Having people speak positively about your medical practice, clinic or hospital and the services you provide is key to attracting new patients and retaining existing ones.
Clearly, your frontline staff is in a position to give your practice a competitive edge and build on your already good reputation, or they can cause patients to become annoyed and frustrated and to go elsewhere for their care. Certainly you want your staff to be in the first category.
Teaching employees to use the computer system, follow standardized procedures, and understand the chain of command is easy compared with educating them in the use of "soft skills" such as providing quality patient service. But no practice can afford to ignore those soft skills.
In the training guide, Making a Difference with Excellent Patient Services, author Karen Childress identifies nine service skills your staff must have to ensure that they are providing the level of service your patients demand.
Managing patient expectations is one of the most powerful skills, which Childress covers. She notes, "Frequently patient's expectations for timeliness or other aspects of the healthcare experience don't mesh with the realities of a busy practice. Working with patients to ensure realistic expectations can go a long way toward improving patient satisfaction."
Your staff can avoid complaints about wait time, she says, by managing patients' expectations. "Train your staff to notify patients up front when you are experiencing delays. If you know the schedule is behind, don't let a patient wait 45 minutes to be surprised. Instead, anticipate and manage expectations by saying 'We're running 45 minutes behind schedule. Would you like to wait or to come back in half an hour?' How often should you update patients? Fifteen to twenty minutes is about as long as most people can go without an update, notes Childress.
Making a Difference with Excellent Patient Services is one of six self-training guides from the Customer Service Group's Healthcare Division. Additional information on each of the guides is available online at http://www.CustomerServiceGroup.com/
