You’ve likely read the many media stories these days about hospitals that are closing or laying off staff because they simply can’t stay competitive. Recently Becker’s reported on 68 hospitals and health systems cutting jobs.
In an environment where patients and their families are becoming more demanding and competition is rising not only from traditional providers but from online providers literally around the globe, you can’t afford to be complacent or oblivious to customer demands—or basic expectations.
Where Are Your Patients and Potential Patients Experiencing Breakdowns?
What happens in your healthcare system when:
• A patient reaches out with a question about their care.
• A consumer calls to request an appointment as a potential new patient.
• A patient sends you an email.
How quickly do you respond? Do you respond at all?
You might think the answer is: “Of course, we respond—and quickly!” But do you really know?
We recently asked these questions of an executive team in a small system. They were optimistic that they were performing well. Needless to say they were shocked to learn that mystery shopping showed that 33% of calls went unanswered.
The Impacts of Non-responsiveness
Unfortunately, in our secret or mystery shopping engagements, all too often that’s not the case. In several studies we found the healthcare organizations failed to respond to inquiries in a timely manner—if at all. This can have some serious ramifications for healthcare organizations, including:
• Potential patients deciding to seek care elsewhere.
• Trust in your services eroding.
• Patient outcomes suffering due to delayed care.
• Damage to your reputation and brand.
Word of mouth is real and can either bolster or destroy your brand. Your ability to ensure responsive customer service isn’t just something that’s nice to do—it’s something that you must do in this competitive environment.
Steps Toward Responsive Customer Service
Here are some steps you can take to ensure your standards drive a consistently positive customer experience:
• Clearly define and communicate service standards to all staff
• Identify and mitigate barriers to staff achieving the standards consistently
• Regularly train and reinforce these standards through real-time coaching
• Implement a system for monitoring adherence to standards
• Address issues promptly and consistently when standards aren’t met
• Recognize and reward staff who consistently meet or exceed standards
Finally, don’t leave it to chance that these things are happening. It’s important to conduct regular audits to evaluate the experience you’re providing.
We learned that lesson ourselves, the hard way, when we discovered that we had a broken contact form on our website, resulting in 120 missed inquiries over six months. Imagine how bad that it looked for a customer-service training company to fail to respond to inquiries. Breakdowns happen. But we won’t know about them if we’re not constantly vigilant and continually checking and testing our systems to make sure they’re working as intended.
Mystery shopping can be a great way to test your systems. Learn more.
About Baird Group
Since 1994, Baird Group has been on a mission to make healthcare better for patients and the people who serve them. A leading healthcare management consulting firm is who we are.
Founded by Kristin Baird, a nurse and pioneer in the patient experience, Baird Group is a leading healthcare management consulting firm uniquely qualified to help healthcare leaders understand their current culture and the resulting experience. We then can drive engagement solutions that achieve greater loyalty with patients, employees and providers.
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