The Importance of Customer Service in Healthcare
Though many healthcare organizations are for-profit institutions that provide services for customers, associating “customer service” with the healthcare industry might receive some confused looks. However, the processes and principles of customer service play a vital part in the success of healthcare provision across every type of healthcare provision institution.
The United States healthcare system is a vast landscape that touches millions of people every year and provides huge amounts of often vital services for countless individuals. When healthcare professionals don’t provide proper customer service for their patients or clients, they can experience a host of costly problems. Customer service is a vital part of healthcare that should be emphasized and implemented in every type of healthcare provision.
Why Customer Service is an Important Consideration in Healthcare
Customer service affects healthcare provision across multiple viewpoints. It can be helpful to look at customer service within healthcare from two perspectives: micro-level and macro-level customer service.
Understanding micro-level customer service includes evaluating the individual patient’s perspective and experience when receiving healthcare. In many healthcare provision settings such as hospitals and similar, many of the people that come for care are under high levels of stress, pain, or other difficult emotions and experiences. Patients (and their friends and family members) will often interact with numerous healthcare professionals during the process of treatment or care provision.
For anyone receiving healthcare, the way they are treated by each of those healthcare providers has a significant impact on their experience and sometimes even the outcomes of their treatment. Sometimes referred to as “bedside manner” or similar, the way healthcare providers interact with patients and their loved ones can range widely from cold, rude, and unconcerned to personable, caring, and compassionate.
Studies have been conducted that explore various aspects and implications of good customer service vs. poor customer service on healthcare provision and outcomes. Treating individuals with kindness and respect has been linked with better treatment results as well as lessened rates of complaints, malpractice lawsuits, and more.
Conversely, looking at macro-level customer service zooms out from individual interactions and considers widespread trends that exist across the healthcare industry. Macro-level customer service consideration can help shed light on large, systemic social issues that exist within our healthcare system. Some of today’s most pressing macro-level customer service concerns include the continued presence of racism and other prejudices. Statistical differences exist between the average outcomes and success rates for treatment between populations of different races. Similar disparities can also be observed for other select demographics, such as individuals of minority sexual orientations and low socioeconomic statuses.
Other large-scale trends in healthcare treatment effectiveness adversely affect those with physical disabilities, persons without legal status or documentation, those with mental health problems, persons from certain geographical regions, and more. These vulnerable populations experience healthcare treatment differently on average than individuals who come from majority demographics, who belong to higher income level brackets, or who are from higher socioeconomic backgrounds.
These trends contribute to existing problems within the healthcare system that affect its customer service track record towards entire subpopulations.
Ways of Identifying Customer Service Problems within Healthcare Systems
Across such a vast playing field of thousands of healthcare facilities, many thousands of healthcare professionals and workers, and millions of patients seen each year across the country, how can such a volume of interactions and healthcare outcomes possibly be analyzed and consolidated into trends like this with any accuracy?
Actually, today’s technological advancements make this more possible than ever before with the vast amounts of data collected across the healthcare system. Healthcare data collection and analysis allows for healthcare professionals and public health officials to identify macro-level trends that wouldn’t have been possible to observe without the technical capabilities available today.
This ability to analyze huge amounts of data from across the healthcare industry is allowing healthcare professionals to begin identifying places where the system isn’t performing at its full potential for all its patients. Among these problem areas, the healthcare industry’s delivery of adequate customer service and care has been identified as an area it needs to improve.
Across the healthcare industry, new initiatives are being instituted to help change this reality and decrease the disparity in treatment quality between different demographics and subpopulations, as well as improving customer service standards for all patients across the board and reducing the instances of poor customer service delivery that span the healthcare landscape.
How to Improve Customer Service Quality in Healthcare Provision Settings
Healthcare facilities and organizations across the country are becoming more aware of the impact customer service can have on their patients, their staff, their communities, and their fiscal performance. Many are reevaluating how they teach and assess customer service practices amongst their workforces.
