Understanding Customer Service in Healthcare

Customer service in healthcare basically means the constant care and support which customers receive during the process of treatment for their health-related issues. Efficient customer service is not limited to just receiving treatment; it also extends to monitoring the progress of the patients before and after being treated for their health issues.

Earlier, healthcare industries based customer satisfaction on the care quality received by the customers. When the customer experienced good quality treatment, they gave a satisfactory response. However, things are not the same nowadays. The healthcare industry is becoming fully automated, and the intake and experience gauging volumes of effective healthcare services aren’t just limited to care quality. Additionally, the growing medical awareness and expansive nature of the health ecosystem widens the communication gaps between healthcare professionals and patients. Hence, in modern times, healthcare services can’t be limited to the experience a customer gains through quality caregiving alone.

This makes it pertinent to look into some of the factors that contribute to providing a wholesome customer service that isn’t just limited to clinical care. The following subheadings will detail the outcomes of effective customer care and will also discuss some of the challenges pertaining to providing a wholesome customer experience that goes way beyond clinical care.

The Impact of Customer Service on Patient Care

Here are some of the everlasting impacts which good customer service by a healthcare service can lead to: Firstly, it helps the healthcare institutions to build brand loyalty with customers. Healthcare professionals want to maintain a long-term relationship with their customers, and it isn’t limited to just appointments or occasional health check-ups. This will encourage the patients to open up as they may feel supported. Secondly, excellent patient services lead to a higher margin of returns to the healthcare industries, affecting the bottom line of their businesses. A study showed a 50% marginal increase because of effective healthcare. Thirdly, growing awareness of medicine, the advancement of science, and information overload which customers consume online has made them a little skeptical about the constantly changing healthcare ecosystem. They expect care and trust during the time they are treated. An efficient healthcare service provider who can win the patient’s trust will not only increase the patient acquisition ratio but will also pave the way to implement better treatment plans, and the good word of mouth can lead to more patient intake. 70% of patients check online reviews for doctors before they step in for consultation. This shows the sensitive line the healthcare professionals and customers tread along. Hence, efficient customer service has many long-standing advantages for the healthcare industry.

Key Elements of Effective Healthcare Customer Service

  • Communication with patients: Communication can change the perception of how healthcare professionals are viewed by patients. Effective communication strategies make the patient feel understood; thereby, healthcare professionals can earn their trust. Just like our informal relationships, effective communication is the founding pillar of the relationship between healthcare professionals and customers. Each patient is different. The healthcare professionals are obligated to take into account the personal and medical history of the customers before they break down complex medical information. They should actively listen to what the patients have to say. It is like keeping their eyes and ears open at all times. In addition to this, healthcare professionals should provide timely responses to their doubts and queries.
  • Empathy and understanding: Goes hand in glove with effective communication. Each patient might react differently to their different medical outcomes. The power of empathy and understanding is deep-rooted and helps in creating a long-term relationship with patients. Hence, healthcare professionals should prioritise empathy before their judgement while dealing with patients.
  • Timely and efficient service: Reduced customer waiting time, waitlist segregation, and streamlined appointment processes add significant weight to the process of building relationships. In addition to this regular follow up will make the customers feel that they are valued.
  • Respecting patients’ privacy: Like empathy, this cannot be understated. Healthcare professionals must respect and uphold patients’ privacy in all manners. It includes their medical decisions, data protection services, and information about their past medical histories.

Importance of Customer Service in Healthcare

Non-clinical and clinical support care services are equally important as the services of medical and paramedical professionals. They respond to customer queries, feedback, and complaints and give a necessary first impression on how the patients are being valued. Taking their services for granted might lead to diminishing opportunities for maintaining a long-term relationship with customers.

They can adopt certain ways to increase the efficacy and efficiency of their services. They can create outstanding first impressions by providing thorough guidance with their front desk services, reducing customer waiting times, and when required, they can give importance to patients requiring utmost attention and care. In addition, they act as a bridge of communication between the patients and the medical professionals by predicting and blocking communication and service-related practical difficulties with their work. Non-clinical staff can reduce queues and waiting times in pharmacies and hospitals to ensure treatment and diagnosis aren’t delayed.

