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Quality Customer
Service in Healthcare is Critical: Secrets to Building a
Customer-Driven Service Platform
By
Joe Caliro
October/November 2007
Many companies in the retail industry
include a variation of the statement "provide world class service" in their
mission statements. These same companies have well-planned business strategies
and comprehensive marketing strategies. But ask them about their customer
service strategy and you'll find it's often nothing more than a bullet point in
their mission statements.
The need for quality customer service
in any industry is evident; in the healthcare industry it is especially
critical. Unlike call centers where retail products are being sold, medical
call centers are dealing with people's health - and quite possibly their lives.
Consequently, it is crucial that the quality of customer service, including the
operation of the call center, which often deals in life and death emergencies,
be as high-level as possible.
It's important to remember that the
call center in a medical environment can be established to perform a wide
variety of functions, perhaps more than in any other industry. These include
conventional answering services for physician
after-hours call coverage, nurse triage/health information, community
nurse lines, emergency department advice calls, and
home health calls, both inbound and outbound. What's more, the settings in
which the call center can be located are almost endless: hospitals, doctor's
offices, medical practices, hospice care, home health care, and long-term care
service providers. Generally speaking, the pressure placed on a call
center by a physician or other health care professional is far greater than the
pressure put there by the executive manager of a typical retail business.
When establishing a consumer-driven
service strategy in a medical facility, the task is to look at how customers
(that is, callers and patients) are represented in your organization. This data
is collected in many ways, for various reasons, and by different departments.
Unfortunately, there usually is not a single department responsible for pulling
all the data together. There are four key types of data required for a
well-built customer-driven service platform:
In many medical organizations, various
departments access this data through static daily or weekly reports. Nowhere
does this data meet both analytically or operationally to show the cause and
effect of major business actions. Because the data is not linked, it's
difficult for a company to see how the different aspects of operations are
affected by one another. In reality, each of the four data points reflects
effective "levers" that can be pulled to affect business or marketing efforts.
Over time, these four key data points can be tied to financial fluctuations and
true Return on Investment (ROI) analysis.
Data Rules:
It has been said, "He who has
the data rules." But in many medical organizations, the four key data types are
owned by or kept in separate silos or departments that have formed strong
"fiefdoms." Unfortunately, fiefdoms tend to protect "their" data and can be
unwilling to share or allow other departments to control the analysis, impeding
the development of a customer-driven service platform.
While other departments can and should
take an active role in the collection and interpretation of data, only one
department should be responsible for linking all the data that will feed the
customer-driven service platform: the quality department. If fiefdoms exist or
the quality department does not have the analytical power to build the linking
service platform, organizations should consider outsourcing the task to a
quality company that specializes in building customer service measurement
platforms.
The four primary quality operations to
consider outsourcing include:
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Monitoring and evaluation of calls, chat, email, and customer comments
coding
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Customer and employee surveys
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Advanced satisfaction/loyalty modeling
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Continuous quality improvement efforts
There are a number of reasons to
outsource the monitoring and evaluation function. Much of it has to do with the
type of monitoring model that your call center employs, usually either a
traditional monitoring model (multiple quality assurance monitoring (QAM) teams
operating within the center), or a decentralized monitoring model (a QAM team
accomplished by coach-driven monitoring with no internal QAM team).
The challenges raised by these two
models are similar: they are costly, consistency in calibration of accurate
standards is difficult, and the objectivity of the reporting is suspect and not
effectively used by the center or the organization. The emerging centralized
monitoring model provides a highly viable alternative. This model is actually a
hybrid of the traditional and decentralized models and allows organizations to
replace the internal QAM team of the traditional monitoring model and outsource
the required base call monitoring and evaluation requirements for coaches in the
decentralized monitoring model. Besides reducing costs, the emerging model puts
actionable data in the hands of management and coaches, allowing them to focus
on improvement efforts and targeted coaching.
In the emerging centralized monitoring
model, an objective, third-party company evaluates call centers from one core
calibrated group of employees. This group is directly calibrated by company
program managers and reports results on a reporting platform that allows anyone
in the organization to track quality trend by all levels of the entity,
including at the individual employee level. This model can eliminate the need
for a large headquarter QAM team, as there is no need to "check the checkers."
Feedback is Predictable:
Of
course, regardless of the model used, an organization cannot begin to understand
the effects of its operational and marketing plans - not to mention procedures,
policies, systems, products, and service - without an actionable and accurate
customer and employee feedback loop. Every organization should have at minimum
two types of surveys: relationship and transactional.
For budgetary reasons, many only use
relationship surveys. Relationship surveys certainly have value, tracking the
brand image in areas such as price, value, advertising, customer service, and
billing. However, surveys are given at random to the customer base with no
point of reference to business activities. Thus, a customer may have interacted
with your organization one week ago or one year ago. With no point of reference
to time or possible recent interaction, customers draw their answers from
collective memories, their experiences, or what they remember from advertising
or word of mouth. Consequently, relationship surveys are bad for managing the
day-to-day business decisions affecting customers.
Conversely, transactional surveys
measure customers' experiences within a given time frame of their interaction
with your organization, permitting sufficient time to complete their
interactions and form opinions. A good transactional survey breaks down these
interactions into key elements of the experience. With the proper analytical
modeling, an organization can survey and track which aspects of the customer
experience are causing the customer to be satisfied, or dissatisfied, with the
outcome of the interaction.
