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Hi. I’m John Tschohl.
I’d like to talk about, how can we implement the customer service strategy in health care.
There’s so much money available for health care. The customer service tends to be weak. There’s so many different options and competitors that you have in your industry. You could be a hospital. You could be a clinic. It could be a nursing home. You could be a cosmetic surgeon. The question is, how good is the customer service? There’s 4, 5 things I’m going to discuss very shortly that I think you should take a look at that we help organizations with.
Number 1 is, how do you change some of the policies, and systems, and procedures that you’ve got in place to make it easier for people to spend money with you? To do business with you? Secondly, what are you doing to drive an empowered workforce in your healthcare organization so people can make fast, empowered decisions? They can bend the rules instead of saying, “I’m sorry sir. We have rules, and we have policies, and we have procedures at our health care facility?” Then, third is, you got to teach people speed. People want, if they have an appointment at 9:30 they want to see the doctor at 9:30. If they are having a medical exam and it’s scheduled for 2 o’clock in the afternoon, they want to be able to get in at 2 o’clock and be out.
Then you got to have quality. You can have all this great customer service, but in health care quality is also very important. If you were to ask 100 customers, “Tell me your definition of quality and service?” It’s going to be all over the map. You have to exceed customer expectations. Then we need to teach the employees the skills and the art of customer service. We tend to teach a lot of medical information. The real question is, we have 3 seconds with a customer. Can they tell that you care? That your employees care? 99% of the customer contact is with your total workforce. It could be a doctor. It could be somebody that’s admitting the person. The question is, what is the level of customer service like?
If you really want customer driven employees, if you want high-performing employees, just like becoming a doctor. There are courses, and classes you got to take every year to keep current. Well, you need to educate your total workforce every year, virtually every 4 months, with new fresh material constantly. Teaching them what I call the skills in the art of customer service. If you use the same program it goes in this ear and it goes straight out this ear, and you wasted all your money. You got to say it 10 different ways because you’re trying to have execution of fundamentals. You’ve got 3 seconds with a customer. In those 3 seconds, you want to deliver an incredible customer experience so that that customer believes they’re dealing with the greatest health care facility in the entire world.
Thank you.
Look at Leading Empowered Teams to see how I can help you improve the customer service strategy in your healthcare facility.