Making a Lasting Impression
My dentist's assistant called me on my birthday. The local book store sent me a note to tell me that my favorite author had published a new book - and sent an order form. Amazon sent me a listing of the latest business books. That made me think - what are hospitals doing to proactively connect with customers in a meaningful way? They may not want to buy our services unless they really need them, but isn't that all the more reason to keep in touch?
Are we reaching out to customers after discharge, just to see how they're doing? Are we following up after a diabetes education class to check if patients want to enroll in a nutrition class? We build tremendous databases of customer/patient information. Who is doing anything with this valuable data?
We all know that resources are stretched thin. But the connections and loyalties that customers establish now will last for years. How are we working to deliver excellent and proactive customer service despite shrinking budgets and staff?
I'm interested in how you are addressing these questions.
Comments
I work in a maternity unit. Your comments caught my attention. We have a nurse that makes followup phone calls of every new mom after they go home, and reinforces one unit phone number with the patients. We also send out congratulation cards to all the patients, signed by each nurse that cared for them
Part of my role as a patient care manager is to make follow up phone calls for our post-op patients. The patients very much appreciate the call. Patients like to know they have not been forgotten and I am able to find new ways to improve patient satisfaction. The phone calls are extra work but are well worth the effort.
We just don't think in these terms. For some reason, the thought of co-branding, cross-merchandising, and up-selling is seemingly inappropriate. Perhaps when we make the obvious shift in thinking that our services improve health, then we can embrace best practises from other industries. Another random thought would be our obviously complex IT solutions. When devising a new IT platform, our focus is on clinical information integration and ignore the next level of IT utility. As always, you make us challenge conventional thinking. My thanks.
Obviously a follow-up call to a patient makes good sense. You want to ensure they are healthy, safe etc. How about the follow-up calls to people who have attended classes? Is there any research showing that the call reinforced a bond and made that person a future customer of health services?
We are calling all inpatient discharges, all emergency center discharges, and select outpatient discharges. We monitor our own Lifeline units and perform birthday calls. We call patients of hospital owned physician practices to be sure they have had routine colonoscopies as recommended for their age group (>50). We collect data for all discharge calls such as any concerns, need for follow-up on complaints, all appointments scheduled, did you fill your prescription, etc.
Our clients sign up those attendees at events, such as your Diabetes education class example, for the Diabetes topic in their e-Health newsletter and enter a referral source of Diabetes Education Class. From that point forward, they have the ability for ongoing, targeted communication in multiple ways. One way is through targeted messages under each health topic, i.e. under the Diabetes topic in the enewsletter each month you could promote Support Groups or cooking classes or the Wound Care Center. Another way is using the CRM tool that is part of the enewsletter to send a targeted email to just those subscribers who have attended the Diabetes Education Class - perhaps about that upcoming nutrition class - or to all subscribers who selected the Diabetes topic in their enewsletter. This type of follow up has been very effective. 68% of subscribers indicate a new awareness of the provider's services as a result of their enewsletter and almost 14% have already used services because of that new awareness.You build an ongoing relationship with this consumer by providing valuable health information, and you are able to send relevant hospital information to the right person at the right time.