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Healthcare institutions have increasingly turned to service initiatives as a strategic priority over the past decade. In light of the current economic challenges, these organizations are relying more heavily on their service excellence strategies to retain the business relationships they currently have, and fortunately, providing friendly, customer-focused service tends to be a lower-cost initiative.
Providing service excellence to patients has always presented unique challenges within the hospital laboratory structure since most organizational service initiatives are linked to patient contact. While laboratory personnel provide an extraordinary contribution to patient care, only about 5 percent of laboratory employees have direct patient contact. Additionally, patient satisfaction surveys assess satisfaction levels related to direct patient-staff engagement, therefore leaving the laboratory to be solely assessed on their draw services, relegating the remainder of the laboratory's services as insignificant in terms of patient satisfaction measured by their healthcare institution's service excellence initiatives. This puts the laboratory in a difficult position: how do you provide service excellence when, for all intents and purposes, service excellence is only evaluated from the perspective of the patient's experience with the laboratory?
Here's How
Start by defining exactly who, beyond patients, a laboratory's customers are. Determine what equates to service excellence for those customers specifically, and then develop laboratory-oriented service excellence strategies to meet and exceed the needs of those customers. In doing this, patients will be guaranteed optimum service levels from the laboratory.
There are critical components to consider as you evaluate the development of service excellence strategies, chief among them are:
- Developing leaders within your laboratory organization who can model and inspire service excellence behavior in those they lead.
- Define more specifically what service excellence means to you and your organization so employees are fully aware of the expectations, leaving little or no ambiguity.
- Recognize that for service excellence to be a permanent aspect of your culture and a strategic advantage to your laboratory, it must be consistently modeled by those in leadership. Service excellence must be supported, incentivized, communicated, monitored, measured, and reported.
Developing Great Leaders
There is a distinct difference between managing and leading. Managing is a task. It's about directing, governing, handling and controlling with a component of conferred power. Leadership, on the other hand, is about the ability to influence outcomes based on your relationship with others and their willingness to follow, earned only by your actions and behavior. A culture of service excellence is deeply rooted in an organization's ability to be directed by great leaders. The most effective leaders recognize and value the importance of modeling the behavior they expect in others. They hold the proverbial bar higher for themselves than they do for others, but also understand that holding the bar high is critical to success. The ability to lead has to be earned, and once earned, personal rather than positional authority is gained and can only be taken away through one's own actions.
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