Customer Service

Practicing joy

By paying attention to the details of the customer experience, you can create opportunities to celebrate new vision.

BY VANCE THOMPSON, MD AND MATTHEW JENSEN, MBA

PHOTOGRAPHY BY WES EISENHAUER

The leadership at Vance Thompson Vision has developed a set of shared values for all employees.

The great blessing of working in ophthalmology is that every day presents opportunities to celebrate new vision. You share joy with these opportunities, but creating them involves an attention to detail in how you stage your customer experience.

Setting expectations

What a customer expects versus what a customer experiences is a distinction that contributes to his or her overall satisfaction. Therefore, it is important to set expectations from your office’s initial point of contact. To understand the experience through the customer’s eyes, ask the following questions:

• What will the customer experience when he or she walks through your front door?

• Will the customer need to fill out paperwork?

• How long will the appointment last?

• What sort of tests will the customer experience, and how could the tests impact his or her day?

The answers to these questions set the foundation to your customer’s experience, and it’s best to communicate this information when the customer first schedules his or her appointment with your office.

Alison Tendler, MD, discusses aesthetic procedures with the VTV team.

At our office, for example, when a customer expresses interest in laser vision correction, our first-impression team working the phones will inform the customer that an evaluation will last from two to three hours. The team will explain that the dilation drops necessary for a thorough examination will cause light sensitivity after the appointment, and sunglasses will feel necessary, even inside. Working in ophthalmology, we understand that these are the daily realities of providing comprehensive eye exams. It’s also important we understand the customer does not possess our same level of familiarity with these procedures.

It’s best to prepare your customers by setting expectations for the foundation of their experience, but do not give away all of the smaller details over the phone. This allows your team to surprise the customer with the smaller details. (For example, offering patients a cup of their favorite specialty coffee.) These details enhance the experience more when your customers do not see them coming.

Relying on the team

Creating a positive and joyful experience for your customers requires more than just performing well in the operating room or laser suite. Patients already expect surgical excellence when they schedule appointments for vision correction. However, experiencing joy before surgery is not an expectation; therefore, it’s an opportunity for you to provide personal service that leaves your customers saying “wow.”

Everyone on the team must share in the opportunity to create joy. Why? Because the customer spends significantly less time with the physician than the various members of our team. In our practice, we want our staff to feel comfortable taking initiative to delight our customers throughout their experiences. Each morning, the staff meets for what we call a “holy huddle,” a 10- to 15-minute meeting where we discuss ways our team has gone above and beyond — from delivering a cheeseburger to a patient after surgery to taking two minutes to grab them a soda. Here, we remind staff that they have the freedom to surprise and delight the customer.

Matthew Jensen talks to the VTV team about the customer experience.

Personalizing service

Our staff will serve specialty coffee drinks, cookies, and fruit (treats always seem to bode well in creating happiness), and we also encourage our staff to make our customer’s day with small gifts, such as gas cards or other small value gift cards. We keep track of what our customer’s love during their initial consultation so we can surprise them with what they love when they return on the day of their surgery. For example, we’ll listen to our guests’ favorite music and connect with how they’re planning on enjoying their new vision. These are experiences at our office that we do not tell our customers to expect; yet, they’re foundational to how we relate to our customers on a daily basis.

To create these experiences, we first place a stamp in the front of each patient’s chart. It reminds us to ask for the information — favorite food or music, what they want to do with vision or anything they mention about activities, loved ones, etc. — and write it in the front of the chart so that on their return visit, we already know they prefer Coke to Diet Coke. We know that they want to enjoy a baseball game with their kids (so maybe we have tickets waiting for them). Everyone — the technician, the front desk team, the doctor — has the option to notate patient preferences in the chart. The attention and enthusiasm of our staff is essential for making these surprises happen.

Vance Thompson, MD, emphasizes the importance of teamwork during a recent VTV retreat.

When our customers feel valued through this attention, our staff feels good, and our company culture flourishes.

Celebrating the team

When you’ve worked to create an environment that celebrates bringing new vision to people, it’s important that your team is always watchful of how to improve customer experience. Whether it’s someone in the business office noticing a line and coming down to the front desk to see how they can help, to our director of finance stopping in the front lawn on his way into the office to pick up some garbage, our team is always looking out for ways they can improve the patient’s experience.

It’s also important to celebrate the work that your team performs to improve your practice.

John Berdahl, MD, shares his perspectives with the VTV team.

A shared values approach

We’ve set the stage for our employees by developing a set of shared values as we approach our work every day.

Caring: We are passionate, empathetic, and sensitive to the needs of our teammates, patients and everyone we touch.

Fun: We choose a positive attitude everyday. We use humor as a way to create a less formal, less stressful, and more productive work environment.

Committed: We are accountable and 100% committed to the success of Vance Thompson Vision. We are “boundaryless”: we willingly take initiative to delight our customers, motivate fellow teammates, and improve financial results.

Egalitarian: We play on a team where everyone is equal, where no task is too small for any member to step up and own — inside and outside their functional area.

We celebrate our team throughout the year at special gatherings around holidays, but, more importantly, we celebrate our team at every “holy huddle.” We celebrate the work that our team has done and discuss how we can continue improving. We share encouraging clips from YouTube and celebrate birthdays. These meetings are a daily opportunity for our team to grow together and meet the day with joy.

Creating a memorable experience

To create your practice’s memorable customer experience, answer these questions: what about your patient experience requires effort, and how can your team work to remove the effort?

The 30,000-square foot Vance Thompson Vision facility, completed in 2013, is located in Sioux Falls, SD.

Put yourself in your patients’ position — is there a better way to greet your customers in the morning than with a fresh cup of coffee?

If you’re interested in celebrating the lives and new vision of your customers, remember that their experience in your clinic is just as important as their surgical outcome when it comes to overall customer satisfaction. Just as we ask our team to keep their eyes open for improvement, keep your eyes open to how you can improve the experience in your own practice. Ask questions, seek answers, and remember that new vision is always worth celebrating. OP

	Vance Thompson, MD, is principal at Vance Thompson Vision in Sioux Falls, SD, and assistant professor at the University of South Dakota School of Medicine.
	Matthew Jensen, MBA, is the CEO of Vance Thompson Vision in Sioux Falls, SD, and he is a certified Experience Economy expert. Mr. Jensen may be reached at 605-371-7120 or matt.jensen@vancethompsonvision.com.