Customer service is a critical part of providing patient care. In an industry that’s rife with life-and-death situations, delivering superb customer service can greatly heighten the reputation of and trust in a healthcare provider. Moreover, providing quality customer service can also help medical and licensed practitioners avoid the staggering costs of dissatisfied patients. A study from Zhejiang University notes that patient satisfaction is one of the most important factors when measuring the success of a healthcare provider. Failing to respond to the concerns, queries, and questions of a patient can negatively affect patient satisfaction and lead to bad reviews and feedback, which can eventually affect the revenue of the healthcare provider.
However, not every healthcare provider has an on-call staff who can quickly attend to the queries of their patients. In many single provider offices, there’s often only one person managing everything for the doctor. If you’re a licensed practitioner with a small clinic who wants to improve your patient satisfaction rates, we’ve highlighted below some customer service essentials that you should strongly consider.
Responsive customer service
Every healthcare organization should be able to provide great customer service and expertly handle customer concerns. Some key customer service responsibilities in a healthcare organization are scheduling appointments, answering phones, settling patient insurance claims, and answering queries related to medical care and benefits information. For this reason, you should look into improving the customer service skills of your assistant or secretary. Thankfully, plenty of online platforms such as Udemy, HubSpot, and LinkedIn offer customer service certification programs that can help your staff hone their customer service skills.
The right healthcare customer service tool
You should equip your secretary with a customer relationship management (CRM) tool in order to maximize them. With a CRM tool, they can identify sales opportunities, take note of service issues, store patient contact and data, as well as facilitate communication with existing patients. When choosing the right CRM tool, a guide on review website Digital.com notes that you should check for features such as patient management, medical history records, and physician management. Furthermore, you should make sure that the CRM you select is HIPAA compliant to guarantee the security of patient data and avoid lawsuits down the line. Salesforce and Zendesk are some reputable software manufacturers that offer healthcare CRM tools.
A knowledgeable IT professional
As we’ve mentioned, the healthcare industry is a high-stakes sector that experiences a lot of life-and-death situations. With that said, it is critical for your customer service platform and infrastructure to work as smoothly as possible, especially if your practice is involved in emergency services. To ensure that patients experience a seamless service, you should have an IT professional routinely check your systems and infrastructure. This way, you can make sure that the software and tools that you and your assistant use operate smoothly.
Furthermore, providing superb customer service in healthcare also requires a comprehensive and accessible database. To secure your organization’s database, you employ the services database administrator. In an article from Maryville University, it is detailed that database administrators are responsible for organizing huge quantities of data, such as health records and patient information. These professionals often have a background in information technology and computer science, which enables them to build your organization a secure and organized database, and even adapt your legacy databases to newer and more efficient infrastructures.
Customer service chatbots
In a previous post discussing the ‘14 Benefits of Mobile Telehealth Services’, we pointed out that telehealth technology has experienced massive development in the last few years. But aside from specialized diagnostic devices, monitors, and sensors, chatbots are also a telehealth product that is quickly rising in popularity. Powered by artificial intelligence, customer support chatbots can respond to a patient’s inquiries by accessing your organization’s database. Customer service chatbots are a great addition to your healthcare practice as they can relieve your assistant with some of their customer service tasks, provide helpful responses in real-time, enhance business productivity, and boost customer satisfaction.
Every patient deserves the best care possible. To ensure that your practice provides top-notch customer service, do consider what we’ve discussed above.
Article by Iyanna Viggo
