Evaluating customer service

Effective listening is the primary means that healthcare professionals use to determine the needs of their patients. Many times, these needs are not communicated to you directly but through inferences, indirect comments, or non-verbal signals. A skilled listener will pick up on a patient’s words and these cues or nuances and conduct follow-up questioning or probe deeper to determine the real need. Most people take the listening skill for granted. They incorrectly assume that anyone can listen effectively.

In an ideal world, organisations would monitor every aspect of customer interactions and service delivery. Unfortunately, in practice, most organisations simply do not have that kind of resources for monitoring. Deciding what needs to be monitored will vary depending on the organisation and its service strategies. It is important for managers to consider what the most important areas to monitor are for the healthcare facility. Some common areas are:

• Patient satisfaction
• Patient complaints
• Patient retention
• Sales conversion
• Efficiency in delivery of services
• Efficient use of resources
• Product quality

How an organisation chose to monitor service delivery will obviously depend upon which areas of service delivery they chose to focus on. While there are countless strategies that an organisation can use in order to monitor service levels, three of the most commonly used strategies are:

1. The use of customer relationship management systems – a customer relationship management (CRM) system is a system used to collect, store and manage information on all customer interactions (this includes marketing, leads, sales, and feedback). Many organisations will use a CRM system to monitor overall organisational performance (Baran and Galka, 2013). Depending upon the system and the information recorded within it, CRM systems can typically run reports on multiple critical customer service measures such as key performance indicators (KPIs), sales, patient retention, enquiries, and patient satisfaction results.
   
   An effective CRM system is only as reliable as the information being recorded within it. Therefore, it is important that all staff are made aware of the importance of accurate record keeping and how this develops a strong database. Effective CRM systems can also be used to communicate organisational goals and strategies to staff members and assist in decision-making processes.
2. Encouraging ongoing patient feedback - organisations must have processes in place to ensure regular customer feedback is obtained. One of the best ways to do this is to ensure that it is easy for customers to submit feedback at every point of interaction. Some strategies for this include:
   • Establishing a system for your employees to be able to record any feedback that customers supply during their interactions.
   • Ensuring that “Comment Cards” are prominently displayed.
   • Having and easy-to-find “Contact Us” or “Feedback Form” on your website.
   • Including a reference to your feedback systems in all customer interactions.
     
     Ongoing patient feedback must be encouraged and acknowledged. Additionally, organisations must regularly review such feedback in order to identify key trends and then utilise this data to adapt service delivery to meet patient needs.
3. Patient interviews and surveys - while regular patient feedback is a great source of information, organisations will usually have specific questions that they want answered. Organisations can use a number of strategies to gather such data, including customer interviews, focus groups and surveys.
   
   The benefits of patient focus groups and interviews is that they are a great way of obtaining qualitative data or feedback. This is because a person can explain, in detail, their particular issue during an interview. Their complaints or opinions can be explained and the interviewer can ask questions to clarify details. Quantitative data can also be collected during interviews by asking ‘closed’ questions which contain a weighted or numerical response.
   
   One of the lower-cost strategies utilised by most organisations are questionnaires or surveys. These can conducted online and can be used to provide the organisation with accurate and targeted information on its customer service delivery. Surveys can also collect qualitative or quantitative data. Qualitative data is obtained by asking ‘open’ or long answer questions. Quantitative data is obtained by asking ‘closed’ questions which contain a weighted or numerical response.

An example of a basic quantitative Customer Satisfaction Survey is included below. This survey is purely quantitative because all the questions are ‘closed’ and ask for a weighted or numeric response:

Record keeping and management methods

A customer record contains relevant business information about your customers, prospects, and other contacts. They typically contain a name, email address, phone number, company name and website. Customer records could also include information about purchase history, interaction with your website and emails, birthday and other information that would be necessary for communication and future sales.

Collecting customer information

Customers could provide information through:

• order forms
• enquiries
• complaints
• warranty cards
• customer rewards programs
• customer satisfaction surveys
• feedback cards
• customer competitions
• your website
• in-person or over-the-counter surveys
• social media polls or messages
• online subscriptions
• email correspondence.

Customers can either provide information in writing or electronically, or they can provide it verbally and you record it.

