Question

you are required to review the customer service delivery and monitoring for a healthcare business and base your responses on that.
You are required to analyse & review customer service delivery and monitoring system in the organisation and identify an opportunity to enhance the quality of service and products offered by the organisation. You will need to base your recommendations on your research of the existing delivery process and analysis of customer feedback and satisfaction.
You must submit a report with specific recommendations to improve customer service delivery. In the report you must mention the following:

1. How to identify the customer needs

2. Effective interpersonal and communication skills used identify and clarify customer needs, inform customers about available choices

3. Possible constraints or limitations in addressing and meeting customer needs

4. Relevant legislations that may impact business operations and customer service delivery

5. Complaint handling procedure

6. Available options/flexibility or opportunities offered to clients to promote and enhance services and products to customers

7. Process to review service delivery using evidences like feedback forms, questionnaires, surveys, customer complaints, reports etc

8. Customer services related reports and documents

9. Recommendations on improving the customer service delivery of the organisation

Answer 1

Health care business these days are changing rapidly and to stand apart from the competition, we need to understand the customer voice, focus on that goal and improvise our delivery to establish a robust customer service delivery system. To accomplish this we need to do the following practices:

1) Identifying Customer needs.

• Behavioral Customer Segmentation- based on focusing the needs of patients by reviewing their medical case history, and their demographic information. For e.g. Grouping heart patients of particular age group.
• Understand the customer journey of that segment by seeing their medical history and requirements. Interact with some of the customers to understand the pain-points.
• Extensive research over the available technologies to identify that could target the customer needs effectively.

2) Interacting with the customers with effective communication skills

• The medical practitioner needs to develop communication skills to pickup the pain-points and understand the customer needs
• The timing of interaction with the customer and the right stakeholder (viz. guardian, or family member of patient) is vital to understand the customer medical history, their feasibility of availing medication

3) Identifying the constraints and limitations of targeting customer needs

• The lack of particular medical infrastructure and technology to target a particular customer segment for a particular medical history needs to be identified
• The budget constraints of the healthcare institution to avail the infrastructure or the medical expertise required to operate needs to be identified. Then the recommended technology or the manpower needs to be availed
• Identifying the customers' feasibility to avail the medication and availing the apt insurance schemes

4) Identify the regulatory laws that can affect the following

• The medical technology newly acquired to solve customer needs
• The intake and prescriptions of medical drugs in terms with IMA, WHO and international medical institutions.
• Updating with the doctor-patient contracts and relevant regulations.

5) Reviewing the customer complaints handling procedure

• Segregating the possible subjects for customer complaints like medical claims and insurance, medications and operations, etc.
• Assigning the right personnel and resources for each subject that can tackle the issue with expertise.
• Standardizing the process of customer complaints resolution for each subject as standardization is the key to achieve excellence in Service Management.

6) Provision of options to the clients

• This can be by providing apt options for solving a medical issue, This can be achieved by identifying customer needs appropriately
• Provision of choices of medical insurance schemes. This can be achieved by teaming up with the right insurance companies or by contract agreements with companies within their HR policies

7) Collecting customer feedback

• It is necessary to review the newly established customer service delivery system by understanding the customer feedback
• Utilize mechanisms like feedback forms, surveys, questionnaires to be filled while discharging and maintain them in the customer database, linking them with the customer reports and medical history.
• Replicate the above step for customer complaint redressal too and maintain them in the customer database.
• Understand the overall feedback for all the customer segments by data mining and to track the customer service delivery system progress and implement the changes for that particular customer segments.

8) Always maintain the customer related documents like medical history, progress report in a repository, from which important and relevant trends can be data mined

9) To improvise the overall customer service delivery system of the organization

• Review the whole business process from admitting a patient for the first time, right up to their discharge and follow up procedure
• Break the entire business process into smaller sub components
• Standardize the procedures for every business process, similar to the case of Narayana Hrudalaya Heartcare in India, wherein they have literally standardized the heart surgery process like an industrial conveyor belt and have achieved excellence in service management of heart care internationally.
• Always segment the customers by needs, maintain their data repository, and understand the needs for each customer segment.