Service Excellence - Archives
10 Tips for Training Staff on Service Recovery
The key to successful service recovery lies in creating an environment where employees feel prepared and empowered to handle whatever comes their way. Only when employees feel prepared and empowered will they be able to view a complaint as a true gift. Continue Reading...
5 Ways to Cement Service Mindedness throughout Your Organization
The Baird team is frequently asked to consult with hospitals and systems that want to improve their HCAHPS scores. The first thing we evaluate is whether or not the focus is on the scores or the experience behind the scores. Exceptional patient experiences are not the result of a one-time training event or award ceremony. To be sustainable, great scores require ongoing communication, coaching, modeling, monitoring, and reinforcement. Following are 5 ways to cement service mindedness throughout your organization.... Continue Reading...
5+ Secrets for Powerful Phone Connections With Patients (and Prospective Patients)
Where do the vast majority of your patients and potential patients interact with you? Not in person. Not via email. But, by phone. That's right - the telephone remains one of the most significant contact points in health care. Unfortunately, while significant, it is often overlooked as a crucial part of the patient experience. Continue Reading...
Four Critical Steps to Picking Yourself Up When You Fall Short
"I wouldn't come back to this hospital again even if they offered my family free health care for life!" Imagine passing a young mother as she storms out of a busy emergency department. She's speaking loudly and angrily into her cell phone, with an obviously cranky, uncomfortable toddler in tow. The hospital staff members within earshot simply look at each other and shrug. After all, they're swamped with work; what can they do about this one woman's situation? Continue Reading...
Getting Physicians on Board With Service: Five steps to building buy-in
You've completed the staff training for customer service. The managers are fully on board. You've established the standards and clarified everyone's accountability for results. There are action plans in place with measurable results. It's beginning to feel like all the pistons are firing in synch and then comes the zinger... another person asks the critical question, "So what about the doctors? When are they going to start living customer service?" Continue Reading...
Making Your Customer Service Job Descriptions Fit Everyone: Senior leaders, managers, and staff
When I ask groups of health care workers, "Who is responsible for customer service?" I really expect everyone from the CEO to the newest housekeeper to raise their hands. While "customer service" needs to be part of everyone's job description, it is important to define what each person's role looks like from the perspective of rank and title. Not everyone's duties are the same. In fact, one might say that the higher the pay grade, the broader the service responsibilities. It can be easier to identify the service behaviors related to standards than it is to recognize the service competencies required of leaders at the top and middle management levels. Continue Reading...
Mission Critical: E + E = Service+
The importance of superior customer service in carrying out your organizational mission should be clear to all employees. However, sometimes the employees who work most closely with the greatest number of customers can lose sight of that essential connection in their daily work. To foster that critical connection, employ a simple formula in which E (ducation) plus E(ngagement) adds up to a successful mission. Continue Reading...
Service Recovery: 5 steps for making things right
We’ve all had bad customer service experiences at hotels, restaurants, airports and yes, even health care organizations. But the real test of service excellence comes when a bad experience is swiftly and honestly addressed and turned around. When a customer complains, you have a brief window of opportunity to make or break all chances for satisfactory resolution and ultimately loyalty. What does it take for true service recovery? The fundamentals are fairly simple yet the most common challenges are threefold.... Continue Reading...
Silence Isn't Always Golden: 3 tips for confronting problem behaviors head on
Whoever coined the phrase; silence is golden, was not talking about a management technique. It's widely accepted that positive reinforcement is one of the best ways to increase good behavior. But don't be fooled into thinking that ignoring overtly bad behavior or marginal performance is the antithesis of positive reinforcement. Continue Reading...
To Cure Sometimes, Relieve Often, and Care Always
Ambroise Pare' is credited with these words and while Pare', the uneducated son of a country artisan who became a great surgeon, said them in the 16th century, they still resonate today. In fact, a Google search of the phrase generates 1.3 million hits! Continue Reading...
Trust is a Fragile Thing
Recently, I intercepted what could have been a travel disaster for me as I saw an airline attendant about to put the wrong shipping tag on my luggage. Fortunately, I was able to alert the attendant and make sure the right tag was used, ensuring that, when I arrived in Phoenix, my luggage would be there as well! The attendant might simply have apologized for the almost-error and thanked me for catching it. Instead, she did something that I’m afraid many of us in healthcare also do from time to time: she made excuses. In this case, her excuse was that she had been up for over 24 hours. She said something like, “So, I’ve got to expect that I’m going to make some mistakes.” Continue Reading...
What Can You Do in Eight Seconds? You may be surprised
Eight seconds. That's how long it takes to form a first impression. If you think about your own interactions, you can quickly see the validity of this statistic. Whether at a job interview, a social event or a retail setting, we form impressions quickly. So do our patients. Continue Reading...