How to Develop a Healthcare Customer Service Culture
A health care employer can develop a positive customer service culture in three steps. You need an assessment of the staff's attitudes toward your company's customers and patients and their views about staff. Based on this information, you can develop a training program that will improve employees' attitudes toward customers and patients. A follow-up program is necessary to make the improvements last.
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Instructions
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Determine the nature and extent of any customer and patient dissatisfaction with your employees. You can ask customers and patients when they have contact with your company to complete a brief, anonymous questionnaire. This can be done before or after the contact. You might randomly select a number of customers and patients from each department to interview. If you reassure the people you select that what they say is confidential, will not be shared with any employee and will not affect their services, most will agree to be interviewed.
Asking employees to complete a questionnaire listing complaints about customers and patients is often useful. To gain more in-depth knowledge, summarize your findings in general terms and discuss those findings with groups of employees from within departments or across departments. Try to determine if each issue is specific to one department or cuts across departments. Ask for recommendations for resolving the issues.
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Develop a training program specific to your health care company's circumstances, or find a generic program and adapt it to the issues discovered in the assessment. Decide who will receive what training, with what materials and methods and on what schedule. Be sure that the trainer you select has input into the process.
Seek exercises, group discussions, examples of good and poor practices and other training devices such as role playing or videos that will improve your employees' knowledge, skills and attitudes. Be aware that trainees may resist or remain indifferent to training because of fear of embarrassment before their co-workers or possible punishment for their views, lack of concern about the issues or difficulty in changing habits of long standing.
Training is more effective when employees know that their supervisors and top managers believe in the training. Explain the benefits of the training to everyone before it starts.
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Design a follow-up program to prevent old ways of behaving from returning. The most important factor in follow-up is feedback. Without knowing how well they are applying what they learned, most employees will cease to progress.
The best reinforcement comes when customers and patients comment on good service, when supervisors and co-workers provide encouragement, and when the employee observes effective behavior and appraises his own performance. Adding customer and patient relationships to the criteria for performance appraisal is a way to continue reminding employees of its importance.
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