Know your customer
You can look at quality metrics and cost comparisons all you want, but not everything is subject to measurement. So don’t leave the customer out of the value equation.
“The first step, of course, is to know your customer,” Berthelsen says. “And the best way to know your customer is if you can participate in receiving the service or the product that you sell directly.”
KelseyCare, the company’s health benefits plan, is available to all employees. But even if your employees don’t directly partake of your service, they’re still customers at some point, so they have a general perspective on what customers appreciate.
“Everyone has an intuitive sense for what is true value with regard to our patients’ perspective because at one time or another, we’re all patients,” Berthelsen says.
That insight can start to fill the gap in feedback where measurements alone won’t do. But in some cases, measurements and instinct won’t give you the whole story about customer satisfaction. It’s one thing to measure waiting time in minutes, for example, but you should also consider what patients think about that wait.
“With regards to the things that depend upon patient validation — as to whether or not they like it better or not—– we have a program called the M.A.G.I.C. program, which is an acronym for Making A Good Impression Count,” Berthelsen says.
It’s a real-time feedback program where patients are polled about various areas of the clinic at the time of their visit, as opposed to receiving a card in the mail weeks later. About every three months, Kelsey-Seybold surveys patients about their experience at the front desk, with a nurse or with a doctor by handing them a card with six questions and room for comments.
The cards give a scale of response options for questions such as how patients’ waiting times match their expectations or how likely they are to recommend the clinic to a friend. The questions are quick and simple enough that patients can drop cards in a collection box before they leave and the responses get back to employees within a couple days.
“We have indicators when we’re doing things that improve the quality by these quality metrics that we mentioned, but we also know when our patients like what we do,” Berthelsen says.