Client Spotlight

By Jackie Longworth, Director of Product Development, OccuMed program at Bon Secours Hampton Roads

At Bon Secours Hampton Roads, customers have always been our priority. But we realized that simply having satisfied customers was no longer enough. After all, our competition had them, too. It was time to raise the bar, to go beyond basic customer expectations.

What we needed was excellent service, a level that promoted loyalty and long-term partnerships, for both the employee/patient relationship and the employer/company relationship.

Asking the right questions

In an increasingly competitive market, the Bon Secours Hampton Roads OccuMed and MedCare facilities have committed to Strive for 5’s—the top ranking on our customer surveys. To do this, we had to design a program that answered some important questions:

• How do we ensure that our customers’ goals and objectives have been delivered?
• How do we ensure that the company’s needs are clearly defined and communicated to the OccuMed/Medcare team?
• How do we make this so much of our daily functions, to a degree that customers say our service is excellent?
• How do we engage our team in the value of customer loyalty (contract retention) to ensure 5’s on satisfaction surveys and customer rounding?

On this journey to Strive for 5’s and produce company loyalty, I used what I’d learned in Studer Group quality training to help better understand the drivers of customer loyalty. (Ed. Note: The Studer Group is an outcomes-based healthcare consulting firm, specializing in helping organizations create and sustain outcomes in service and operations.)

In order to begin to start increasing customer satisfaction levels, we believed each member of our staff needed to understand what’s required in achieving excellent service. We started by involving more of our staff in capturing feedback from customers, so team members could hear firsthand about the impact they were making.

We instituted face-to-face meetings with patients at each clinic location. We asked every patient to complete a customer satisfaction survey and also had our staff do patient rounding. Checking with patients let us keep a pulse on how they were doing and to create a personal connection between the staff, patients and employers. 

During these rounds, our team asked questions developed for us by the Studer Group, such as:

• “Our goal is to provide excellent care to you. How are we doing?
• “What are we doing well?
• “Do you have any suggestions for improvement? Do you have any questions or concerns that I can address for you?”
• “May I ask how the staff responded to your questions or concerns?”
• “Do you have any questions about the plan for your care?”
• “Is there anybody on the staff who has really done an excellent job for you? Tell me what they did, so I can share with them.”
• “Are there any physicians I should recognize?”
• “Is something I can do for you right now?” 

Next, we took this a step further: Our sales team did rounding on company contacts, asking questions similar to the patient questions. This allowed us to compare the responses of companies’ employees with company management responses, and to track trends. The trends let us see what’s going well (excellent service) and what needs to be improved.

These personal meetings, I’ve found, give us insights into the client’s responses that we couldn’t get from a written survey alone. Our surveys, for example, had told us that some employers were dissatisfied with the facility. That was puzzling, given that the facility was brand new and the staff had gotten excellent feedback from patients.

However, during my rounding meeting, we clarified that the source of dissatisfaction wasn’t the facility itself, but rather its hours of operation. As a result, we’ve been able to implement changes that better meet the employer need. 

Within only a year of this new focus, our facilities have earned 92% of their “5” ratings. And while achieving this percentage of 5’s has been an important accomplishment, maintaining these levels is our main goal. To do that, we’ve developed a specific strategy to keep our team focused on continual achievement:

• Involve the team in patients and employer rounds.
• Teach employees how to identify the keys to delighting a customer by helping them interpret the rounding and survey results.
• Develop scripting that focuses on the customer needs and improved communication.
• Study results of surveys to look for trends, by type of company, services delivered, time of delivery and time we’ve had the contract.
• Provide constant feedback to the staff on how they are doing, through things like setting up/keeping current communication boards in each center.
• Close the loop with the employer on issues discovered during rounding—a crucial step in using the information for success.
• Always stay focused on doing what’s right for the customer. Treat each customer as an individual; be sure to address their needs.

In addition to the high customer service scores, our OccuMed and MedCare facilities are also enjoying a position of profitability. Today, these centers provide a contribution and quantifying workers’ compensation downstream revenue of in excess of $12 million.  This downstream revenue is comprised of referrals to services within Bon Secours that we might not otherwise have captured. 

Working with Corporate Health Group, we developed a tracking system to measure and quantify direct OccuMed referrals for rehabilitative therapies, radiology, laboratory, surgical procedures, inpatient admissions, and other related categories. With this data, we have been able to help our leadership see the value of our hospital/employer strategy. The results we’ve achieved have a created a more loyalty-driven customer environment. We look forward to another strong year in 2008!

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