Many hospitals and healthcare providers are jumping onto the customer service bandwagon. While corporate America has long embraced, albeit not always delivered, the concept of superior service, providers are just beginning to understand what the rest of the world has always known: take care of the customer – or someone else will.

Traditionally, from the provider perspective, "good patient care" has been synonymous with "good customer service." Faced with increasingly stiff competition and shrinking revenues, many providers are turning to Service Excellence Programs to secure patients and improve financials. If these programs are not maintained, however, the provider is making the same mistake made by business and industry when customer service programs are introduced but not sustained. We live in what is tauted as a service sector economy, yet how often in your life as a consumer do you feel that you have received good, let alone great or superior service? Creating Service Excellence is the first challenge – sustaining it something else altogether.

For many organizations their "customer service" is evidenced only by a few slogans and some policies employed by the Customer Service department. While slogans and policies are an admirable start, they do not define real service. Real service is constant, pervasive and largely invisible because it rests in the minds and perceptions of each and every customer as a collective impression of their experiences with your organization. Real service begins and ends with every internal (employee to employee) and external (employee to customer) exchange. Real customer service becomes the way of doing business – not this year’s management tactic to improve organizational performance.

Perhaps the most compelling reason for healthcare organizations to develop a customer driven organization is the simple truth: there isn’t one customer who wants to buy what we deliver. Given a choice, all of our customers would prefer to spend their time, money and energy on more desirable pursuits and purchases. Our corporate customers would prefer to use that money to pay a return to their stockholders or a bonus to their employees or maybe invest in a new plant or operating equipment. Our patients would certainly prefer to be doing something other than gowning up for a physical or receiving treatment for an injury.

Do you think you don’t have the time or resources to develop a Service Excellence Program and transform your organization or department? Think again. The implementation costs do not have to be high, but it does require some of your time, energy and talent. Compare this modest investment to the costs of replacing lost customers (5 to 6 times the account value) and reversing negative, word-of-mouth advertising, and it is apparent that you will save yourself both money and time in the long run.

To begin making immediate progress toward developing a service savvy organization, evaluate your most frequent complaints or problems – then fix them! These are irritants for your customers, employees, and you. They waste time and energy by needing to be fixed again and again. While you may not be able to fix or completely avoid these issues in the future, by working on the most frequent complaints or problems you maximize your investment of time and energy. By dealing with such issues now, you will eliminate most of your future complaints or problems. Customers who have complained in the past will experience a marked improvement and feel their comments (and business) are valued. Employees who have been the sounding board for customer complaints will be able to devote more time to providing quality services rather than resolving complaints.

If benefits such as more time and money aren’t enough to convince you to begin a Service Excellence Program, how about less stress and a more pleasant work environment? While this will not happen overnight, being customer driven means you will get better service in exchange for the better service you deliver. You and your employees will be better prepared to deal with problems and difficult customers, and your work and home life can only benefit as you learn better communication, listening and problem solving skills. Great customer service skills are learned and these skills can transfer into all other areas of your life, making you a better friend, parent or partner in addition to a better manager, co-worker and employee.