How Good Customer Service Enhances Patient Satisfaction: 

Healthcare professionals meet patients in their most vulnerable moments. Their servicing isn’t just limited to initial appointments, for they have to ensure that what the patient expects to happen has not only happened but was made to happen to make them feel valued and listened to. Both clinical and non-clinical personnel should make note of the following points to enhance customer satisfaction: 

  • Set Expectations: From the beginning, it is important for non-clinical staff to ask open-ended questions during their course of work at the front desk. They need to ask open-ended questions which would encourage the patients to open up. It is important that they keep their replies trustworthy and non-committal so that patients feel heard while the non-clinical staff help them navigate through the medical process. 
  • Emphasise the importance of essential communication: The patients need to be given a complete idea of what would be the process of medical treatment which is applicable to different sets of situations. These situations include the likes of accidents, trauma care, delivery, surgery, post-surgical care, emergency admission, and similar situations where transparency is an unavoidable prerequisite for the clinical professionals to administer treatment. 
  • Responding in a polite and courteous manner without rushing things while being open to queries will be another added asset in enhancing customer satisfaction. Apart from transparency in the case of a medical emergency, the non-clinical staff should ensure complete transparency in non-emergency cases as well. This extends to the outpatient department, general waiting rooms, restrooms, examination rooms, lab areas, and other places where organisation and management will add to the increasing satisfaction of the customers. 
  • Pain Management: Clinical professionals must provide clear guidance on pain management for chronic, terminal illnesses as well as pre- and post-surgical pain. Further, they need to take patients through available medication options and should recommend the best possible option for patients. 
  • Punctuality in medical professionals makes the patients feel that their time is valued. It is important for medical professionals to be on time for their medical procedures, appointments, and surgeries. If things aren’t going according to plan and if there is a likely situation where the customer is about to experience delay, professionals should make sure that they are properly informed about the same. Most professionals should make sure that they maintain their attire in a neat and clean manner

Consequences of Poor Customer Service in Healthcare: A potential failure in effective medical intervention can bring devastating consequences to medical professionals on multiple levels.

Considering the outcome of such a situation, a patient who is dissatisfied with the work of medical professionals may have to face temporary or permanent health impairments. This could potentially lead to lower patient acquisition rates, poor word of mouth, loss of patient loyalty, and a reduction in brand image.

Worst of all, healthcare professionals may have to face legal and professional consequences. The estimated negligence cases around the world are close to twenty billion dollars a year. In addition to this, healthcare services industry that provides bad customer experience may lose out to competitors, which may even lead to the risk of being closed down. Not only that, the deterioration of poor healthcare services in the public image might give rise to socio-political problems in a country. People who aren’t aware of medical treatment may lose trust in healthcare professionals.

It is important for healthcare professionals to understand that their services aren’t just run for business purposes. Access to good healthcare is a basic human right for every individual, a potential threat that might place the future of the healthcare sector in jeopardy.

Common Challenges in Healthcare Customer Service

While most healthcare services are dedicated to providing a well-rounded customer experience, the process doesn’t turn out to be easy for healthcare professionals. They face a number of problems when it comes to delivering effective healthcare services. A few of those problems are discussed below.

Communication Gaps in Healthcare Facilities
 Owing to the diverse nature of patients, healthcare professionals have to encounter a lot of communication issues. This includes the likes of explaining complex medical outcomes in simpler words, language barriers, information retention, and information delivery to patients. On one hand, there is a set of patients who may be new to experiencing how healthcare facilities work. Due to their notion of medical care, this set of patients may expect a particular form of treatment rooted in traditional science and medicine. It is a painstaking process for healthcare professionals to explain how allopathic practice is different from home medicine. On the other hand, excessive use of search engines like Google has led to patients being bombarded with medical terminologies. Sometimes they tend to project their half-baked knowledge on medical professionals or might label themselves using medical jargon for their symptoms without a doctor’s consultation. In such cases, medical professionals are burdened with additional communicative work where they have to break down these patients’ preconceived notions and then proceed with treatment. Non-clinical staff pose another set of communication challenges wherein they have to deal with their own inexperience and shortfalls while bridging the communication gaps between healthcare professionals and customers. Inexperience, lack of skilled personnel, and unregulated job vacancies all add to the problems of miscommunication.

Administrative Roadblocks that Impact Patient Services
 Healthcare services are one of the most complex ecosystems. There are too many administrative blocks affecting it. Insurers, X-ray technicians, pathologists, non-clinical staff, billers, and receptionists all play a role in delivering effective healthcare. But it turns out that it is easier said than done, mainly because interdepartmental communication within these professionals is sparse. This might lead customers to experience billing difficulties or mis-billing, increasing their financial woes. Long waiting hours, queues, systemic scheduling challenges, and inefficient patient tracking become huge administrative blocks in administering effective customer care. Sometimes, the lack of tracking systems in laboratories has led to a number of misdiagnoses or wrong diagnoses, all of which add to increased patient frustration. This makes them lose hope in interventive effectiveness.

Challenges Faced by Small Clinics
 Administrative inefficiency, inexperienced staff, lack of resources, complex regulatory provisions, ineffective technological infrastructure, and low networking opportunities all present hurdles while small clinics are trying to provide effective healthcare services. In addition to this, competition from large-scale healthcare professionals who offer a broad and dynamic range of services might stop small clinics’ scope of increasing their marketing. Consequently, lower patient acquisition rates and reduced viability lead them to taking a back seat. In addition to this, small clinics face funding issues owing to their industrial newbie nature. All these constraints increase the magnification of the issue.

Proven Strategies to Improve Customer Service in Healthcare

It is important for healthcare professionals to arrive at a solution to tackle these problems in order to deliver effective customer services. This part of the subheading deals with some of the most common strategies that can prove to be useful for healthcare professionals to improve their customer servicing standards.

Enhancing Patient Communication

Most of the preconceived notions held by customers will get cleared if healthcare professionals enhance their communication strategies. Empathy is a very tricky area. On one hand, despite a lot of training, medical professionals might feel frustrated that their empathetic intentions might not be clearly communicated to the patients, leading them to grow frustrated. On the other hand, patients exhibit an element of impatience to unlearn their preconceived notions. Effective communication is a two-way street. However, to propel an effective communication channel and to foster empathy, healthcare professionals must develop and practise some soft skills. These include active listening, avoiding their own judgement about a situation to cloud patient handling, developing emotional intelligence, adapting their communication strategies to suit the needs of the situation, conflict management, a positive attitude and a sense of humour. While patients are in the process of getting their check-ups done, reports claim that while they go on to deal with administrative procedures, they are constantly filled with anxious thoughts. Regular reminders, appointments, scheduling calls, preponement and postponement announcements, and communication of practical difficulties will make the patients understand that they are felt and valued. If healthcare professionals initiate open-ended and empathetic communication before, after and during treatment, it becomes easier for patients to navigate their way through complex medical procedures.

Leveraging Technology to Improve Customer Service

Healthcare service providers can concentrate on the use of EHR (Electronic Health Records). EHRs provide systematised and automatic information reminders pertaining to the patient’s medical history. This saves time and resources used in getting work done through converting manual health records into a computerised format. In addition to this, the patients aren’t obliged to update their medical histories. Apart from this, healthcare service professionals can also use 24/7 accessible portals. These patient portals can be used to upload and download test results, prescription updates, pay bills, invoices, and health screenings. Patient portals come with a number of advantages: they are easy to navigate, simple to use and user-friendly, and they have options to integrate the right tools. FollowMyHealth, Medfusion Patient Portal, and Athena Communications are some of the potential portal options that healthcare services can consider. In addition to this, they can use SMS to give reminders on appointments, schedule appointments, inform customers about changes or cancellations of appointments, and invite feedback by providing a link. SMS has high open rates and quicker deliverability, which furthers quick responses. Apart from this, healthcare professionals can use emails, blogs, and phone calls to communicate with patients. Each of these technologies has its own advantages and disadvantages. However, if the healthcare services effectively leverage their use, it will cut down on a lot of manual labour, saving time, cost and resources.

