Healthcare is one of the sectors where exceptional customer support is critical. Pretty contrary to what people usually think. At its core, customer support in the healthcare industry plays a crucial role. Customers are primarily dependent on the quality of care provided to them. They depend on the day-to-day interaction between them and the staff.
Hence, every healthcare company employee (whether they directly interact with the patient or not) is potentially a customer support representative. It is their collective job to ensure that the patients receive the best care possible.
What Does Best Care Signify?
Good healthcare support is a necessity rather than a luxury. Usually, healthcare organizations think that patients are not entitled to a superior experience. And it is probably the biggest mistake our industry makes.
MD, Chief Experience Officer at Cleveland Clinic
To provide the best level of healthcare, the providers must exhibit the following traits:
- Empathy and Care
- Efficiency and Professionalism
- Timely flow of Information
- Patient Privacy and Confidentiality
Digitization of healthcare support has enabled a timely solution to all the patient queries and an efficient flow of Information. Confidentiality and data security are essential aspects of digitized healthcare.
Research shows that 70% of patients want to connect with their healthcare providers instantly without waiting. They think that they could benefit from faster access to healthcare information.
Another report states that around two-thirds of clients care about the privacy of their personal health records and only 39% of them felt that their health data were safe and secure. Most patients in American hospitals consider privacy and security (of medical information) as the critical factor in choosing a healthcare provider.
Lately, many healthcare providers and organizations have started to move towards digitization. But they still have a long way to go. Hence, organizations across the healthcare ecosystem must pay attention to customer support. In this guide, we will talk about some tips that can help healthcare organizations provide quality healthcare support successfully. But first, let’s look at the importance of customer support in healthcare.
Importance of Customer Support in Healthcare
The quality of customer care directly impacts the health of the patient. The quality of interactions between the staff and patients directly guides the care. Every employee should approach their job with a customer-service mindset. Here are some reasons why customer support is essential in the healthcare industry:
1. Seamless Patient Experiences
Having the most highly skilled and top tier educated physicians and nurses is not enough. You need to provide a high-quality experience to your patients consistently. Even a minor inconvenience may keep them from recognizing your outstanding healthcare delivery. Hence, if your goal is to develop lasting relationships with patients, a seamless patient experience is necessary.
2. Happy Patients = Retention and Referral
Healthcare is crucial, and people usually rely on word-of-mouth references and other patient’s experiences. Excellent customer support can help you create a loyal fan base. Hence keeping your patients happy should be your utmost priority.
A satisfied and happy patient is more likely to return to you whenever they need. Plus, they’ll refer your services to other people as well. You just must facilitate exceptional customer care for them. Your reputation is vital in determining whether patients seek you out in the future or not.
3. Lousy Customer Support Reflects Bigger Issues
Poor customer support is an indicator of your business’s underlying problems that need an in-depth approach to solve. Hospitals that deliver customer support excellently are likely to have robust systems and workflows in place. While the ones with poor customer support usually struggle with data quality, staff training, and workflow inefficiencies.
Your customer support is also an indication of underlying issues within your service performance. Organizations that provide excellent customer support are likely to have refined processes and systems to streamline their workflows. Organizations with poor customer support usually have loopholes in analyzing staff performances that lead to inefficient results.
4. Effective Communication
Effective communication is essential to provide the best medical support. Staying in touch with patients regarding checkups or medicines is utterly essential. But it would be highly inconvenient for the patient to visit the hospital every time they need help. In this case, healthcare helpdesk software can help you provide the needed solution to your patients.
The healthcare helpdesk software eliminates the need for patients to visit the hospital again and again. They can mail their queries to the concerned person. The helpdesk software can automatically register these issues and assign them to the concerned person.
How to Provide Good Healthcare Customer Support?
Patients expect much more than just treatment from their healthcare provider. They expect utmost care! The end-to-end customer experience includes many digital touchpoints, and each of these touchpoints plays a crucial role in healthcare customer support.
1. Select the Right Customer Support Tool
The tools and technology you use are a direct reflection of how efficient your customer support will be. The very first touchpoint is the communication channels that patients use to contact you to report an issue. Good customer support ensures that a holistic view of the kind of services and products a company offers is at easy disposal.
An ideal healthcare help desk software allows customers to be in touch with healthcare organizations 24*7. Patients no longer need to wait for office hours or be on hold on the phone lines to resolve fundamental ground-level issues. They can access their healthcare information from the respective providers, access their medical history, and seek advice and treatment all from one place. It can also streamline the medicine management process, which eventually leads to better healthcare. Hence it would help if you made the right choice while choosing your healthcare support portal.
2. Develop a Patient-First Mentality
It is essential to note and acknowledge that customer support in healthcare differs from customer support in other industries. Seeing a doctor or visiting a hospital can be an intimidating experience.
Everything from the administrative staff, the waiting room experience, the appointments, visits with the doctors and nurses, and the follow-up sessions play a vital role in making the patient feel comfortable and at ease. Hence, you need to have a well-thought-out plan and keep a patient-friendly support environment.
3. Analyze Feedback from Your Patients
An intelligent healthcare organization learns from their patient’s feedback and their bad experiences. Get your hands on your customer feedback and data. Collect authentic feedback from your patients and get valuable insights on how you’re progressing on your quest to provide good customer support. If patients struggle to book an appointment, you can resolve it quickly. Or, if you find out that your patients are facing difficulties in tracking their follow-up appointments, you can resolve it as quickly as possible.
You can address and analyze the communication skills of the medical staff as well as patient experience demographics. Knowing patient experience is invaluable. A helpdesk tool can serve as a diagnostic tool and help adjust for better patient care in the future.
It is all about the data.
The healthcare sector relies on reports and numbers to find out the vital stats of a patient. Getting the wrong data means playing with a life! An ideal healthcare help desk is the very first line of defense against such grave mistakes. Channel your data from paper to the hands of doctors and ensure that a patient can undergo the best possible healthcare.
4. Improve Your Follow-Up Practices
Once a patient has received medical services, the next natural step would be to ensure that they can sustain good health and not relapse. A simple feedback email or a few minutes on the phone call can help you establish a personal connection with the patient.
You can address their doubts regarding any medical information empathetically. You can also leverage your healthcare help desk to carry out this process in a simplified and effective way. It is an essential part of customer success as well.
DeskXpand: The Ideal Choice of Healthcare Industry
There is no denial of the fact that customer support is now a deep-rooted aspect of healthcare. The healthcare industry is starting to embrace healthcare help desk software as the ultimate solution to all their problems. A healthcare help desk software mixed with deep-rooted customer-focused strategies can help you serve better and enable patients to get quicker and refined medical care, which they deserve.
Regardless to say healthcare help desk software is indeed a boon for healthcare organizations. So, now that you know all the benefits of implementing helpdesk software for your healthcare organization, it is time for you to provide a well-coordinated helpdesk to your patients.
DeskXpand is a robust, secure, and flexible healthcare helpdesk software. It lets you connect seamlessly and understand all your patient data—wherever it lives. DeskXpand is known for its scalability and its flexible personalization features. We can help you configure your workflow on the channels of your choice and empower you to serve a top-notch digital healthcare experience to your patients.
We are ISO27001 certified healthcare portal experts with 14+ years of industry experience. Request a personalized demo to know more.
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https://www.deskxpand.com/blog/how-to-ace-customer-support-in-healthcare/
