Healthcare’s Evolving Role in Service Excellence.

On 23^rd July 2022, attended a session organized by Service Knowledge Base (SKB) on Healthcare’s Evolving Role in Service Excellence. Speaker was Netra Tandon, Head Service Excellence, Aster DM Healthcare.

The key takeaways are:

Service Excellence is a value system on which the success of any brand depends. Creating a unique patient experience will allow hospitals not only to win the game, but it will allow them to change the rules of the game altogether. Service is valued more especially by a healthcare customer, who is willing to pay 4X the price. Recent studies say emotions play a larger role than analysis in service settings. Decisions of patients to choose hospitals are 70% emotion based - trust, transparency, confidence, integrity, etc.

A successful Service Excellence framework is to establish a formal voice of the customer program, document and deliver on service standards, hire the right talent, equip employees to deliver on excellence, and create valuable and memorable experiences.

Every customer journey & feedback is unique. It is very important to know what customer is saying about the healthcare service provider. This can be achieved e.g. by senior leaders performing “Manager on Duty” roles at IPD, and OPD intermittently to know what the customer is saying. Customer Experience is the key to exceeding customers’ expectations in the Healthcare sector. Business leaders need advanced analytics, the ability to deeply understand customers, get insights, and tell compelling stories. Technology plays a great role in healthcare - establishing communication touch points e.g. text messages indicating the status of reports, automatic reminders for the next appointment with the doctor, etc. it’s also about continuity of care once a patient leaves the hospital so they have a quality outcome. These are called PROMs (Patient Reported Outcome Measurement) and PREMs (Patient Reported Experience Measurement). From there, patients can more proactively drive their own wellness plans.

As a customer or patient-focused business, healthcare employees must live and breathe company values, be committed to helping customers solve problems, and be willing to go above and beyond to serve their needs. To achieve service excellence, total employee involvement, teamwork & active cross-functional participation is very important.

Service Recovery - Winning Back a Customer is very important for Healthcare Sector. Healthcare has adopted many best practices from the hospitality industry. Service Wallet is one such concept wherein a frontline employee can spend a certain amount in a day without waiting for approval from seniors to enhance the service experience. A small gesture like sending a bouquet of flowers with an apology note goes a long way.

How do you know if your customer service is living up to customer expectations? The answer is in KPIs. Some Key Performance Indicators in Service Excellence Journey for Healthcare Sector are C-SAT, NPS, Customer Retention Score, Average Resolution Time, Complaint Escalation Rate, Customer Effort Score, People Competency Development, Develop Effective / Efficient Quality Management System.

Why Service Excellence is required in Healthcare? Health industry and its components owe it to the clients they have decided to serve. With excellent, value-based services, there will be more clients, and there will be maximal utilization of services, resulting in enough revenues and income to continue to operate and to expand when and as needed. An advice for those who will manage Service Excellence in hospitals - the journey should start early and one has to be very perseverant as there are a lot of challenges and new things to learn.

The session concluded with the speaker recommending a few books to read on service excellence. They are Service Culture Handbook by Jeff Toister, Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsien, Be our Guest by Theodore Kini, Human Sigma by Jim Asplund & John Fleming.