The Role of Staff Training in Better Patient Experience

Empathy and the active soft skills required to practise empathy would not reach their fruition if they are not backed by proper training. The training programmes should be carefully curated in such a way that patient handling should result in larger patient acquisition. Soft skills are put to effective use only with training. For this, the organisation has to clearly inform their policies, goals and how they would align with their customer servicing standards. The next step involves skilled and experienced professionals evaluating the patient handling skills of their juniors. This smoothens the training process, as well as the audience will be open when they share their feedback. The use of technology, as mentioned in the above paragraph, should be put into effective use. Superior professionals should always be open to guiding and clearing the doubts of their junior professionals. Finally, they should establish clear goals and objectives related to customer service.

Benefits of Using SendHub for Healthcare Customer Service

SendHub is a platform service that can be used to send bulk messages that suit your business needs. It is a communication facilitation platform. SendHub aims to put SMS technology to best use while being committed to providing high-quality tools that efficiently propel your business to earn revenue, while it takes the pressure off channeling your text marketing efforts. It can also be used as a platform to send bulk messages for communication between healthcare professionals and patients.

Advantages of SMS communication in healthcare

SMS marketing campaigns boast high open rates, superior click-through ratios, timely and effective delivery management. All these advantages are applicable to communication between healthcare professionals and patients. SMS promptly reminds people about appointment dates, report collection dates, and appointment schedules in a time-sensitive manner, enabling them to stay focused on the context of their medical visit without having to worry about follow-ups. This further increases patient engagement and patient acquisition ratios.

How SendHub simplifies patient communication

SendHub provides healthcare professionals with pre-uploaded automated sending options scheduled to remind customers about their medical visits and consequent follow-ups. It enables two-way communication between healthcare professionals and patients by providing patients with an opt-in and opt-out feature. Its advanced software tools seamlessly integrate EMR and EHR databases with the healthcare system’s software, reducing the burden of manually verifying each upload.

Key features of SendHub for Healthcare customer service

SendHub provides a wide variety of tags and customisable grouping options with predetermined SMS templates that can be used as a tool for different medical documentation purposes. Unlike other platform tools, SendHub doesn’t charge any additional or add-on subscription fees for providing advanced feature tools. This helps healthcare professionals send bulk SMS while also providing them with the option to track their deliverability. Above all, it ensures that all communications made through the platform are compliant with HIPAA regulations.

Role of Technology in Modern Healthcare Customer Service

Effective use of technology in healthcare services will not only reduce the manual labour required to maintain and process data but will also dismantle the communication barriers created by the complexity of the health ecosystem.

Patient Portals and their contributions to better service

Patient Portals reduce the administrative burden placed on non-clinical staff. They are made accessible 24/7, and any person using the portal can easily communicate for varied purposes. It provides them access to their medical records, helps them schedule or reschedule appointments, and patients can request prescription refills, which reduces the use of phone calls. In addition to this, patients can access their billing through these portals, which reduces in-person hassle in the form of timing delays and queues.

The role of SMS and Email in Patient Communication

SMS has higher click-through and opt-in ratios, while email has pre-scheduled automation options that make it an essential multi-channel communication tool that could be used to systemise communication between healthcare professionals and patients. They can be used to remind patients of appointment schedules, get test results, provide health tips, and get updates on billing-related queries and deadlines. Using them smoothens the patient engagement process and makes sure that necessary information reaches the patients on time.

