Any small business owner can tell you that unhappy employees are rarely productive employees. That is also true for hospitals and clinics. Unhappy hospital team members rarely prioritize customer service. Bad attitudes toward work can create for an environment where employees treat patients as an annoyance rather than engaging with them to solve problems and build relationships.

A happy employee, on the other hand, is much more likely to treat customers with respect and compassion, which leads to better patient satisfaction.

So how can we help our employees?

Improve leadership

Leadership comes first in improving employee satisfaction. Leading by example is not just the job for the hospital administrators. Managers, directors, at all levels of a facility’s staff should be compassionate toward employees and responsive to their needs and concerns. A good leader offers guidance and shows the way rather than dictating and giving orders.

Listen to staff

Hospital staff are your eyes and ears when it comes to the day-to-day operations of your facility. That means their concerns and suggestions should be taken seriously rather than dismissed off hand. We know that working in healthcare can be a stressful job, but taking a few seconds to slow down and listen to your team members can go a long way toward restoring trust – and it can also reveal ways to improve efficiencies and work practices.

Educate staff

Inconsistent rules and procedures are frustrating. Making policies understandable and training staff on procedures will make expectations clear and reduce frustration. When a member of the team in one department is treated differently than in another department it’s easy to lose focus – or worse, lose respect for the hospital’s leadership. Enforcement of policies must always be uniform across all areas of the hospital. Explaining to staff why certain guidelines exist helps them understand that procedures are in place for a reason and are not just arbitrary. “I don’t know why we do it this way; it’s just what I’m told,” is not what a patient wants to hear from a member of your staff.

Improve staff relations

Team cohesion is important to employee engagement. Your staff member don’t have to be best friends, but gathering everyone together to flesh out problems and go over ways to make work less stressful can help everyone get along better in the workplace. Make sure to hold regular team meetings and give everyone a chance to speak and give suggestions on how to improve the workplace environment. Staff activities such as contests and events are a good way to promote employee interaction. Even just a little dialogue between staff members can help improve team relationships.

Creating a positive environment for you employees is one of the best ways to improve customer satisfaction. An engaged team is much more inclined to be responsive to patient needs and build constructive relationships.

For more advice about customer service in hospitals and clinics, call SRJ Marketing Communications at 214-528-5775 to schedule a consultation. SRJ has years of experience training hospital staff in customer service.

For the rural healthcare facilities, customer service is the most important tool in the marketing strategy toolbox. While rural healthcare providers can’t have the fanciest, the biggest, or the most expensive equipment, they can have a commitment to taking care of patients and family members with dignity, respect, and compassion that is often not found in the larger hospitals.

What customer service means

Customer service is more than just answering a patient’s request. It means anticipating a patient’s needs and responding to concerns with compassion and understanding. Instead of just answering “sure” when a patient asks for something, the healthcare team members need to show through their speech and actions that they are genuinely concerned for their patients’ well-being. When someone asks for directions, don’t point; take the person to that location. Communicating with patients and understanding their needs is the best way to build trust. Sometimes it is as simply suggesting an extra pillow or socks.

Phone courtesy

For many hospitals, a great deal of customer service takes place over the phone – answering questions, scheduling appointments, explaining payments. This is one of the most frequent and important tasks many members of the non-clinical healthcare team will face. That means phone conversations cannot be treated with a sense of drudgery. Phone conversations need to be welcoming and understand about patient confusion and questions. For those who work in the hospital field, it is easy to forget that most patients are not experts. That is why having an intuitive sense of patient concerns is so important when it comes to talking with people about their health needs.

Follow up

Maintaining good patient relations means staying in contact. Especially in small communities, patients are our neighbors. Building bridges and lasting relationships between patients and healthcare professionals is what really separates community healthcare from corporate hospitals. Don’t badger patients, but to call them on the phone to check up after a surgery, difficult stay in the hospital or the birth of a baby will show that your staff is compassionate and genuinely concerned with the health of the community.

Don’t be afraid to apologize

It is easy for patients to get irritated when it comes to appointment times or other administrative issues. One of the biggest complaints in healthcare is wait times. We know that it’s not always possible to predict how long an appointment or procedure will take. There are all sorts of variables that influence waiting times that patients who don’t work in healthcare wouldn’t be able to know about. A simple apology can go a long way toward restoring patient trust and improving satisfaction. Being empathetic to patient concern has two benefits: It can help diffuse frustration and can sometimes reveal opportunities for improvement.

Customer service is often the best marketing tool for small hospitals and clinics. Patient concern is crucial to improving satisfaction and retention. It is easy for patients who are already worried about their health concerns to become frustrated or angry. A good customer service model helps keep patients at ease and lets them know that they are being cared for by compassionate professionals.

If your healthcare facility is looking to improve its customer service program, contact SRJ Marketing Communications at 214-528-5775 to schedule a consultation. Founder and CEO, Steven R. Jolly, has over 25 years of experience educating and training health care teams in effective customer service strategies.

This month, take some time to create a new customer service initiative to refine your strategy and review what is working and what isn’t.

Put yourself in the patient’s shoes

Be the customer. You and your team should take some time out and go through what a day looks like for the patient – from reception to discharge. Each member of your team should know exactly what it is like to be a patient. Often what is going through a patient’s head is a lot different from the doctor’s or clinical staff. An important component of customer service is being able to empathize and understand how your patients feel. Try to forget everything you know about what happens behind the scenes and stay in the moment!

