GETTY IMAGES / THINKSTOCK

Continual communications is key to customer service. It's critical to keep customers in the loop with as much detail as possible, says Rhoda Weiss, Ph.D., a customer relations consultant.

"As patients are concerned about their health and wait anxiously for test results, those with cars in the shop also anxiously await word on the condition, diagnosis, treatment and length of time until the process is completed," says Weiss, past president of the American Hospital Association Society for Healthcare Strategy and Marketing Development.

Once you've established a plan for maintaining constant contact with your customers, find out if they prefer to receive phone calls or e-mail.

Customer service can be summed up in one word – relationships.

"We say marketing and customer service is defined by the sum total of impressions, experiences and relationships our patients/customers have with our health-care organization," Weiss says. "It's no different for auto body repair firms."

Adrian Miller, a trainer and consultant in sales and customer service for medical offices, collected a list of lessons learned to enhance customer service. Some are:

• Greet customers with warmth, friendliness and an honest desire to help. Don't imply you're too busy or disinterested in their needs.
• Don't use jargon.
• Control your customers' expectations. When you give a completion date, that's the customer's expectation. Fail to meet their expectations and you lose their confidence. If you can't make the expected timeframe, tell them proactively.
• Be honest about what you can and can't fix.
• Call customers after their job and make sure they're satisfied. Ask if they'll provide a testimonial.

Although these practices can be effective, Miller says many health-care organizations have failed to live up to their own basic customer expectations, not to mention their customer-service strategies.

"Customer service in health care is often considered some of the worst there is," Miller says. "You experience poor phone systems, awful on-hold time, surly office managers and worse."

Bruce Boissonnault, CEO of health-care consumer watchdog group Niagara Health Quality Coalition, concurs with Miller.

"As a former executive with Disney, health care is an unlikely place to learn how to provide better service," Boissonnault says. "Some do it well. Others are awful."

The first step to effective customer service is measuring satisfaction levels.

"Gauging customer satisfaction helps gather evidence for a marketing/advertising campaign," Boissonnault says. "By measuring satisfaction, you can improve customers' perceived quality to stay ahead of competition.

"If consumers say they like your service more than your competitors' service, that's a legitimate marketing message," he adds. "Second, you don't know as much about your customers as your customers do. That's the best reason to assess and improve customer satisfaction."

In health care, quality leaders embrace rapid-cycle improvement, which enables organizations to measure how they're doing in their patient's eyes. Hospitals, which conduct rapid-cycle surveys almost daily, detail patient surveys to be sure the rapid-cycle survey is working.

"They don't wait for a year to find out how they're doing," Boissonnault says. "They want to know every single day based on a small sample."

Disney formalized the rapid-cycle improvement concept years ago in its parks. Through research, the company learned its guests return every three years on average. Disney discovered if it does something their guests perceive as poor service this year, it wouldn't see the resulting drop-off of guest visitation for as long as three years.

"That's too late to fix problems, and worse, problems pile up and become too numerous to fix in real time," Boissonnault says. "It's the same in the auto body business. You need to know right away if your customers will recommend you and/or if they plan to use you next time they need service."

With a rapid-cycle approach, devise a small list of customer-satisfaction-related questions you plan to ask a small sample of customers daily or weekly. Compute a test of the results to see if satisfaction is declining. Then fix the problems before business is affected.

"It's important to understand why satisfaction might drop," Boissonnault says. "This may indicate your shop is doing something worse than it used to, or more likely, that your competitors are doing something better than they used to do it and you're not keeping pace. If the survey is simple enough, no follow-up with the individual customer is needed unless the customer reports something specific that warrants further investigation."