How Automated Appointment Reminders reduce No Shows

Automated appointment reminders are pre-scheduled tools that give prompt appointment reminders to customers without requiring them to be present at the front desk every time they need to know their appointment status. Their no-show rate reduces the tracking and follow-up efforts required by both non-clinical staff and customers. They can be sent through SMS, emails, or automated phone calls, reaching patients in a timely manner. This includes both appointment reminders and potential rescheduling options. It further enhances patient engagement by instilling a sense of responsibility in them to follow up on the reminders. Not only that, but it also reduces the administrative workload on multiple levels. Hence, the effectiveness of using technology-induced practices can never be undermined while navigating customer satisfaction in a complex ecosystem such as the healthcare industry

Best Practices for Delivering Excellent Customer Service in Healthcare

Health care service professionals can implement some of the following practices for delivering excellent customer service in health care.

Improving Staff Communication Skills

Essential communication is one of the key prerequisites for delivering good health care services. Training staff in active listening, adaptability, developing emotional intelligence, empathetic communication, and clear communication with respect to the nature of medical treatment is one thing. The other thing is creating imaginary situations using practical experiences in patient handling while training clinical and non-clinical personnel to hone their soft skills. They should also be made aware of the health care policies and customer service standards. These things can help the staff improve their communication skills.

Practices and Procedures for consistent patient services

Creating clear, non-ambiguous standardisation policies and adapting the policies to suit the changing nature of the healthcare ecosystem is the first step to provide consistent patient services. All the clinical and non-clinical staff should be made aware of such policies in addition to their inclusions, non-inclusions, and changes. Structured communication models like SBAR (Situation, Background, Assessment, Recommendation) can facilitate effective communication exchange among health care service professionals in providing improved patient care.

Using Patient Feedback to drive service improvement

The planned actions for providing better patient care by health care professionals will be reaped to their optimum potential only if they take the feedback and surveys of patients seriously. They can use feedback collection tools and implement the suggested changes. For example, Stanford Health incorporates hospitalisation strategies to create an empathetic and personalised environment to suit the needs of its patients. They regularly invite feedback using a mechanism that helps them look through their service and communication gaps. They use the feedback to deliver better hospitalisation strategies.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Q1: Why is customer service important in healthcare?

Not adopting means of effective customer service practices in health care might lead to squandering opportunities and diminishing returns. More importantly, it is the life of a person that would be at stake. Non-compliance with customer service might attract legal and socio-political consequences in addition to diminishing patient satisfaction and patronage. Hence, customer service should be the highest priority in healthcare industries.

Q2: How can healthcare facilities improve patient satisfaction?

There are several ways in which healthcare services can improve customer satisfaction. They can set clear expectations, encourage open communication, provide active empathy, reduce customer waiting times, and streamline appointments and schedules.

Q3: What role does communication play in healthcare customer service?

Communication is the fundamental fulcrum that holds together the relationship between healthcare professionals and patients. Effective communication creates trust and a sense of value in customers.

Q4: How can small clinics improve customer service on a budget?

By enhancing staff communication skills, utilising feedback tools, and standardising healthcare policies for consistency.

Q5: What technologies help enhance customer service in healthcare?

Patient Portals, Systemised EHRs, SMS, Email, Phone Calls, and blogs all help in customer service.

Q6: How do healthcare providers measure customer service success?

From the business point of view, they can measure success rates through increasing patient acquisition rates, and patient inflow rates, and from the customer service point of view through feedback and surveys.

Q7: What’s the difference between customer service and patient care?

Patient care services usually deal with diagnosis, prognosis, and checkups wherein communication is centred with the clinical staff. Whereas customer service focuses on customer interaction with non-clinical staff who may follow scheduling, billing, appointments, and clerical queries with the customers who might or might not be patients.

Q8: How do appointment scheduling systems improve patient experience?

Their automation options provide a predetermined time interval to send appointment reminders which do not require human intervention. This dismantles the manual tracking and follow-up efforts from both customers and patients.

Q9: How does proactive communication reduce patient complaints?

It sets clear expectations and standards as it helps patients see through how they will be serviced by healthcare professionals.

Q10: Why is empathy training important for healthcare staff?

Communication is the foundation of trust-building between healthcare officials and patients. Empathy fosters trustworthy communication, therefore, empathy is an essential prerequisite and soft skill among healthcare staff.

 

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