The danger of ‘glossing’ over Customer Service
18 February 2010
Customer Service is always at the forefront of our mind at LMH – after all it is one of the cornerstones (or focuses) upon which we have been established. Over the last week or so this has been even more the case for me personally as I have been a close observer of how the NHS deals with its customers (otherwise known as patients or their families).
More of the NHS shortly, however, an example of how not to treat customers was in the news this week regarding a pensioner from Dorset. It seems that the retired office worker popped out on a shopping trip and purchased a £3.75 can on non-toxic green paint to do a spot of DIY at home. Unfortunately, he was unable to travel home as he was denied access to the bus presumably in case he used the paint for graffiti – I suppose the bus may have been running on bio-fuel and was 'green' enough but it does seem a bit silly to me. Surely Customer Service is about doing the right thing but also about using a bit of common sense.
Turning to my recent experiences of the NHS I don't really want to go in to the details other than to say how disappointing it has all been. People attend hospitals as customers (either patients or family members) at times which are very worrying to them and are all too often met with apathy and even sometimes contempt.
As I have already said Customer Service is right at the top of our agenda and I would like to think that we would never treat customers in such a way. I am very keen that we do, however, acknowledge when we get it wrong – put it right – and learn lessons for the future. Our complaints procedures, are, therefore, very important to help with this and we should actively encourage complaints so that we can learn and improve.
Complaints are a means for our customers to give us a view of when they are unhappy and other ways need to be established to identify when things go well and where we make the lives of our customers better. Two good examples that we are using to do this are, firstly, our use of a third party independent company to carry out all of our satisfaction surveys. Voluntas (who are the company we use) get truly independent feedback from our customers rather than filtering it through the lens of forms filled in while staff look over the shoulder of customers. This cutting edge approach will help us in getting real customer insight rather than just chasing good scores or a few 'green ticks' on a balanced scorecard (perhaps drawn with green paint!!).
The second area which is important is third party assessment of whether we provide a good service. We are in the midst of an assessment against the Government's Customer Service Excellence Standard and hopefully this will show that we are providing an excellent service – not because the badge is important but because an independent assessment is of far more value than self praise.
If we get these things right then we will know exactly what kind of service we give and the pensioner from Dorset can use it to gloss over his own cracks.
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