Customer service: Making it your claim to fame
By Renee Hall

Here are some eye openers regarding customer service:
Patient dissatisfaction costs the average practice 10.6% of annual revenue.
Most patients who have a bad experience with your practice will not tell you.
But on average, a dissatisfied patient will tell 10 other persons.
The cost of retaining a patient is only 20% of the cost of establishing a new one.
And, you can increase sales by 30% by providing excellent customer service to
your existing customers.

The purpose of your practice is to help people hear well again, but to stay in business, you must do this at a profit. Patients are not necessarily looking for the least expensive product. What they are looking for is best value for their money. Good customer service plays a critical role in providing that value.

Components of Customer Service
Customer service is akin to good relationship building. It is a process that makes the patient feel trusting, secure, relaxed, and well disposed toward you, your staff, and your products. It consists of showing your patients that your practice cares about them, understands their needs, and is motivated to resolving their hearing health needs.
It is an attitude, a “culture” within your practice, that creates loyal, and satisfied patients. And all staff should be a part of this culture.

Growing Importance of Customer Service
Excellent customer service is more important today than ever before. Practices face increased competition. Patients have more choices. We have better educated patients who are better informed about hearing impairment causes, their potential solutions, and in many cases their potential costs.
So, it is important for you to offer a consistent, positive experience to each patient that can be repeated. And you need to do this better than your competition can.

How Do We Give Excellent Customer Service?
Building trust is at the head of the list. You must be someone patients can trust. You must be honest, sincere, and confident in your own ability to help persons hear well again.
Learn to recognize the personality style of your patients, and adapt your personality style to fit theirs. Improve all aspects of your practice that can affect patient satisfaction with your services. These include your hours, access, scheduling, the initial contact, and back office operations. All must be patient oriented. The experience that the customer has in your office must be consistent and be repeatable.
Particularly important are the thoroughness and tone of the initial contact, the way you and your staff comport yourselves, your professionalism, your products, and your ability to identify needs, meet expectations, resolve problems, and follow through.
As the manager/owner, oversee all areas of customer service, and prepare your staff for their roles in achieving patient satisfaction. Start by identifying their strengths and deficiencies in dealing with patients. Remedy any deficiencies with training and refocusing.
Develop a customer service mission statement. Communicate it widely and expect all staff to live it.
Be aware of patient concerns by listening to them, as well as to your staff and colleagues. Develop patient satisfaction goals. Motivate staff to achieve them, and reward them for doing so.

Making Appointments
When making an appointment with an established patient, the front office staff should be trained to repeat the time and day slowly, having the patient repeat it. If in person, give an appointment card with your business card on the reverse.
For all appointments, call and confirm the day prior, and call and reschedule
no-shows or canceled appointments.
With first-time appointments, mail to the patient a copy of your office brochure, the in-take history questionnaire, and hearing aid information, including realistic expectations and reasons for binaural amplification. Also, send them a COSI (Customer Oriented Scale of Improvement) or similar questionnaire, and have the patient bring it and the
in-take questionnaire to the appointment.

Customer Service with a Personal Touch
Always smile, whether on the phone or face to face. Be welcoming and offer patients coffee, water, or refreshments. Greet patients by name -- even new ones. Having them sign in gives you their names so that you can personalize your contact with them.
The staff should always acknowledge a person entering the office even if on the phone or busy with another customer.
With the older generation, shake hands, touch the shoulder, and sit side by side if possible. With baby boomers, use a more direct, less physical contact with an open, relaxed style. In general, try not to sit behind a desk or table when discussing finances or devices.
Have fee schedules posted, along with procedures of how services are carried out and general policies on such things as returns, exchanges, refunds, and warranties.
Give all customers the same quality of care, including children.

Communicating with Your Patients
Remember the old adage: “You never get a second chance to make a good first impression.”
For patients who have just had a hearing aid recommendation, this is the time to convert the patient’s fears of making the wrong decision into the conviction that your product and its support is what is needed. Answer questions, provide literature on recommended devices, realistic expectations, and advantages of binaural amplification.
Provide a realistic date of availability and delivery, warranties covered, a clear statement of specifications, a simple ordering procedure, and a prompt order acknowledgment after the visit. Pre-schedule a follow-up for impressions if they decide to wait, and call a few days later to answer any questions.
For patients who have just ordered, send them home with care and maintenance information for hearing aids. Audiologists should make follow-up calls the next day to reinforce the purchasing decision, to express confidence for a successful fitting, and to review realistic expectations
For patients who have just been fitted, call them at home the evening of the fitting to inquire about length of use and comfort of fit. Do not ask how they are hearing. Save that for the follow-up.
Reinforce that you felt it went well and that they had a good fitting. Remind them of the next appointment. Schedule the first follow up within one to two weeks. Your patients will remember your personal touch.

Assisting After Delivery
Always preschedule follow-ups. Require at least one visit after the fitting, but if the patient is doing fine, let him or her cancel subsequent visits.
Offer easy-to-follow explanations and guides for care and use, and train your staff to provide simple services like inspections and cleanings, changing batteries, fixing broken battery doors, and providing instructions for cleaning.
Specify policies for replacement, remake, or repair that may be needed after the sale.

Handling Complaints
Be thankful for customers who complain, for you still have the opportunity to make them happy. All staff should know what to do when a complaint is given and be able to handle it promptly and properly. Empower the staff to take immediate action if appropriate, delegating the decision-making ability and minimizing the need for approvals.
AHAA promotes five basic steps for handling complaints:
1. Probe: Ask questions, and identify the problem.
2. Listen: Don’t interrupt; take notes, stay calm, and polite.
3. Ask: Ask the patient what resolution he or she expects; agree on a
solution and how and by when the complaint will be resolved.
4. Adhere: Take steps to abide by the solution and its schedule.
5. Follow-up: Ensure that the complaint is quickly and fairly dealt with, and you will have a loyal patient in the future.

Measuring Results: Feedback
Once you have customer service standards, have ways to measure them and the results you expect from your staff. As AHAA’s COO Tina Soika puts it: “The measurement of customer satisfaction needs to be a variable that is just as carefully watched and measured as the company’s sales and profitability figures. What gets measured, gets managed. If you want to make commitment to customer satisfaction integral to the culture of your practice, find a way to measure it and hold people accountable for it.”
One of the best ways to gauge your level of customer service is to ask your patients how your practice is doing. Keep customer service surveys brief, and pay careful attention to them. Patient feedback is critical to your success. Share it with the staff.
Areas that surveys cover include patients’ experience with the initial contact, general office courtesies and promptness in responding to inquiries, ease of scheduling, staff efficiency -- especially via the telephone -- product and procedures knowledge, office cleanliness, the thoroughness of explanations about test results and needs, and the range of products and pricing available. You can also use the survey to solicit referrals. If you and your staff have achieved the level of excellence in customer service that you seek, your patients may provide valuable potential customer leads.
Doing surveys by mail is fine, but make sure they have prepaid postage. Customers should not have to pay to give you their opinions.
Discuss customer service issues – good and bad -- at staff meetings. Concentrate on skills and attitudes required by staff. Enhance their customer relations and communications skills. And provide training to remedy any deficiencies.

Renee Hall, BC-HIS, is Manager of American Hearing Aid Associates’ Southwest Region. Correspondence to the author at rhall@ahaanet.com.

Written by the staff of the American Hearing Aid Associates