“I was so upset and confused. And I didn’t know who to tell.”
That’s what a friend of mine said after a physician on the surgical team entered his room the night before his cancer surgery and said, “The procedure they’re planning to do tomorrow won’t work.” And just left. He hadn’t given his name, just said he was on the surgical team. The impact left my friend confused and frightened.
My friend wasn’t dealing with a clinical error or a system failure. He was dealing with behavior that should never happen in healthcare—or anywhere. The behaviors he told me about were abhorrent, but what struck me even more was his response: “I didn’t know who to tell.”
This is someone fighting a debilitating condition. Someone who is vulnerable, and dependent on his caregivers. And he had no idea where to turn. No clear path to report what happened. No confidence that speaking up would help rather than make his situation worse.
This is what happens when service recovery systems don’t exist—or when they exist only on paper.
Healthcare organizations: you can do better than that. You must.
The Difference Between Complaints and Service Recovery
Let’s be clear about something. Service recovery isn’t about handling formal complaints or regulatory grievances. Yes, those are essential. Yes, hospitals must track them per CMS Conditions of Participation. But service recovery is about something bigger. It’s about the things that make or break the patient’s experience, eroding trust and impeding care.
Service recovery means preparing and empowering staff to handle whatever comes their way. When employees have the skills and confidence they need to act in the moment, they will see complaints as the gifts they really are. But it also means preparing patients so that they know where they can turn as well.
Most healthcare organizations are good at the regulatory piece. They have grievance policies. They track formal complaints. They produce reports for the board.
But they’re missing 90% of the dissatisfiers that never become formal grievances. The cold meals. The long waits without explanation. The dismissive comments. The lack of acknowledgment when something goes wrong.
These daily frustrations erode trust, damage your reputation, and cost you patient loyalty. Yet most organizations have no systematic way to capture them, learn from them, or empower staff to address them in the moment. Many don’t openly share how patients can express a complaint. In my friend’s case, this was the biggest impediment.
The Power of Proximity
We’ve known for years that the sooner you can reach resolution, or at least acknowledgment of a dissatisfier, the better the outcome. This is what I call the proximity principle, and it’s fundamental to effective service recovery.
Think about it: When a patient’s meal arrives cold, what matters most isn’t whether it eventually gets documented in some system. What matters is the immediate acknowledgment and action that can prevent a small dissatisfier from becoming a major grievance.
It restores trust. It shows patients they matter.
But this only works if staff know what’s within their authority and have practiced how to respond.
The 12 Building Blocks of Service Recovery Excellence
After working with healthcare organizations for decades, I’ve identified 12 essential elements that distinguish organizations with robust service recovery cultures from those just going through the motions.
- Set the expectation that everyone is responsible.
- Teach the Baird A+ service recovery steps.
- Help staff anticipate needs and expectations.
- Use dissatisfiers to prepare role-play scenarios.
- Give real-time feedback.
- Define and demonstrate active listening.
- Create “never” statements.
- Role-play apologies with empathy and sincerity.
- Empower staff to take action by identifying alternatives.
- Provide tools for making amends (not just gifts).
- Create a universal log for all departments.
- Practice regularly in pairs.
These are the bare bones. If you want to drill down deeper into the 12 steps to significantly improve your service recovery efforts, get in touch! We can help you build a program designed to address even the most egregious service missteps promptly and effectively.
