Developing leaders and teams in the art and science of exceptional patient, service user and professional customer experience

For the Leader

Core Skills in Creating Excellence in Patient Experience

Leading Customer Experience Excellence

For the Team

Core Skills in Customer Service Excellence

Contributing to Customer Service Excellence

Introduction

Positive patient experience is a core component of Clinical Business Excellence, ignored at considerable peril. With the government committed to a choice agenda, money following the patient through payment by results, PCTs targeted to increase provider numbers and the Conservatives intent on extending this further, it is essential that all services get their house in order in this vital area. This course, designed for those taking the lead, comprehensively covers developing a patient experience excellence strategy and implementing it throughout a team, department or even a whole Trust.

Introduction

Aimed firmly at front line staff, Core Skills in Customer Service Excellence is designed to encourage exceptional skills in and continuous attention to creating a superb patient, public and service user experience irrespective of your service type. This comprehensive programme covers the importance of an excellent experience, through skills development, right to embedding it as an enduring culture. What’s more, all team members exit the programme with an unambiguous picture of how a superior experience translates into security and success for them.

Programme

• Understanding the importance of the ‘customer’ in modern healthcare
• Financial implications of poor customer experience
• What matters to patients, relatives, carers and other service users
• The GP as customer – essential understanding
• Assessing customer experience using the 5 primary pathways
  1. Published information, both objective and subjective
  2. Patient surveys
  3. Patient pathway analysis
  4. Diary exercises
  5. Focus groups
• Developing episodic and real time patient experience monitoring
• Using patient experience data in service performance management
• The propensity to refer – the ultimate measure?
• The patient as innovator – assisting your future success
• Experience risk assessment
• Unreasonable experience expectations and how to manage them
• Balancing patient & staff needs
• Developing a patient experience plan (and for other ‘customers’ too)
• Core components of an effective experience strategy
• Setting experience enhancement goals
• Building an ethos of experience excellence throughout a team
• Fostering senior management support for experience enhancement
• Improving complaints management
• The complaint as an opportunity
• Strategies for rectifying poor patient experience
• Re-establishing poor relationships with key service customers

Programme

• Understanding the importance of the ‘customer’ in modern healthcare
• Implications of poor customer experience in a competitive market
• The cause and effect relationships of seemingly simple things
• Defining the customer – who are they really?
• Differentiating between users and payers
• Internal versus external customers
• What matters to patients?
• What matters to carers & relatives?
• The GP or other service as customer
• Where and how ‘potential’ customers learn about you
• How you can learn from published information
• How to measure customer experience – an overview
• The reliability factor – what’s your perception
• The propensity to refer – the ultimate measure?
• Loyalty and how it affects your security
• Creating a high baseline for dignity and respect
• Developing behavioural flexibility to individualise experience
• Using active listening techniques & reflection
• Telephone excellence in the clinical environment
• Enquiry handling – marrying efficiency with experience
• Resolving problems and the extra mile effect
• People under stress – how you can help
• The right face in face-to-face exchanges (and other body language issues)
• What’s your atmosphere – understanding the group effect on experience
• Projecting positive self image and values
• Unreasonable experience expectations and how to manage them
• Balancing patient & staff needs
• What to do if you are faced with a complaint
• The complaint as an opportunity
• Handling emotions positively
• Become a CPE (Champion of Patient Experience)

Target Audience

This course is aimed at those seeking to take a lead role in improving patient or customer experience and is suitable for all grades of staff, regardless of background. If you are looking for a programme that develops customer service skills then we have an alternative programme for use with team members.

Target Audience

Aimed at anyone in a customer or patient contact role, whether it be face-to-face, telephone or even further behind the scenes.

More information

• Core Skills in Creating Excellence in Patient Experience

More information

• Core Skills in Customer Service Excellence