The Rationale for Improved Service Excellence
Customer service is an important, and we believe, an increasingly essential function for senior living residences and senior care facilities. Excellence in customer service is naturally important to seniors and their families - as a matter of quality of life. And this creates a true business imperative for senior residences and facilities - as a matter of competitive advantage. This imperative, to build and sustain a culture of service excellence, will very likely intensify over the next decade. There are two primary reasons:
Service Quality Reviews
There are increasing demands these days for improved service quality in healthcare, along with a growing trend to publicly grade facilities in terms of service excellence. This is already mandated by Medicare for hospitals (i.e., HCAHPS rankings of patient satisfaction), and it will probably be extended to nursing homes (and perhaps other senior facilities) in the not-too-distant future.
Generation Baby Boomer
The generation of baby boomers, who are now beginning to enter the senior living sector, are likely to demand much more service quality than previous generations have. Moreover, they have ready access to public grading (i.e., online reviews of resident and/or family satisfaction), which have already begun or will soon be applied to assisted living facilities and independent living residences.
Aging Matters can help your facility improve customer service and build a sustainable culture of service excellence. We have established expertise and experience helping healthcare and other organizations implement customer service initiatives. And we have a record of demonstrated results, as measured by substantially raised customer satisfaction scores (on HCAHPS, Press Ganey and other surveys) following upon our interventions.
Components of a Service Enhancement Initiative
Our Customer Service Training Programs may involve some or all of these elements:
A baseline customer service survey to gather relevant data (from residents & family members, as well as facility management & direct service staff, both administrative & caregiving)
Introductory training, for both management & staff, on the principles and strategies involved in building a culture of service excellence
Articulation of a customized customer service vision, via facilitated focus group sessions with facility management & direct service staff
Undertaking one or more pilot projects, where teams of caregiving & administrative staff conceptualize, recommend and ultimately implement concrete service enhancement projects
Consulting with facility leaders & middle managers to trouble-shoot and work-out systemic obstacles to achieving service excellence
A follow-up service excellence survey, to measure the extent of initial success, and to recommend key areas for ongoing improvement
A program of strategic communication throughout the project and afterwards to communicate project success and build momentum for service improvement across the organization
