Why healthcare institutions need customer service excellence (2)
On improving healthcare institution patient communication, many in the healthcare industry are already recognising the financial benefits of focusing on an excellent patient experience.
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Improved communication could be one of the most important triggers to delivering improved customer service and a real differentiator for hospitals. What does great customer service in a hospital actually look like? The answer really isn’t that different than for any other industry: attention and communication. The concluding part of this article focuses on some practical steps hospitals can take to improve their customer orientation.
Clear information
Being in the hospital can be a scary time. It is an unfamiliar environment where there are sometimes more questions than answers. It is imperative to provide information quickly in health care. It is also crucial to be transparent with patients about their conditions from the start. Advances in technology mean that patients are used to having information at their fingertips, fast. They do not like waiting too long to be briefed on test results or treatment plans, especially when their lives are already being disrupted by a hospital stay. Clinicians should strive to be as quick and direct as possible when delivering important information about patient care.
Admit mistakes
Admitting when something goes wrong is also an important issue when communicating to achieve superior service excellence. Instead of recognising when to apologise for any lapses in service delivery, healthcare personnel tend to become defensive when errors are pointed out to them.I am aware of a painful situation where a young lady lost a baby because even when the pregnancy had gone full term, a doctor neglected to operate on her on Saturday because he was busy and asked her to go home; even though the young lady had intimated she felt the baby was coming. Apart from the usual African refrain of giving the situation to God, healthcare institutions should in such cases render profuse apologies for such negligence and not take a posture of infallibility. It is best to take the patient’s side in these types of customer-service disputes. Healthcare institutions should demonstrate empathy for the patient’s position, and train all hospital staff to respond to these situations with courtesy and grace.
Keep promises
On communication again, healthcare institutions must learn not only to be promise givers but also to be promise keepers.Many promises made to patients are never kept. Statements like, "you will get the best care here" and "we treat each individual who comes to us with dignity and respect" are statements that reflect service promises that must be kept.Healthcare institutions must always strive to keep their service promises.
Communicate clearly
On communication again, healthcare personnel sometimes employ complicated jargon in addressing patients (customers) and this could result in misunderstandings and sometimes errors.Nobody wants errors in today's healthcare environment.Healthcare professionals must ensure their explanations are not clouded with excessive and complicated verbiage. True professionals go out of their way to explain things in simple sentences. Additionally, on communication, everybody likes to be thanked when purchasing an item in a retail store, but in all the many healthcare delivery venues, saying "thank you" is seen as inappropriate. "Thank you" has magic vibes for any kind of relationship. It is a great way to get repeat business from customers and also make them advocates of your healthcare brand.
Patients do not go hospitals to engage in intellectual battles with healthcare personnel. Even when they have incorrect information, they still should be accorded respect. If healthcare personnel disagree with them, they should politely be educated on why their point of view is not necessarily correct. The goal of the healthcare service provider should be to explain and communicate, and then to continue to explain and communicate. These service providers should assist patients understand what is going on as treatment is being given. Patients should feel they are just important, in the scheme of things, as the healthcare professional.
Customer service
It is hoped that as educational and professional training institutions in Africa continue to teach healthcare-related subjects such as medicine, biochemistry, public health, pharmacy-to name a few - they will consider introducing basic customer experience courses. At the masters’ level, courses such as service excellence in health care could be introduced to give clinicians and other healthcare professionals strategic and tactical training on how to deliver service excellence. Existing healthcare institutions should also invest in customer experience management training and the design of service excellence strategies.
Conclusion
To conclude, a good combination of hard (healthcare training) skills and soft (sales, customer service and other marketing management) skills needed today to achieve customer service excellence in healthcare. Health care professionals must always remember who they are and what their core business is. They should keep a constant reflection on whether they became healthcare professionals to take care of people and deliver true value and be paid a premium as a result; or was it just to make a lot of money; irrespective of the kind of customer service quality they deliver?
The writer is a Professor of Marketing at the University of Ghana. He trains and consults on marketing, sales and service excellence issues and supervises a project on Sustainability and Enterprise Development. He can be reached at [email protected]