Survey says…

Go over your customer service surveys. Take them seriously! They can provide valuable insight into what your patients love – and hate! – about your service. Go over the surveys each month and catalog them. Evaluate trends. Are you getting better? Are things getting more negative?

Educate and train your team

Good customer service is a process. That process needs constant monitoring, evaluation, and training. Remind your staff that every interaction with the patient counts. Your patients don’t know that you have already been on shift for 12 hours and want to go home. Every member of the team needs to provide a consistent level of quality customer service.

Make guidelines clear and identify scenarios in which there could be confusion about what to do or how to best help a patient.

Don’t just train once. It happens way too often that the only customer service training staff receive is on their first day of the job! Training should happen regularly and management should be ready to provide feedback and performance reviews.

Are you speaking to your patients?

Be sure you and your team are speaking the same language as your patients. Are you explaining their health issues and treatment options in a way that they can understand? One of the easiest ways to increase patient satisfaction is to change the way you speak those you are treating. Be clear and simple, and be ready to answer questions!

Commit

Customer service doesn’t always yield immediate results. It is a process, and improvement takes time. But if you are willing to invest in a customer service initiative and stick with it, your hospital is likely to see better patient retention and higher levels of satisfaction. Good customer service initiatives build loyalty, which is a huge payoff in the long term.

If all this sounds daunting, don’t worry. Call an expert! Whether its customer service training or coming up with a comprehensive customer service initiative, the team at SRJ has worked with hospitals of all sizes to raise the bar and create plans to yield results!

As someone who spends a lot of time working with hospitals and rural health clinics and physicians offices, I can tell you that you are not alone.  In fact most hospitals often don’t have an overall marketing strategy. That’s understandable. Most healthcare professionals aren’t marketing experts, but that doesn’t relieve you of the need to have a plan for your communications program.

But with just a little bit of planning, I’ve seen hospitals greatly improve their patient outreach and their ability to build more top-of-mind awareness and form important new relationships with the community.

Define your audience

The first step to creating a marketing plan is realizing who you are trying to reach. That means first defining the care and values that make your hospital what it is. Once you have an outline of your services and what sets your clinic or hospital apart from others, you can start making assumptions about those you are trying to reach.

Defining your audience is one of the most important steps in developing a targeted marketing strategy – even for hospitals. Targeting and narrowing your strategy is crucial. Hospitals too often fall for the idea that marketing to everyone is the best way to maximize patient numbers. In reality, if you try to reach everyone, you are more likely to end up reaching no one.

Identify your strengths and weaknesses

Where does your hospital shine? Do you offer outstanding customer service? Are you an active member of your local community? Do you have specialized care that no one else offers? These are the points you need to emphasize in your marketing strategy.

Weaknesses are often linked to financial constraints, especially when it comes to small hospitals. But they can also be things like inefficiencies and lack of name recognition. These are the areas that need time and planning to manage and mitigate.

Write down realistic goals

When I ask new managers what their goal for their company is, I often here something like, “We are going to be the best and most successful company in our field!” That’s great, but it doesn’t say anything about what that person plans on actually doing!

Goals should be concrete and attainable. Think along the lines of patient volume and improving feedback scores. Setting idyllic goals is good for morale, but it doesn’t give your strategy any real direction.

Focus on content

Content is your greatest asset. Focus on ways to provide better content that is relevant to your target audience. How can you add value to the patient experience outside the hospital walls?

Integrate your strategy

Integrate your marketing strategy! This means planning and consistency! You should speak with the same voice and communicate the same values through every aspect of your marketing strategy. Integration also means leveraging your website and social media in addition to more traditional marketing methods. Work on the “whole package” to plan a more complete marketing strategy that doesn’t lean too heavily on one medium.

Developing a marketing strategy takes time and focus. If you are looking to improve your hospital’s marketing plan, give SRJ a call at 214-552-5775.

I have seen organizations take great care when developing a logo; from understanding how the consumer reacts to the visual, meticulous decisions made about color and font, to ensuring the feel of the logo matches the brand identity of the organization. But what is often observed in large and small businesses is how little attention is given to how the logo will appear in practical applications.

As the visual representation of your brand, consider why the practical application of your logo is important. It is going to be at big community events on large banners. And, it will be in the midst of other logos reduced in size on sponsorship sheets. You may even have it on thumb drives and pens. In all instances your logo must retain the ability be recognizable and legible.

Think for moment about some of logos you have come into contact with throughout your life. For example consider the Nike Swoosh, Apple, Chevy and Target. At any size, in color or black and white, and in any environment these logos retain their visual identity.

A simple way to see how your logo fairs is to  take a sheet of letterhead and make copies of it until your logo is small enough to fit on a pen, and large enough to fill the paper. Does it in all instances remain:

• Crisp
• Legible
• Identifiable (as solely being yours)

If so, then it passes. But if it’s hard to see, it will just be visual noise to the consumer and be ignored. In this case it is time to review why it doesn’t work and what it would take to make it work. It could be just a design alteration, or it could be time to review your logo entirely. You have a lot vested in your logo, it is key that your logo properly represents you wherever it ends up.

SRJ Marketing Communication understands the importance of your logo as part of your overall branding. Contact 214-528-5775 to discuss how we can audit your visual identity for versatility and overall brand compatibility.