Want to help your team to make exemplary service the core of what they offer your customers? Here is an exercise that works very well.
Gather your team in a room. Introduce the topic of customer service and ask them to give you examples of excellent patient care that they've witnessed from your group. Then ask them to provide examples of excellent customer care that they've witnessed as well. This will introduce the topic of customer care and prepare them for the next part of the exercise.
Then, ask everyone to think of a time when they were the customer and they received such bad service that it made them absolutely MAD! Ask them to visualize the episode over and over in their mind. Give them plenty of time to visualize the episode again and again. Make sure that every person in the room has an episode of horrible customer service in mind that they experienced personally. Next, ask each team member to share their story. Ask them what 'triggered' them to get so MAD when they experienced their horrible service. The word 'triggered' is particularly appropriate, because it conjures up mental images of how incensed they were when they were treated poorly by some person or business. After each team member shares their story, ask them to summarize what every episode had in common. Every time I've performed this exercise, there is always one over-riding commonality to every episode of poor service, and the commonality is that the person they were doing business with 'DID NOT CARE'. The 'trigger' for every episode is similar, and it is the fact that a person who could have cared, did not. You will be stunned at how every person will immediately be wiser about customer service and how simple it can be if they exhibit 'care' when dealing with every customer. It is a simple, yet powerful lesson. Teach your team to care!
