Providing Customer Service to Your Employees

According to a recent study, a patient staying at a large hospital for 3 to 4 days may interact with 50-60 employees throughout their stay. That’s about 49 other people who aren’t their primary doctor.  In clinic visits, they also interact with many people before ever seeing the provider.  To keep your patients coming back, you need to offer the kind of customer service that compels them to think of YOU every time they experience a medical problem.

But how do you get your employees on the same page as you to make sure they are representing your organization the very best way possible? 

Here are 6 steps to achieving that perfect customer service experience for your organization:

Start by defining what customer service means to you

81% of patients admit that they aren't satisfied with their healthcare experience. But customer service is not just about meeting other people's expectations. It is also about meeting your own. That’s why it is so important to define customer service in your own words. What does customer service mean to you? Why do you do what you do? What are your goals with your organization in terms of customer relationships?

Once you have a solid definition, you need to stick to it. You also need to make sure that the people who work with you feel the same way you do about what good customer service is so that you can all be on the same page. 

Make sure that your definition is really specific and in line with your organization’s mission and vision. If it doesn’t align with the rest of your philosophies, you won’t have much luck with your strategies.  

For instance, if your organization’s mission is to “make healthcare accessible to all,” your customer service definition can’t use words like “premium” or “luxury” because those are exactly the opposite of affordable healthcare. 

Encourage active listening

Employees listen passively to supervisors and trainers, then pass off their responses as their own to patients when faced with a complaint. Perhaps they do that because they think this is the best way to please the boss or because they think it is the easiest way.

Whatever the case may be, you need to understand that it isn’t their fault. Active listening is an acquired skill that takes practice to excel. As the leader, it is your responsibility to give your employees that space and time for training and practice before putting them on the floor to work with patients and complex issues.  

When employees are well-trained to listen, they will be able to help patients better, listen to their real issues and improve your organization’s customer service. 

Equip employees to be problem-solvers

 Good customer service is more than just being a good listener. You need to know how to solve a problem, and that usually means knowing something about the problem before the customer does, which typically comes with training and experience. 

As training experts, one thing we can tell you with 100% certainty is that if you focus on creating the right kind of environment, your employees will take care of the rest.

An effective way to equip your employees to be better problem-solvers is by giving them a systematic process for identifying problems or role play scenarios with them. With guidance, you can teach them how to identify a problem, how to ask the right questions, how to summarize a situation, and how to draw conclusions to offer solutions. 

For instance, if a patient complains about being made to wait for too long, the employees are quick to provide an excuse for the inconvenience (ex. the doctor is busy, the doctor is running behind), which neither helps the doctor nor the organization’s reputation.  

Instead, you can train the staff to help with offering a solution (in this case, you could possibly connect them with another provider or reschedule their appointment) and assure the patient that the matter will be looked into so that they don’t experience the problem again. You can also tell your employees (or even the doctor) to follow up the patient’s missed visit with a call to update them on their complaint AND to let them know that you haven’t dismissed their feedback. 

Not only will this make your patients feel they are being heard but also that they matter to you.

Teach your employees about empathetic communication

Empathy is hard work. But when customers feel that you are empathetic towards their problems, they are more likely to trust you.

One of the most effective ways to start training your employees to show empathy to your patients is by providing them with an opportunity to practice. For instance, give them a quota of patient callbacks to make each day and encourage them to find as many different ways of saying the same thing as possible.

Then, give them time to analyze the calls and encourage them to write notes. Don't tell them what to write. Let them work it out for themselves. This will help them identify their own wording. 

You can also use these three simple rules to instill a more empathetic culture in your workplace:

1. Show interest in what the patient is saying.
2. Don't interrupt.
3. Let the patient finish explaining their problem.

Work on reducing their job-related insecurity

Harvard Business Review confirms that “positive work cultures are more productive.” About 60% to 80% of workplace accidents happen due to stress - of any kind. Since job insecurity is one of the primary stressors in the workplace, you might benefit from working on eliminating job security to get better performance out of your team.

Remember that your patients are only as happy as your employees. So, working on your internal teams well-being might just help you accomplish your external customer service goals because let’s face it, your employees are your customers, too. 

Get to the bottom of your employees’ work-related problems

Not all employees are equal or have the same learning pace as others. If they are experiencing specific work-related issues, the problem could either be personal or a gap in the training. In case it is the latter, you might want to consider giving them individual attention and problem-specific resources to prepare them for better customer service. 

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Happy employees ensure happy patients!

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