These days, quality customer service is in more demand than ever. With online review sites such as Healthgrades, Vitals, Yelp, RateMDs, and more, it’s almost impossible to dodge being reviewed by your patients.
As a healthcare practice, it is your responsibility to ensure that your patients not only receive the care that they seek, but that they feel comfortable with the patient experience. This includes not only the visit with the doctor, but the clinical staff, scheduling staff, and front entrance staff. First impressions are incredibly important, but second and third impressions for returning patients are even more important.
Even if the patient was tended to as far as it looks on paper, their impression of their own patient experience might tell a completely different story. Having an active, quality customer service routine in your practice is vital to positive patient experiences.
Here are a few ways that you can incorporate customer service into your office, and try for yourselves to enhance your practice’s patient experience:
Encourage Greeting and Meeting
When your patients walk through the door, they’re often scared, full of dread, and potentially having an anxiety attack. Because let’s face it, who really enjoys seeing a doctor? Unless you are a stellar practitioner, your patient is at the very least, nervous.
Tell front office staff to be cheery and greet patients as they walk in the door. Positive notes will allow the patient to relax and feel at ease. If they can take the time to chat with them for a bit, they will feel even better. Making a patient feel like a person, and not just a patient, will remind them that their condition or diagnosis isn’t labeling them.
Scan Your Sites
Most businesses will say that returning customers are loyal customers. This may be true, but ever since the boom of online reviewing systems such as Healthgrades, RateMDs, Vitals, Yelp, etc., in this day and age, those may be the most loyal patients out there.
People that take the time to stop their day, go online to their preferred review sites, and write a review for their practice without receiving benefits or rewards are “golden” patients. They’re considered golden because they provide free word of mouth marketing for your practice, all based on patient experience.
Instead of being fearful of these sites, you should take note of where your practice is reviewed, and what the reviews say. If needed, it’s easy to acquire help in doing this from a marketing company that specializes in healthcare, and can claim your listings and scan your sites. This way, even if there is a negative review, responding to those who have mentioned errors, complained, or written a negative review can have a second chance at becoming a loyal customer. If they took time to write a negative review, think of the time they will take to write a positive one.
Fill the Holes and Bridge the Gaps
Other than hearing from your patients themselves, a surefire way to understand conflicts causing negative patient experiences in your office is to simply break down the issues. Some ways to do this include individual meetings with team members, staff outings and team building activities, surveys and questionnaires, or observation.
An extremely solid form of this is what’s known as practice consulting. Through sessions with seasoned experts in various topics, in the arena of office development and growth, your practice can focus on small pieces of improvement to produce the patient retention, and practice growth that you are seeking. Based in the deepest roots of understanding communication across all forms of healthcare industries, a practice consultant will be able to analyze and observe your team, and create a personalized plan for results. One such as Passion for Patients based out of Phoenix, AZ, is a good beginning for a comprehensive evaluation of your practice, and reshaping how the patient views their experience there.
By taking these beginning steps towards solid customer service practices for your office, you are enhancing the patient experience for every patient that walks through your door, without adjusting your skill set as great physicians and doctors.
Think you might need some assistance with discovering your practice’s “best practices”? Contact us for a Strategy Session to get you on the right path.
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