The Ankota Healthcare Delivery Management Blog

Establishing a Customer Service Culture in Your Home Care Agency

  

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Today's post is another in a series of best practice sharing from the Private Duty Home Care Association Summit and Exhibition held last week in Phoenix.  Whether you work in Private Duty non-medical home care, a certified agency, or any other specialty of care, you'll find this advice useful.

The content for this session comes from Pat Drea, COO of Visiting Angels, and her presentation entitled 7 Veteran Strategies to Realign Your Business in a Tough Economy.  Before moving on let me share some observations about Pat.  When you first meet her, you're taken by how elegant and put together she is.  She's a compassionate person and speaker, who was able to identify and acknowledge by name at least 8-10 people in the room during the presentation.  Her compassion really shines when she tells stories about interacting with clients (a snipet of one of these stories is included in our PDHCA highlight video).  But when Pat gets down to business, she can really talk business.  She knows the processes and the numbers.  We'll share more from her fabulous presentation in future posts (including some great advice she gives about maximizing the value of your Home Care Software).

Critical Steps to Establishing a Customer Service Culture

1. Customers are the reason for work, not an interruption of work
2. Train office and caregiver staff - train, train, train
3. Empower your office and caregivers to serve
4. Make service personal
5. Its okay to say yes to approaches that will retain customers
6. Solve Customer service problems
7. Recognize your staff for outstanding service
8. Ask your customers what they think of your service

Thanks to Pat for this great advice!  To learn more about Pat's organization, click on the banner below.