How to help your staff strengthen customer service: a do-able approach

In today's high-pressure, speed-oriented environment, health-care managers face the challenge of helping their staff achieve a higher level of customer service without overwhelming them. Although raising the bar on customer service is crucial to stay competitive, if managers expect staff to institute many customer service improvements at once, staff often respond with confusion, frustration, and resistance. Then results are disappointing, and managers flounder in their efforts to inspire staff to stretch toward higher standards. By prioritizing customer service goals and selecting one goal at a time as the focus, you and your team can institute and sustain improvements successfully. Whether the goal is improving "meeting and greeting," response time, handling complaints more effectively, providing better instructions, or other customer service goals, the one-goal-at-a-time focus makes it possible for staff to understand the desired change, embrace it, learn it, practice it, and savor positive results. By following a simple 6-step process and applying this same process to one goal after another, staff become familiar with the process and it becomes easier to apply in pursuit of future goals. The result: a higher return on the investment of your efforts and your staff's precious time and attention.