regularly underperforming it would be appropriate to determine whether they required additional training.

Providing Feedback

It is vital for customer service managers to be able to provide effective feedback to staff. When delivered correctly, feedback can be an excellent way to improve the delivery of customer service standards. There are three types of feedback, which are outlined below:

1. Positive feedback - when a staff member has done a good job in performing their job role it is very important that it is acknowledged by their manager. Positive feedback is important because:
   • It shows staff that their work is not taken for granted or goes unnoticed
   • It helps staff fully understand what is expected of them
   • It enforces and encourages high quality performance
   • It keeps morale high even in the toughest situations
     
     Example of positive feedback
     
     Do: "When you emailed client XYZ, I noticed that you did your homework on the type of product she had purchased before, you then were able to recommend her a new product more accurately. That was great – you really exceeded her expectations.”
     
     Don’t: "Good work communicating with that client.”
     
     This example demonstrates how important it is to be specific when giving feedback. By being specific this the employee will know that doing the background research helps exceed the customer’s expectations.
2. Negative feedback - feedback should provide a constructive critique of the quality of work rather than take the form of a personal attack. Poorly constructed negative feedback can be perceived as simply aggressive (e.g., “Why can’t you ever get this right!?” or “You’re no good at this.”) By using the word “you” the feedback becomes about the employee rather than a detail about their work.
3. Constructive feedback - customer service managers should aim to provide constructive feedback. This feedback gives recipients specific, concrete steps to improve performance on future tasks. Constructive feedback is important because
   • It replaces negative feedback.
   • It specifically addresses the task or behaviour that needs improvement without personally attacking the employee.
   • It has the potential to improve rapport between a manager and employees if done correctly.

For constructive feedback to be effective, managers should:

• State the purpose of the feedback - it is important to state the purpose of the feedback and what exactly is going to be covered to keep an employee focused. For example: “I’d like to discuss the customer response time with emails.”
• Be positive - it’s important to give at least as much positive feedback as you do negative. For example: “I’d like to discuss the customer response time with emails. The tone in your emails to customers is really professional, yet friendly – really great.”
• Be specific - vague words, even if positive or constructive, will not achieve the results managers are looking for. For example: “I’d like to discuss the customer response time with emails. The tone in your emails to customers is really professional yet friendly – really great. What I would like to see going forward though, is a response to the customer from you within 24 hours not 48 hours as it is currently.” In this example what needs to change is very clear and specific. As opposed to simply saying “You need to respond faster.”
• Be timely - constructive feedback should be given as soon as possible once the area of improvement has been identified. The longer an employee carries on with a particular way of doing things the harder it is for an employee to change their behaviour.
• Allow opportunity for response - after feedback has been delivered it is important to give the employee an opportunity to seek clarification and to obtain their ‘buy-in’ to work on the identified behaviour. For example, the manager may ask: “Do have any questions at all?”, “What are your thoughts on this?” or “Will this be possible?”
• Summarise with support - summarising the feedback avoids misunderstandings and once again gives opportunity to clarify any points. It is also an opportunity for the manager to show support to the employee. For example: “So as I said, keep up the great work with the tone in your emails, now let’s just make sure we get back to our customers within 24 hours. If you have any problems with this, just come and see me, I’ll be more than happy to help out.”

Next watch a video role play of an interaction where there is an exchange of constructive feedback and how the situation is handled.

In this section of the module you have learned some of the key skills required to deliver quality customer service. You also learned about the importance of staff training, monitoring and constructive feedback. Remember, that we have always referred to the term ‘customers’ which can be interchanged between ‘clients/patients/consumers’. The same is applicable to the term ‘staff’ which is a term that refers to nurses, doctors and the healthcare team. In the last section, of this module we will look at how to evaluate the customer service.