There is little point gathering customer service data unless you plan on using it. Organisations must review the data they have gathered and compare it to the healthcare facility’s plans for patient service. If there is a large variance between the established benchmarks and the customer feedback, then it is important to work to understand why. There are several factors to consider when responding to feedback, let’s look at a few:

• Consider the source - feedback comes in all shapes and sizes, and how you respond will depend on who is delivering the message. If you receive negative feedback on a web site from a long-time customer, it should be dealt with immediately. Nothing is more critical to the success of your business than retaining your current customers—especially your most valuable ones. Call them, e-mail them, reach out to them, find out more information on how you can earn back their trust. On the other hand, you may come across an unhappy patient. Such comments are more difficult to respond to in a personal way—and probably not as critical. However, if there is a way to respond, reaching out to find out what went wrong might earn you a new, loyal patient.
• Watch the tone - it’s inevitable that you’ll occasionally receive feedback from an irritated patient. Whether it’s someone who has a legitimate grip or someone who’s just had a bad day and is taking it out on your clinic by venting that there was a long wait to see the GP at the emergency ward. If you give a response like that, the customer will never change his opinion of your establishment and will tell all his friends and associates to never give you a try. The alternative, though difficult, could be effective to spread some kindness instead. For example, a quick message apologising for his bad experience and offering a 10 percent discount, should he be willing to give the clinic another try, might be all the incentive he needs. It might also cause the patient to think about at his previous overreaction.
• Quality versus quantity - we all love to see qualitative feedback written in specific, detailed, and a constructive fashion. But unfortunately, all customer input doesn’t come similarly gift wrapped. That doesn’t mean that large volumes of quantitative feedback can’t be helpful.
• Consistency of feedback - whether it concerns a product or service, a pattern of similar feedback can either encourage or discourage customers when they’re making buying decisions. Giant retailer Amazon goes to even greater lengths to provide potential customers with an accurate look at its products. By providing site visitors with the most helpful positive review run side by side with the most helpful negative review,” Amazon helps customers get more balanced and credible information to use in making buying decisions. Many customers find this kind of feedback more believable, and thus more useful, than typical marketing pitches companies might use to sell their products.

Remember, if a healthcare facility is not meeting their delivery service standards, they must first conduct a review process to find out why and then make the necessary changes in order to get their delivery service back on track. Essentially, the healthcare facility may need to reassess how it is doing things in order to reach its goals.

Taking action to meet customer service needs can take on many forms depending on what needs to change. For example, an organisation may decide to:

• Review specific policies and procedures that are causing problems and then establish specific policies and/or procedures to overcome these problematic situations. For example, if a specific policy is leading to patient service problems, it would be appropriate to establish and implement a strategy to alleviate these problems.
• Deliver further employee training -if customer feedback revealed issues with the service or product knowledge, then this would indicate a need for further staff training. Additionally, training could assist with other issues such as poor sales conversion rates.
• Review service standards. If a healthcare facility is failing to deliver quality service to their patients because the current standards are not what customers actually want, then it is time to review the service standards. For example, if the clinic is providing a basic level of service when their patients want an excellent level of service then standards must be amended.
• Change a service offering to better accommodate the needs of their customers. For example, patients may prefer to purchase certain medical tests (full body check-up) in bundles rather than individually.
• Purchase additional resources to effectively deliver on a higher standard of service. Perhaps the organisation would benefit from better equipment or newer technology to deliver on their standards. Monitoring whether there are sufficient or adequate resources to meet service standards will come down to seeking feedback from the patients, as well as open communication channels between team members and managers.

It is important for an organisation to review all its resources and how these impact customer service standards. For example:

• Buildings/facilities -is the physical environment of the clinic sufficient to deliver service standards? Is it clean and professional? Are there any work health and safety issues to consider? Is there enough disabled parking spaced for the patients who need it the most?
• Equipment – are the equipment capable of producing the required quality? Does the organisation need to update technology, tools, furniture or equipment?
• Technology – is additional investment in computer systems or other technology required to meet patient service needs?
• People - are current staffing levels sufficient to deliver customer service standards?
• Finances – are additional financial resources required to make required changes?

When making any adjustments, it is vital to consider:

• What is the most effective method of change?
• What needs to be done, by who, and by when?
• How will it be done? What specific tasks are involved, what are the milestones and who is responsible for the changes?
• What resources are required?
• Have changes been sufficiently documented?
• How will future performance be monitored?

It is vital to document any changes made, effectively communicate these changes, and ensure that these changes are reflected in updated organisational strategy documents and customer service standards.

Finally, it is important to remember that monitoring patient delivery service is a continual process – it is never finished! We live in an ever-changing world and the needs and expectations of customers will continue to evolve. Organisations must ensure that they continually plan for, deliver and monitor quality customer service.

This section of the Study Guide focused on monitoring and adjusting customer service delivery. You learned how to monitor organisational performance, how to reviewing the resultant data and how to adjust organisational policies and processes to better meet customer service needs.