Ask the Staffing Doctor

Providing a Consistent Patient Experience

by Daniel Abramson

GETTING WITH IT

Q Janice from Dallas asks…I've tried to read up about the importance of customer service, especially in this economy. The group I work for doesn't “get it” when it comes to making changes. What can I do?

A There's a distinct correlation between hiring great people and providing a great patient experience. The magical ingredient is hiring friendly, engaging, and intuitive people. Intuition, by the way, is the ability to make good decisions with incomplete info.

You can't teach friendly…and you can't teach intuition! You either have them or you don't. You have to learn interview techniques to extract these “soft-skill” traits. I also recommend administering a personality test.

One of the only ways to differentiate your services from the crowd and become less of a commodity in the optical industry is through superior customer relations.

As recently reported in Time magazine, “The No. 1 marketing strategy for businesses and organizations now and in the future will be directly related to the quality of that organization's customer service.”

WHY CUSTOMERS LEAVE

Maybe it will help if you show management this finding: According to a U.S. Chamber of Commerce survey on why customers leave companies, 68 percent leave because of an attitude of indifference toward the client by the owner, manager, or employee.

Let's face it… today's customers have lots of options of where to spend their optical dollars. And although price is important, service or the lack of service will make the difference of whether they stay with your company or go to the competition.

RELATIONSHIPS AND REFERRALS

Customer service is especially important in building relationships and referrals. When potential customers or patients are deciding if they want to work with you and develop a relationship, they are judging you by three things:

• Can I trust you?
• Do you care about me?
• Are you committed to excellence and quality patient care?

Customer relations can, in fact, be boiled down to three key guidelines:

1. TREATING PEOPLE THE WAY YOU WANT TO BE TREATED. But even more importantly how they want to be treated.
2. DETERMINING THE WANTS AND NEEDS OF YOUR PATIENTS first and then working backward to develop the products and services.
3. UNDERSTANDING THAT GOOD COMMUNICATION AND HUMAN RELATIONS SKILLS EQUAL GOOD CUSTOMER RELATIONS. People want person-to-person contact, to feel connected, listened to, and like others to care.

At the end of the day, people do business with people that they like, trust, respect, and who are friendly.

Hire friendly and engaging people in every position of your practice. When a patient has a good experience with your product or service, they will tell eight other people. When they have a bad experience, they will tell 16 others. EB

If you have a question you'd like to have answered in Ask the Staffing Doctor, send it to editor@eyecarebusiness.com or Daniel@staffdynamics.biz. An archive of past columns can be found at www.eyecarebusiness.com.