Customer Service - The
Paradigm Shift in Laboratory Quality
In the 18th Century, Immanuel Kant writing
in Critique of Pure Reason
(1787) described the change in approach to scientific study as a “revolution of
the way of thinking”. In the 20th
century, Thomas Kuhn in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
(1962) advanced the phraseology to “paradigm shift”. By whichever phrase we want to call it, today
we are going through an new phase in thought and practice in Laboratory Quality,
especially as it refers to customers and service, that is truly a significant
shift.
Recently I hosted a conference in Vancouver on
the topic of Quality Improvement, Knowing your Customers. One of our speakers, Colleen Taylor, in a most
creative way talked about the dual understanding of the word Patient. In healthcare we use Patient to refer to one
of our customer groups, the person who is the end-user of our products or
services. Equally “patient” describes
our all-too-common approach to the end-user: “ You are tired of waiting? Well we are all very important and very busy,
and you just have to be PATIENT. So just go sit there and we will get to you
when we get to you. Just sit there and
be quiet, and you better be darn grateful when we get around to providing you
with our time and services.”
The rest of the world has figured out that that
is no longer a winning strategy.
Increasingly customers have figured out there is always choice. Hospitality,
and retail, and banking and schools have figured it out; making an unhappy
customer leads to an unhappy customer and a bunch of unhappy friends, and one
day you look around and there are fewer and fewer people coming in your door. And all of a sudden, your business is in
trouble.
Think it can’t happen to medical
laboratories? Point-of-Care Testing did
not start in a vacuum. Pharmacy based testing
didn’t just happen. Theranos, may have
turned out to be a failure, but the reality was that Silicon Valley was
responding to a perceived need, and there is every reason to believe that the
next change will be far
more successful.
So at our conference we learned some truly
important lessons.
Hospitality industry can track
millions of customer experiences, and can maintain complaints at a level of 3
per 10,000 (sigma 6.17). They track and
correct because they understand that every complaint that goes through the door
unresolved gets increasingly expensive.
Tracking customer satisfaction
in healthcare facilities can be done competently and comprehensively on a same
day basis, and indeed on a same hour basis.
Healthcare executive
administrations are looking for service excellence solutions
International Organization for
Standardization (ISO) is developing new standards and tools in service
excellence under a new technical committee (ISO TC312 Excellence in Service).
Some laboratories are
developing some novel approaches for improving customer experiences
The approaches of “the
customer is always right” and “the customer always comes first” are being
replaced by “Your Customer have to come second because your staff have to come
first. Staff who are acknowledged and appreciated
for their skills will take care of your customers needs in ways that are in
both the short and long term successful”.
We can shift staff attitudes
and culture using thoughtful analysis using techniques like Organizational
Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI) and staff management skills and techniques.
Small changes can have big
impacts. Small changes regularly have huge impact.
Starting now is ALWAYS better
than starting later.
To be clear, other aspects of laboratory
quality can not be forgotten about. Areas
like error awareness, error reduction, opportunities for improvement through audit
and prevention and correction, continuing education, continual improvement
throughout the pre- peri- post- and examination phases will not go away. But their impact and success will be much
enhanced through the dynamic of staff and customer satisfaction.
For those interested in seeing some of the
materials from our conference/workshop you can visit polqm.med.ubc.ca/conference
