With Increased Competition and More Patient Options, Providing Excellent Customer Service Is More Important Than Ever
By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD
I’ve covered various aspects of the call center industry, focusing here on healthcare contact centers, for the past 20 years. A persistent and reoccurring theme throughout this time has been customer service. This, I’m confident, will continue to be an essential focus for our industry going forward.
Every telephone interaction we handle is a form of customer service in one way or another. Though I delight in sharing those customer service interactions that went extremely well, too often I find myself detailing customer service failures.
During the past two decades, I’ve written hundreds of articles that address this critical topic of customer service.
Now, I’ve compiled the best of these articles, along with fresh content, in my book Sticky Customer Service. Just as with my articles, Sticky Customer Service celebrates customer service successes and explores customer service disappointments. We can learn from both.
While the customer service wins give us something to cheer about, it’s the customer service failures that provide us with ample learning opportunities. May we learn much from these episodes that we can apply to make our content centers even better.
Though many of our customer service opportunities occur over the telephone, other interactions take place in person, while a growing number happen online.
Each of these three areas are most relevant for the healthcare industry. And each of these connection points interconnect, with one channel often migrating to another.
Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of Connections Magazine, covering the call center industry.
Read his latest book, Call Center Connections.
