Ajay Prasad is the CEO of GMR Web Team, a full-service healthcare digital marketing agency focused on patient acquisition and retention.
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As a healthcare provider, doing it right the first time is the surest way to maximize your patients’ satisfaction levels. However, the truth is patient experience can’t be 100% perfect all the time—system problems and complaints are as inevitable in the healthcare industry as any other.
Service recovery in healthcare is the process of identifying and fixing service failure to win back the trust and loyalty of unhappy patients. It’s a remedial intervention designed to satisfactorily resolve the concerns of a disgruntled or even angry patient. This way, practices can change their patients’ negative perception of the care experience into a positive one.
Importance Of Service Recovery Programs In Healthcare
The primary objective of service recovery in healthcare is to prevent patient churn due to dissatisfaction, which can result in a practice’s income loss. If one of your unhappy patients never returned, you could lose over $200,000 in revenue over your practice’s lifetime.
Also, there are potential indirect reputational damage costs if a patient is unsatisfied with their provider. According to numerous studies, 96% of unhappy customers will share their poor service experience with a minimum of nine or 10 of their friends.
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Moreover, in this digital age, disgruntled patients can quickly write and share negative feedback on physician review websites or post comments on social media. This magnifies the risk of practices losing potential business due to a tainted image online.
This is why you shouldn’t hesitate to use service recovery strategies to make amends with your unhappy patients. It can help restore their loyalty to nearly the same level as patients who never had a poor care experience at your practice. The effect on revenue is impressive, as retained customers can be 377 times more profitable over five years than one-time clients.
According to Accenture, U.S. providers offering superior customer experience are 50% more profitable than those delivering an average experience. There’s no doubt that tracking and resolving patient dissatisfaction is good for the bottom line, as it can contribute to overall experience improvements throughout your practice’s care system.
Service Recovery In Healthcare: Strategies That Work
An effective service recovery program for your healthcare practice should include the following key elements:
Let Your Unhappy Patients Leave a Complaint
You want your patients to come to you first when they have an unpleasant care experience at your practice or hospital. However, that’s not preferable for patients lacking faith in your willingness to listen, and who instead choose to “tell on you” online or to their friends. This can increase patient churn and harm your reputation, so your practice should develop capabilities to find out firsthand what went wrong and quickly intercept complaints before things get out of control.
You’ll want to not only implement an effective feedback/satisfaction survey system but also encourage your patients to use it after their visit.
Allow Front-Line Team Autonomy for Complaints
Many unhappy patients will complain to the staff they’re directly interacting with at any point of their care journey. Red tape and unclear guidelines on who should—and how to—handle such cases can inhibit service recovery in healthcare.
Therefore, it’s important to authorize and empower your front-line staff to act swiftly and try to make amends after receiving a direct patient complaint. Make sure they understand the scope of recovery actions and can initiate them immediately without emailing hospital management.
Support and Train All Staff Onboard
Service recovery in healthcare has multiple potential implications, including public relations, ethical, financial and legal. All staff with a role in this process—from the front desk to clinicians and managers—should have a proper grasp of these issues to enhance the chances of retaining unhappy patients. This is where adequate training comes in.
Training can focus on areas such as:
• Listening (responding defensively is always counterproductive, including when the hospital, practitioner or staff did nothing wrong).
• Recovery protocols (what to do after receiving a complaint, who to contact for approval, etc.).
• Handling emotions with empathy (dissatisfied patients can be angry, sad or frustrated, and turning those emotions into happiness or satisfaction requires skill).
• Implications for both patient and provider.
• Problem-solving and assurance.
Besides training, make sure your staff has the necessary service recovery resources to be effective in their efforts. This includes timely data and insights on patient complaints and trends.
Resolve Patient Complaints Promptly and Effectively
The duration between receiving a complaint and effectively resolving it can significantly impact a provider’s patient satisfaction and retention rates. Sometimes, a bad experience with a specific individual at your practice causes dissatisfaction. Other times, a broader “system” issue is responsible.
The responding team at your practice needs to quickly link each reported problem to its root cause and should follow efficient recovery protocols to promptly reach out to a disgruntled patient before they’ve filed a formal complaint.
Maintain Digital Records of All Patient Complaints
Each patient interaction at your facility, good or bad, can provide invaluable lessons for future service improvements. This is why you should create a database to store all the complaints received through aftercare surveys or otherwise.
Analyzing the collected data will allow you to see the emerging trends in systemic service failure triggers responsible for patient dissatisfaction. These insights enable you to proactively anticipate and prevent common failure points in your healthcare system. Furthermore, based on these insights, you can also generate and share reports with staff and management for service recovery training and enforcement.
The Bigger Picture Of Service Recovery In Healthcare
Effective service recovery isn’t only about dealing with isolated complaints and boosting your practice’s overall retention rates; there’s more to it. It’s about stopping reported pain points from recurring because that’s when healthcare providers have the highest patient satisfaction and loyalty rates. Plus, it allows your practice or hospital to have the capacity to proactively spot and fix systemic issues that can negatively impact the patient experience. That’s the bigger picture!
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Author: Ajay Prasad, Forbes Councils Member
