Saturday, July 19, 2008

Is Telephone Mystery Shopping A Good Call?

Everyone I know has been on the receiving end of a really bad telephone experience.It may have been a rude employee, an excessive hold time or a total lack of communication. Worse yet, all of the above and then being disconnected!

Retail businesses and a variety of call centers use Mystery Shopping to monitor and improve customer service. The healthcare and long term care industries are also seeing the need and value of this service.

Telephone Mystery Shopping is a service by which a caller's first impression is thoroughly evaluated. The “Mystery Caller” uses a detailed questionnaire with a step by step account of their call. An experienced mystery shopper will provide a well written, comprehensive narrative summarizing their total experience. Forms may be customized to suit your organization or facility, addressing specific concerns or monitoring compliance with policies and procedures. You may also find standardized forms that include basic customer service questions but are designed specifically for the healthcare or long term care industries. The areas evaluated are:

• Basic Phone Etiquette
• Scheduling
• Automated Phone Systems
• Hold Times
• Staff Product and Procedure Knowledge
• Staff Interpersonal Skills
• Referral Tracking
• Compliance with Policies and Procedures

I recently ran reports and aggregated scores of the thousands of medical mystery shopping calls in our database. The most telling questions we include on all our custom and standard forms; "Based on your telephone experience, would you schedule an appointment with this facility? Would you recommend it to others? The results... drum roll please; nearly 25% answered NO.
That should tell you how damaging a poor first impression may be to a practice or facility.

The good news; monitoring scores from the beginning of a mystery shopping program, we have seen marked improvement immediately following presentation of initial evaluations. Busy with the daily operations of a practice or business; employees are simply not aware of the patient’s or client’s perception. Once informed, most are happy to make the changes necessary to improve patient/client satisfaction.

Mystery shopping whether it is a Total New Patient Experience, a Walk-In Visit Telephone Mystery Shopping or Patient Interviews is an excellent means to measure and improve the level of customer service. When presented correctly to employees, it’s a non-threatening process; it is a training tool and a means to encourage, praise and reward employees.

Telephone mystery shopping is a good place to start if you think the phone skills within your organization are less than perfect or you are seeing attrition; it is also the only way to measure the quantity of new patients/clients a practice or facility may be losing before they even get in the door.

Explaining what I do for a living is never a brief conversation and always opens the floodgates to the many stories of the inquirers less than perfect experiences with their healthcare providers. My mother has at least one a week for me; I put her on hold.

No comments: