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At Sorry Works! we often say that good customer service is the foundation for any successful disclosure and apology program. Good customer service makes disclosure possible...and credible to patients and families. If you treat people right throughout the process then when an adverse event happens and you have to say "I'm sorry" its more believable. In fact, disclosure and apology after an adverse event is the essence of good customer service. Pulling people closer, making them your best friends, and fixing problems in a pro-active fashion. However, if your customer service is lacking, your staff is not courteous and is rude to patients, and then an adverse event happens it will be much harder to pull off a credible apology with the patient (customer). You will look insincere and phony. Get ready for a lawsuit.
As you look to improve your customer service within your practice or hospital, consider the valuable column below.
Doctors Should See Patients as Customers
By Dale Dauten
THE CORPORATE CURMUDGEON
December 16, 2007
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
If you make a list of the World's Worst Places, somewhere below a public outhouse in Calcutta and somewhere above the DMV would come the doctor's waiting room. There you are, trapped - and despite the excess of fluorescent lighting, you're waiting in the dark.
The people in the know are hidden behind the frosted-glass panel, popping out like asynchronous cuckoos on the clock of eternity. Meanwhile, you're there with the crowd at the State Fair of Afflictions, trying not to wonder which ride your fellow customers in waiting are destined for - is it the Cough-a-Whirl, HemorrhRide, LoogieLand, the MonoDigitRail, Tunnel of Lumps or the Whack-a-(Does this look funny to you?)-Mole?
And, hey, that ain't lemonade in the little plastic cups on the special shelf. If you were especially observant, there's one word in that description of doctors' waiting rooms that did not ring true, that clanked even as I typed it. That word is "customer." For decades now, doctors have been urged to treat those who come to them not as their diseases, but as people.
It's time to do better. Let's face it, the one place you can count on being smiled at and being thought of as interesting and important is in a retail environment. The highest standard for human interaction is now at the mall.
Doctors seem to believe they are removed from such considerations. I once mentioned to a specialist that I'd waited two hours to see him. He said, shrugging: "Oh, I don't have anything to do with that front- office stuff. I just go where they tell me." I responded, "So, those front-office people hired you . . . or do they work for you?" At which point, the literal and figurative came together in a crescendo: He washed his hands.
Well, there's no longer any excuse for doctors not to be good businesspeople. Good business is good medicine. That fact has been proven by Dr. Joseph Golbus. I spoke with him after a stirring presentation at my favorite annual conference, the Compete Through Service Symposium in Phoenix.
Golbus took over the running of a large group of doctors in Chicago, and dared to leapfrog over "patient satisfaction" and began addressing customer "loyalty." (Specifically, he decided to ignore the traditional research measure of "satisfaction," and instead focused on a "would you refer friends and family" survey rating, paying attention to only those doctors at the highest rating - a five out of five.)
It doesn't sound like a big deal, and it wouldn't have been if it had stopped there. What made it work was Golbus convincing doctors that being nice wasn't just nice; it was lucrative. He reports that during one two-year span, "loyalty" rose by 20 percent while doctors' incomes rose an average of 15 percent. Such leaps are not achieved by cheerleading, but by changing the nature of the organization. And it started with one word and one number - "loyalty" and its score.
Once doctors are receiving scores and seeing themselves indexed against the other physicians in the group, pride and/or natural competitiveness kicks in. Plus, once you have one number that really matters, then other numbers become more relevant. (As a former market researcher, I can attest to the wisdom of that approach. It's hard to get people interested in 10 measures; however, if you get them concerned about one, then other numbers take on meaning.) In this case, once you get people to care about the "would you refer friends and family" measure, then they have to care about what's related to that measure.
Turns out, in the case of the doctors, "looks me in the eye" and "knows my name" are the best predictors of the referral rating. Knowing that, you can train doctors on those simple skills, and you can hire for them as well. But Golbus understood that being treated well by the doctor was not the same as being treated well as a customer. Quality medical treatment was merely "the cover charge." So they began offering same-day and walk-in appointments; they increased hours on evenings and on Saturdays; and, get this, have a pediatric walk-in clinic open on Sunday mornings. No wonder he can say that "our customers became our marketing, our sales force."
What Golbus and his team understand is that a doctor ought to be smart enough to treat people as well as they'd be treated by teenage clerks at the Gap.
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