Transactional surveys also drive
operational changes. Because they are relevant to a specific experience at a
precise point in time, it is possible to tie survey results to customer
satisfaction as it relates to weekly internal metrics and financial
performance. When building a customer-driven service platform, an organization
should consider linking all data from transactional surveys to both daily
operation metrics and relationship data in order to track the correlations to
financial fluctuations in the business. Once this link has been established,
the organization can have a service strategy that drives the business from an
end user's perspective.
A "Blueprint" for Customers:
In
order to ensure that relational and transaction surveys are asking the right
questions, start with an "ideal customer blueprint map." This is a total
exploration of the ideal customer experience in your industry. The mapping
includes focus group benchmarks for industry norms and breaks down each aspect
of an organization's service delivery cycle. It explores the articulated and
unarticulated needs of customers and tries to define expectations within their
service experience. The final blueprint can then be applied to an
organization's current business model to determine where there are weaknesses
and points of competitive advantages.
From the ideal customer blueprint map,
an organization can then design a "blueprint survey." In this process, a
comprehensive life cycle survey is created to capture every critical aspect of
an organization's service and sales delivery. Through advance modeling
techniques, an organization can determine the impact of key business activities
from a customer's perspective. The blueprint survey lays the foundation for
developing an ongoing customer satisfaction/loyalty survey, which is a far more
effective tool than a generic survey.
The outcome of a blueprint survey is
easy to translate to management and employees because they can see it came from
customers' input, and the results will help show who is responsible for each
action that drives satisfaction. Once an organization has built an actionable
and accurate customer survey process, it will then have the foundation to
replicate the same process with agents and other employees. The right modeling
can quantify the ROI of a pay increase, commission increase, adjustments to
employee benefits, or changing other aspects of an organization's culture.
Don't "Dummy Down" Data:
Even with
a well-designed survey, some organizations "dummy down" the customer
satisfaction data that they collect. In fact, some market research companies
admit there are better ways of interpreting customer data, but the entities they
serve don't have the discipline to understand and work with higher-level
analytics. Recently, this has led to much "buzz" about how a company only
really needs one question to run its business.
One of the most common ways to "dummy
down" customer satisfaction data is by looking at only the "top two / three box"
responses to key questions. This is where the business reports only the
percentage of responses to the 4 and 5 scores on questions with a scale of 1 to
5. When reporting top box response in this way, the claim can be made, for
example, that "85% of all customers are satisfied or very satisfied with our
service." Unfortunately, this is not an accurate or actionable reflection of
true performance.
Top box reporting also does not reflect
the total effect of changing performance within the top boxes as well as
downward movement of customers in the bottom two boxes. Any negative movement,
regardless of which box the customer rates, is information the business needs.
It is critical to know how all customers are evaluating the organization and how
all customers are fluctuating both in positive and negative directions.
An organization that wants to build a
customer-driven service platform must employ an index methodology for analyzing
and reporting customer and employee survey results. The index methodology survey
process calculates multiple critical survey questions into a single number that,
when operational, will ensure that customer feedback becomes an integral part of
any organization. In addition, the indexed approach allows tracking of
performance to many national syndicated surveys like JD Powers and American
Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI).
The final level of higher analytics
involves bringing all the data together to track and predict financial impact on
operational and marketing efforts. Using a variety of advanced analytics and
predictive modeling techniques can determine where you are losing money or brand
position due to poor performance. This modeling and analytics will determine
your strategic plan's driving issues and will quantify losses or potential
growth opportunities. All analytics will be actionable, quantifiable, and
measurable.
Putting Theory into Practice:
Imagine you want to reduce the wait time for callers because you believe they
are waiting too long and are dissatisfied with their experience. If you have a
robust, customer-driven service platform in place, you would be able to analyze
your data and come up with something like this:
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To
increase the speed of answer, you will need to link wait time and agent
headcount to the cost of X. In this example, $650,000 would give you a 1
point improvement in handle rates.
-
This
handle rate increase will give your company a .12% increase on your overall
customer satisfaction index.
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With
the customer-driven service platform, you would know that a .12% increase in
satisfaction will net a .25% decrease in lost customers
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With
a net present value calculation, you could determine that this .25% decrease
in lost customers translates to a net contribution of $3.2 million to your
bottom line.
In the boardroom, the question would be
asked, "Who wants to invest $650,000 to make $3.2 million?" The answer would be
clear. Think about how this debate plays out on other issues such as: What is
the cost of lower customer service from an offshore center versus an onshore
center? What is the right wait time for a phone call? What effect is an IVR
system having on caller satisfaction?
Healthcare organizations of all types
are consolidating and often losing money as a result. One way to help stem the
tide of this negative financial performance is to provide customers with
consistent, quality information and customer service through the call center and
throughout every aspect of the entire enterprise. Customers must be made to
feel that they are truly the key to a medical organization's success.
Presenting any other appearance can put the fiscal health of a medical facility
into serious jeopardy.
It will not be the panacea to the
financial woes facing the healthcare industry, but it could mean the difference
between keeping the doors open - or closing them forever.
Joe
Caliro is the Executive Vice President of Quality at HyperQuality and
responsible for launching and managing Professional Services, HyperQuality's
new, full-service customer quality consulting arm.
Joe can be reached at
joe.caliro@HyperQuality.com.
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