The Ways to Improve Customer Service in the Medical Field

Whether it is a hospital or a medical call center, patients are dealing with life or death situations. The last thing they want to deal with is poor service. Quality service begins with the emergency call for help to the day the patient is discharged. The patient's state of mind is critical to helping the doctors and nurses attend to the patient's medical needs. For non-emergency patient care, patients can choose other health care providers the same way consumers choose to shop in other stores. In the medical field, customer service is essential to keeping patients happy.

Training

• There is no better way to improve something than teaching your health care staff how to do it better. Third-party companies provide customer service audits in which they will evaluate your customer service for a limited time and then provide you with an analysis of your current customer service effectiveness. In the 2005 report commissioned by the "International Journal of Health Care Quality Assurance," Figueirido Eiriz explains that health care service evaluators go beyond customer criticism to evaluation service excellence by considering related factors such as customer service orientation, financial performance, the competency of the health care staff. From the report, you will be able to create training initiatives that focus on the areas in which you need the most improvement.

Surveys

• The best way to provide the type of service that will make patients happy is to gather information from them to find out what good customer service actually means to them. Ask the patients directly about the courtesy of the nurses on staff and how they felt about how well the doctors kept them informed about test results and treatment options. You can also leave survey cards or questionnaires in the waiting room. You will be able to apply this knowledge to future interactions with this particular patient and use it to create relationships with new patients that start off on a good note. Just asking patient how you can serve them better will be perceived as an improvement in your customer service policy.

Hiring

• Your nursing staff, administrative staff, doctors and cleaning staff are the people who have to execute these customer service initiatives. During the recruiting process, look for staff who have had customer service training in their background. When interviewing, try to find out what kind of person they will be with patients instead of only focusing on their medical knowledge Weed out the people you expect would get upset with a patient who held up their lunch break or leave the building as soon as their shift ends. Test their phone etiquette, work ethic, compatibility with other staff members and their attitude.

Employee Feedback

• Get your nurses and doctors involved in the process. Solicit their feedback. They interact with the patients every day. They will have some ideas about how to improve patient relations. They can also identify obstacles to customer service initiatives that hospital and clinical administration introduce that might not work with the way the job is performed. For example, if surveys reveal that patients complain most about wait time, the nurses can let management know that they don't have enough exam rooms or need more nurses on duty for mid-day shifts. It also energizes them to make the customer service initiatives work as you've shown them their value to the organization.