Customer Service

Refresh your approach toward patients

Improve your training methods to rejuvenate your staff’s attitude about customer service.

BY ELIZABETH HOLLOWAY, COE, CPSS, PHR

While practices implement seemingly endless change (ICD-10, EHR and MU — just to name a few), they are busier and more complex than ever. Unfortunately, this makes it easy to lose sight of the sole purpose of our business — the patient.

When you divert focus from patients, the office can start to struggle in other areas, including staff morale and office efficiency. To regroup and shift attention back on patient care, many practices are looking for better customer-service training.

Does your practice need to improve its interactions with patients? Have all of these changes, which can overwhelm management and staff, made the office a stressful environment? Has your practice received some unfavorable patient reviews online or negative comments from patient satisfaction surveys? If you answered, “yes” to any of these questions, your staff could benefit from customer-service training.

Customer-service training comes in many different forms that can help keep training effective and fun. Most importantly, customer-service training needs to be consistent, creative, and based in real-world scenarios.

Try implementing the following ideas in your practice.

Consider starting a book club that focuses on leadership development and customer service.

Change the mindset

For any training program to be successful, customer service has to become a top priority for physicians and management. Staff members look to practice leaders to set the tone for the office, and they observe how their leaders treat each other, staff members, outside vendors, and patients. To have long-term customer-service training success, practice leaders must commit and lead by example.

Also, stay positive. It is easy to fall into a pattern of sighing and complaining, particularly about all of the recent mandated changes. But remind your staff that complaining does not change the fact that the practice has to be compliant. While it can help to occasionally vent, customer service will not thrive in an environment of chronic complaining. Giving your team an “attitude adjustment” will help them to re-engage with patients.

Keep a consistent training schedule

You needs to provide consistent, ongoing customer-service training. Sending management or staff to an off-site training program, such as the Ritz Carlton and the Disney Institute, or bringing in a customer-service training consultant can help your team. However, practices that are serious about training should create a schedule that will make customer service a part of the culture, not just another training exercise.

Along with investing in a formal customer service curriculum, physicians and management should include customer service topics at staff meetings. Celebrate great acts of customer service and even give small awards to staff members who have done a great job. Staff meetings can also provide a good setting to conduct additional training, such as role-playing.

Use resources

For customer-service training to stay prominent within a practice, management needs to look for new ideas to keep concepts fresh. Team building can be a great way to keep staff engaged in customer service. If you need some inspiration, you can find hundreds of free team-building exercises available online. Many of these ideas just need a little imagination to bring them to the ophthalmic office.

The Internet also has a multitude of customer-service training videos, and many of these resources, such as YouTube and TED Talk videos, are free. InsightSquared’s blog even reviews some of the top customer service YouTube videos (http://tinyurl.com/OPserviceNov15). While not all videos will be relevant to your practice, many of them can provide a great starting point to your next conversation about customer service. Some videos are also funny and most are only a few minutes, which can help keep the staff engaged in your topic.

In addition, the management team may start a book club that focuses on leadership development and customer service. To get started, consider “The Customer Comes Second: Put Your People First and Watch ‘em Kick Butt” by Hal F. Rosenbluth & Diane McFerrin Peters (HarperBusiness, 2002). This book illustrates how one company’s approach to providing happiness in the workplace translated to great customer service and increased profits.

Conclusion

Customer-service training does not happen overnight, and no magic bullet will make a practice great. It is an ongoing, evolving process that should be woven into every aspect of a practice’s day-to-day functions. Although life is filled with changes and challenges, you can always find time to be creative and compassionate and focus on the importance of patients. OP

Ms. Holloway is a senior consultant with BSM Consulting in Clearwater, FL. Her current certifications include Professional in Human Resources (PHR) and Certified Patient Service Specialist (CPSS).