Customer Service in Radiology: Satisfying Your Patients and Referrers

Radiology has long been a service-oriented specialty. Although physicians in other specialties have direct interactions with patients, radiologists' interactions with patients are often indirect, most often occurring as a direct result of another provider's order. As such, radiology practices have had to focus on two distinct groups, patients and ordering providers, to grow their businesses and retain their patients. One could argue that during the past 2 decades, many of the most visible customer service initiatives in radiology practices have been directed toward the ordering provider. These initiatives have included implementing picture archiving and communication systems to improve image distribution and availability, voice dictation systems to decrease report turnaround time, computerized order entry to ease the ordering process, and structured reporting to improve the readability of the radiology report. As the practice of radiology is evolving to become more patient oriented, it is clear that the specialty needs to pivot and implement more initiatives that directly benefit patients. In this article, the concepts of customer service and a radiology department's primary customer are defined and discussed, and the concept of service quality is introduced. In addition, the author highlights the five dimensions of service quality: reliability, assurance, tangibles, empathy, and responsiveness. Each dimension is described in detail, first by using an archetypal business example and then by using an example of a project that has been successfully implemented in the author's radiology department. ^©RSNA, 2018.