Customer service key to happy staff and patients
Building relationships
Making customer service personal can improve the access staff person's own morale. "Patients come in sick, injured, hurt and scared. You have to make them feel at ease while getting all the information you need," says Connie Campbell, director of patient access at Mercy Medical Center in Oshkosh, WI. "That is a real challenge!"
"If you see the same person all the time and now have a name they like to go by, you don't call them Harold when you know they like to be called Skip," says Kevin McAndrews, system vice president of patient financial services for PeaceHealth in Bellevue, WA. Staff are told to answer the questions: Who is sitting in front of you? Why are they here? Have you seen them before? If so, can you relate something to the prior time you saw them?
If a patient's last visit was within 60 days, staff do a quick verification instead of asking patients to recite a lot of redundant information. "Say you have the cancer patient coming back for chemotherapy. Well, the last thing they want to do is go through every single piece of insurance and demographic information," says McAndrews. "So instead of asking 'What's your address?' staff will lighten it up by saying, 'Are you still at 321 Cherry Drive? You haven't moved, have you?' And instead of looking at the screen typing, you are looking at the person."
Campbell says that in addition to having the right skills and the ability to multitask, "the right personality type is everything when it comes to happy access staff."
"In the past, you could hire somebody with good customer service skills and that would be enough. Now you need someone with a much more in-depth type of knowledge," says Campbell. "Access still needs outstanding customer service skills and also has to understand the insurance world and have good financial counseling skills."
Campbell says she has noticed that younger access staff typically have computer skills but they may not be the right personality type. "It's customer service 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You must be able to prioritize what is needed at the moment, while remembering that the patients' illness is the only thing on their mind," says Campbell. In the ED, for example, you may be dealing with a mother with a sick child in her arms, but you still need to get a multitude of information besides their name and date of birth, so health care workers are accessing the right account.
"For patient access, the whole hospital is our customer," says Campbell. "There isn't a department we don't touch. We do data collection for all the staff in the hospital, and we make or break patient flow, so to speak. We do things as much as possible before the patient even leaves home. For access, customer service has very deep layers."
Every year, Mercy Medical Center comes up with a customer service theme, and everything access does to improve service is geared around that theme. One recent theme involved envisioning each patient as a family member and thinking how you'd want them treated. Another theme asked staff to pretend that everyone coming in the door is walking on a red carpet. This year's theme is "the light is always on."
"This means that staff know we are always here for the patient, and so they know it is always OK to come up with new ideas," says Campbell.
The theme also came from a patient telling access staff that he felt as though he had gotten five-star service. "We live in Wisconsin and winters can be bad. He was nervous traveling from out of town, so ended up arriving to the hospital at 4 in the morning vs. his surgery scheduled time of 9," says Campbell. "He stated he was glad someone was here. He also stated the person who greeted him made him feel so welcomed."
Making customer service personal can improve the access staff person's own morale.You have reached your article limit for the month. Subscribe now to access this article plus other member-only content.
- Award-winning Medical Content
- Latest Advances & Development in Medicine
- Unbiased Content