This is becoming an increasingly prevalent and visible issue within the healthcare provision industry. If you work in a position of influence over a healthcare provision organization or facility, your team’s customer service track record is an important thing to be aware of and to improve if necessary. Here are a few beginning steps for improving customer service at the organizational level:
Do an Accurate Assessment of How Customer Service is Being (or not Being) Currently Delivered
It can be a temptation to simply take a look at what’s written in the employee handbook or orientation manual on the subject, or to talk to one or two of your employees or satisfied patients to “evaluate” your organization’s customer service performance. However, if you want to capture a truly accurate picture of how well your team is delivering quality customer service, you need to do a bit more digging. Interact with many members of your staff that work at different levels or in different departments about their observations and practices.
Sit in to watch your staff interacting with your patients. Issue surveys to all current or discharged patients asking for their feedback about how they were treated during their visits or stays in your facility. Look for opinions published online or submitted to your organization. Make a point to listen to patients or clients that have complained about your services. Only by doing an in-depth dive into how your organization operates with all of its constituents will you gain a representative picture of how you’re truly performing from a customer service standpoint.
Learn from Organizations Who are Already Doing it Well
Ask for meetings with managers or executive members of organizations that have strong reputations for good customer service. Ask them about their methods and strategies. How have they instituted policies, training, onboarding, and incentives to promote strong customer service policies? How have they secured buy-in from their staff? How do they assess customer service standards throughout their organization, and how do they address instances of poor customer service delivery?
Even a single conversation with a leader who has a track record in building and maintaining solid customer service practices within his or her organization can provide important insights and strategies that could formatively improve your organization’s customer service approach.
Help Your Entire Organization Understand Why Strong Customer Service is Important
If your staff doesn’t think customer service is a priority, they will not meet customer service standards. Because of this, it’s imperative to help teach your organization the reasons that delivering strong customer service to your patients and stakeholders is beneficial for patients, for themselves, and for the organization as a whole. Share how quality customer service can improve their interaction experiences with patients. Show how customer service can benefit the organization and each team member by reducing backlash, negative press, lawsuits, and more.
Have your staff contribute ideas for organization-wide customer service goals that might involve things like reducing complaints or negative feedback ratings or sharing positive feedback amongst the team to help reinforce the benefits of strong customer service provision. And demonstrate quality customer service techniques yourself, whether interacting with the public, the board, stakeholders, media, patients, or your staff. These steps and more can help put customer service “on the map” and make initiatives to improve your organization’s customer service track record much more successful.
Tips for Improving Your Own Customer Service as a Healthcare Professional
If you are a healthcare professional and are interested in improving your personal customer service techniques, here are a few tips you can implement to improve how you come across to your patients and to other stakeholders:
A Little Bit of Compassion Goes a Long Way
When experiencing profound stress, pain, or anxiety, sometimes patients or their family members and significant others can be difficult to work with. For many healthcare providers, patience and emotional capacity reserves are constantly depleted in the course of everyday work responsibilities.
It can be easy to respond in kind when patients or family members are shouting at you, speaking aggressively, succumbing to elevated emotions, or being generally rude and frustrating. However, this is when customer service can do its finest work. By taking a breath and responding with a bit of grace and compassion in the face of frustration, you can often deescalate the situation and help the patient or family member see things from your point of view or interact with more civility.
Remember Why You Do What You Do
Reminding yourself of your motivation for entering a healthcare profession in the first place can help you tap into your care for people, interest in solving problems, and ability to relate to the people you work with.
Engage in Service Training
Customer service skills are learnable. There are countless techniques you can practice in order to engage more thoughtfully and positively in interpersonal interactions. Training courses and classes exist that can help you learn and practice these skills. This could be a helpful tool not only for yourself but for your workplace and your colleagues.
Don’t be afraid to check with your organization to see if any existing resources or stipends exist that can help you access these types of trainings, or suggest to them that it might be a good program for them to institute not just for you but for your organization as a whole.
These tips can help you and your healthcare organization begin to institute stronger customer service practices. It’s never too early (or too late) to work on building your customer service muscles within your healthcare organization or environment.
