Does Your Customer Service Need A Check Up?
Differentiating between patient care and customer service can help you deliver more patients to the practice.
MICHAEL W. MALLEY

When it comes to practicing medicine, some physicians simply take the approach used in the movie, Field of Dreams: "Build it and they will come." Others prefer to spend time and energy utilizing proven methods such as employing strategic external marketing tactics.

Regardless of which approach you take, the key to the long-term success of your practice does not rest solely in how many new patients you attract. It is also how well you treat them when they get there.

Before you disagree, let me prove my point. Take a quick glance at the number of new patient visits from last year, now check the referral source. How did those patients come to you?

In an informal survey taken this year by our company, CRM Marketing Group, virtually 100% of all practices who participated reported the number one referral source for new patients fell into a single category: Patient, Friend or Family.

This is not necessarily cause for celebration among these practices, because call counts, surgical volume, practice growth comparisons and patient satisfaction are not monitored. We simply know where the majority of new patients are coming from.

What was somewhat surprising was that even those practices that were engaged in heavy external advertising campaigns still reported Patient, Friend or Family as their number one referral source. This information simply confirmed the correlation that good customer service can lead to more patients, and ultimately have a profound effect on your practice's bottom line. The problem, however, is that many practices fail to carefully monitor and adjust their level of customer service.

Customer Service and Patient Care

I purposely use the term "customer service" as opposed to "quality patient care" to make another point. When asked, most physicians and administrators will quickly chide you if you inform them they are providing anything less than quality patient care. But it is possible to provide outstanding patient care and substandard customer service.

Customer service really has more to do with how you interact with a patient than how you make a diagnosis or treat a disease. It has more to do with the method in which you answer the telephone than the information you dispense on it. It is the gentle, empathetic nature of your technicians vs. their technical prowess.

Of course, medical and technical expertise are critical components in building and maintaining a successful ophthalmic practice. That portion of the equation must come first, and most practices today make a concerted effort to provide the highest quality patient care. Patient care can also be easily measured. How long was the patient's office visit? How accurate was his or her refraction? What was the patient's surgical result? How much time did the patient spend with the surgeon? How well prepared were the patient education materials that were displayed? What was the level of technology used in the diagnosis and surgical procedure?

However, even if you provide excellent quality patient care, or are your way to doing so, if you can not back it up with superior customer service, you will soon find yourself with enough holes in your schedule to allow two or three additional rounds of golf during the week.

Monitoring patient care can be carried out more closely and can be adjusted to a higher level of care more easily, than monitoring and adjusting your level of customer service. It is challenging to gauge the latter. Is your front office "welcoming committee" receiving patients in a happier mood on Friday than they are on Monday morning? Is the front desk check-in process as patient friendly as it can be? What is the tone of voice used on the phone with potential new patients during peak call-in periods? Are your techs running patients through your system to stay on time, or to provide quality care? Is your staff giving patients the opportunity to ask questions during every part of their visit, or being told where to go next? Are you monitoring the morning and afternoon schedule by patient counts or by patient satisfaction?

Adjusting to Superior Customer Service

In a busy practice, it is easy to fall into the numbers game. Every day the discussion becomes, "how many patients do you have today vs. how well you should treat your patients today?" As in any repetitive job task, it is easy to become complacent and take emotion out of the equation. It is much more efficient to put your head down and perform your professional duties as quickly as possible. After all, you usually have another patient right behind the one you are seeing.

It is the repetition that usually does you and your staff in. Seeing patients in the same lanes, day in and day out; hearing the same story from patient after patient; and your staff performing the same tests. After a while, you convince yourself that you have heard it all and you can start to tune patients out. You reach a level of efficiency that allows you to do an entire exam in record time without getting too emotionally involved with the patient. And that is how many of the most successful businesses in the world are run.

However, with the medical field, peoples' demands are greater when it comes to their health, especially their vision. They want their eyes to be cared for by the best possible doctor. They want to voice their opinion, and spend time discussing their vision, all in an efficient environment. It is a challenging and difficult balance to maintain, but not nearly as difficult as some make it.

Staff and physicians can learn to provide a superior level of customer service while simultaneously being efficient at their job. Check into any 5-star hotel and indulge yourself in superior quality care and unsurpassed customer service. Regardless of how booked they might be, the finer hotels find a way to make you feel as if you are the only guest they have to worry about for the moment. And if you think about it, an encounter with a 5-star hotel can easily be compared to a standard office visit at an ophthalmology practice.

In a luxury hotel, you are welcomed when you arrive, usually by someone well-informed, well-dressed and well-spoken. This same interaction occurs in your practice when your staff welcomes patients. And that is one of the keys to outstanding customer service — the first impression.

If you really want to know how well you are performing in terms of customer satisfaction, call your office sometime pretending to be a patient. Or, you could conduct a quality assurance review with your patients. When conducting this survey, ask patients about your customer service and their likes and dislikes about your practice. Listen to your techs in the hallway. Listen to your staff at the front desk. Do they sound energized? Do they sound motivated? Or are they just going through the motions?

Reminders and Recommendations

One way to maintain unsurpassed customer service is to remind the staff at least weekly how important the non-medical components of the practice truly are. Give the staff an opportunity for feedback regarding what patients are saying. Remind them how challenging it can be to always be at their best with patients, but that it is part of a being a medical professional.

Recommendations for improving customer service should include the following: Make a warm and welcoming first impression; proactively address patients fears, concerns or questions at every stage of their visit; and present a professional image throughout the practice, including staff uniforms, patient educational materials, artwork, magazines, flooring, equipment and personal appearances.

Remember, customer service is more about how you say something than what you are saying. True success in a practice is measured in how you balance quality patient care with superior customer service.

Michael Malley is president of Houston, Texas-based CRM Marketing Group. He can be reached via e-mail at mike@refractivemarketing.com.