New Government regulations mean that all acute NHS Trusts are now required to ask both inpatients and Emergency Department patient’s one standard question known as the Friends and Family Test. The test asks: “How likely are you to recommend us to friends and family if they needed similar care or treatment?” It aims to encourage patient feedback, showing patients that their views and experiences matter to the NHS and improve patient care.
All public sector organisations face fresh challenges. Today’s savvy consumers are familiar with a wide variety of experiences from a broad range of products and services and their expectations are high — a challenge for many organisations as they struggle to maintain service levels with shrinking budgets and smaller workforces.
Here, our Customer Champion Sue Hedaux, looks at lessons the NHS and other healthcare organisations can learn from the retail industry to help exceed patients’ growing expectations for what the ideal experience looks and feels like.
Doing more with less is the new mantra in the current economic environment. While first impressions count, hospitals have a great opportunity to demonstrate the quality of care their whole team provides over the treatment period. Public sector organisations can also learn from savvy retailers who are using technology to further exploit the talents of their workforce and build an emotional connection to customers.
Tip #1 — Ask more than one question to find out why your patients felt like they did during their visit
Hospital Trusts are mandated to ask just one question, the Friends and Family Test. Retailers have learnt that asking the right questions allows them to understand how they are doing in looking after their customers across a range of issues that add up to the perfect customer experience. One question gives you a top line measure but does not tell you what is causing either great or poor experiences – and this is critical information to enable you to drive performance improvement.
The right set of questions allows you to understand how you are doing on the underlying drivers of great care so you can focus your limited resources on making the improvements that will make the most difference to your patients.
Tip #2 — Focus on positives by engaging your employees
Empathica’s industry leading programmes encourage customers to leave positive feedback for employees. When a customer leaves positive feedback about a colleague an alert is sent to the store so individuals can be recognised by the store manager and thanked for the great care they gave to the customer. This “real” feedback, in the customers own words, is highly motivating and encourages colleagues to engage with the programme and strive to deliver great customer experience.
In Empathica’s patient experience programme with Surrey and Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust, the patient compliments have proved to be really popular with the ward teams. Nurses print off the compliments for their portfolios and the programme has extended beyond the required Friends and Family Test departments at the request of the other teams, who want to be able to receive patient commendations too.
Tip #3 — Drive action from your data
While having easy visibility of customer satisfaction scores for every store across a retail brand can be a huge step forward, the real value of the feedback is when it is harnessed to make the changes that make customers happier and drive commercial return.
Retailers have shown that a real benefit of Empathica’s customer feedback programmes is the ability to support each individual store to implement an action plan based on what their own customers are saying about them. Empathica’s online reporting and action planning tool ensures every ward has a ward specific plan built using the best practise library within the action planning tool.
Tip #4 — Use social media to drive advocacy
The old adage is, “Do a good job, and a consumer tells three friends. Do something wrong and they tell ten.” Word-of-mouth is now even more important thanks to social media. People now have the means to tell everyone in their social circle about their experience in one communication at a moment’s notice. Savvy retailers are capitalising on the technology to build emotional connections with shoppers. Social media is no longer a separate function from the bricks-and-mortar customer experience. Retailers are connecting with shoppers on a more personal level, encouraging them to interact and give feedback which can be used to guide future activities.
Empathica’s surveys can connect your patients to healthcare social media sites such as NHS Choices and Patient Opinions to encourage your satisfied patients share their great experience on these increasingly important recommendation sources.
Tip #5 — Be patient care obsessed
The retail businesses that have most successfully driven an improvement in the customer experience they deliver put customer care at the heart of their organisation. Simon Roberts, Chief Customer Officer for Boots said “Becoming number one in customer care is all encompassing in our business. It’s about everything we do – a cultural and organisational shift.”
NHS Trusts are increasingly focusing on delivering ever improving standards of care. An integrated patient experience programme can help keep what patients are saying at the heart of Trusts’ planning processes and ensure that leaders at every level of the organisation have the insights and tools they need to drive improvements in care.