Service quality is a crucial factor for your patient satisfaction and experience, isn’t it? Are you clear on why customers choose your practice? Related to the experience you have provided? More often than not it is why patients stay with you. It is surprising to us how many Physicians aren’t clear on this question.
Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the client or customer gets out of it.
–Peter Drucker
Peter Drucker certainly understood the real meaning of a great customer experience design, didn’t he? The end state quality of what the customer received was what counted. Including the experience, the customer received while he purchased the service. Often that is what was remembered the most.
Before we continue, let me ask you a question.
What customer experience design techniques work best for your business? We would love to hear what it was. Would you do us a favor and post it in the comments section below? Be the one who starts a conversation.
The quality of your practice’s customer experience is ultimately determined by the way customers feel after their last interaction. If the customer is unhappy, your customer experience is bad.
If the customer doesn’t have a feeling one way or the other, your company’s customer experience is mediocre. If the customer feels good, your company’s customer experience is satisfactory.
But if the customer feels delighted, your company’s customer experience is a substantial competitive advantage. That is the only one that really matters to success.
When it comes to the physician service you receive, most people are more tolerant and more accepting than with most other businesses. But should it be that way though?
See our article on The Story of How JetBlue Turns Customers into Advocates
It shouldn’t and here is how I would redesign many of the customer experience elements in Physician’s offices:
Patient satisfaction … respect value of patients’ time
Most people today suffer from too little time and it is an increasingly important factor. Time is the one thing that even the richest patients don’t have enough of.
So patients’ perceptions about your practice’s customer experience are largely influenced by time. Often the meaning correlates with convenience. This means you have to reduce the time it takes for them to:
Find you
Engage with you
Communicate their problem
For you to resolve that problem.
Improving patient satisfaction … building and maintaining trust
Always do what you say and set good examples. Demand from yourself the same level of professionalism and dedication that you expect from others on your staff. Trust, once broken, is seldom restored to its original state. It is the most fragile yet essential attribute of leadership.
One of my favorite experts in the field of customer experience is Andrew McFarland and Pivot Point Solutions. You’ll find lots of good examples and case studies to learn from in this blog.
Go the extra mile
Customers like knowing that the doctor and his staff care. Great service is the top reason customers keep giving their business to doctors and the top reason they recommend them to others. It is critical to ensure that your practice delivers great service care.
The care that results in good results and great experiences that are remembered and talked about. So far based on action item response time and errors, the new doctor, and staff indicates they are much more about the business revenue than their care and service.
Patients don’t want to be treated like a number. They want to feel valued, understood, and most importantly, listened to.
Their belief? That the money they spend with your practice entitles them to such treatment. The differentiation of the experience your doctor delivers will, therefore, be at least in part contingent on your ability to personalize his interactions with patients.
That means knowing their name, their previously expressed health issues, or listening to the particulars of their current situation. Lots of small ways to create customer personalization.
Doctors and staff who rarely smile and engage socially at one on one engagement are at a very serious disadvantage in being able to create a delightful customer experience. In the longer term, a practice needs to build relationships with all patients. Hard to do with no personalized engagement.
Patient satisfaction in healthcare … expectations
If promises are not kept, expectations by the patient are not achieved, and negative experiences result. Too negative and your practice will lose the patient forever.
The absolute last thing that either the practice or the new patient desire. But that is what often happens.
Build patient relationships
Build patient relationships like you make friends. Be pleasant, social … wear a smile and a nametag. All things being equal, people like doing business with their friends.
Not very good at making friends? Maybe being a physician is not for you.
Follow through
If a patient is told X will be done, they should feel that it will happen. Hopefully faster and better than promised. If something unexpected happens, a good experience demands the customer be notified and kept informed.
Often, the staff is not good at putting closure dates on commitments … which is not a good sign.
Actively solicit feedback
Many patients are itching to tell you how to improve. If they are not given an opportunity, it degrades the experience. Likewise, patients always feel good when they see positive improvements.
Few practices that I have ever been associated with seek feedback or notice much when it is given unsolicited.
Listen and observe patients well
Close observation and effective two-way conversations absolutely begin with doctors and staff listening carefully before responding. They should also take care of patients to understand the ‘whys’ of the doctors’ decisions.
Being stuck on transmit mode in a two-way conversation won’t go anywhere fast. The new physician’s office indicates that they can’t take the time to do much explaining to patients.
Patient experience … explain, educate, and close
The entire physician’s staff should be encouraged to be ‘assertively friendly’. They should seek out those who need help before they come looking for help.
And most importantly close quickly on open actions. If the doctor’s staff are extremely slow in closing actions and get things wrong too many times, the experience can be good or bad quickly. Not a good situation … in fact unacceptable in my mind.
Keep up with other patients doctors are doing
It is very clear that in the medical field, the right hand certainly must know what the left hand is doing. Lots of specialists now aren’t there.
And with digital medical records, there is no excuse for not being up to speed. Mistakes abound when it doesn’t happen.
Staff Expertise
Patients need to believe that your practice’s staff are good at what they do. They must perceive that your staff is well-informed about products, services, policies, issues, and any other relevant subject matter.
So, to protect their best knowledge of your patients, you have to make sure that they are fully empowered with information that’s accurate, complete, and up-to-date. And the ability and time to provide sound advice. In the new practice, it appears to me that they have too many patients leaving them with not enough time to provide a good service.
The bottom line
You can’t neglect your patient experience if you want them to stay with or recommend your practice.
Need some help in building better customer insights from your customer engagement? Creative ideas to help grow your customer base?
What you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new insights that you have learned.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
Check out these additional articles on customer insights from our library:
The Story of How JetBlue Turns Customers into Advocates
