The Marketing Bureau

Brian H Meredith calls for the medical profession to think about the concept of marketing and the overall customer (patient) experience.

I attended an appointment with a surgeon this week. Or, at least, I tried to. I had been referred to this surgeon, by a Specialist who is, in my humble opinion, an excellent clinician. However, the Specialist is part of a medical practice that is absolutely dreadful on just about every non clinical dimension I can think of.

Making an appointment to see him, for example, can take a couple of days because, for some extraordinary reason, his rooms don’t answer the phone very often. Your call is answered by an automated system that provides several options including one to talk to the receptionist. Having selected this option I invariably get the receptionist’s voicemail.

When did receptionists get to have voicemail? Next thing we know the automated phone systems will have their own voicemail, telling us that they are unable to not answer our call right now and asking us to leave a message and they will automatically not call us back.

But I digress.  I leave a message on the receptionist’s voicemail and sometimes, only sometimes, my call is returned up to 24 hours later. Sometimes, it is not returned at all.

This automated system is also problematic if you want to talk to any other person in the practice. If you don’t know their extension number (and who does?), you have to select the receptionist option. And guess what? 

Even returning calls from people in this practice is tough. They invariably fail to leave their extension number in their message to me so I have to select the Receptionist option. And then ……..

Ggggrrrhhhhhh!

But the specialist with whom I am consulting on a lengthy and complicated matter is a good guy and a good doc. So I cut him some slack. Don’t know how long I will have the perspicacity to continue doing this before walking but I’ve managed it thus far. This despite the Receptionist’s voicemail challenges, the arrival for an appointment with a technician who did not have the appointment in her diary, the recent receipt of my Fees Invoice accompanied by the Fees invoice for another patient whom I do not know but whose name, address, treatment type and treatment costs I now do.

But back to the surgeon.

Having arrived 5 minutes before my appointment time, I was surprised that, at 15 minutes past my appointment time, the patient with the appointment prior to mine was called in. Now, knowing that a consultation was likely to be of approximately 30/40 minutes duration, I quickly worked out that I was likely to be seen by the surgeon almost an hour later than my scheduled time. And the cost to me for this was significant – somewhere around $400 for the consultation and a similar amount of lost fees for me in the hour during which I was to be kept waiting.

And I received neither explanation nor any apology when the previous patient was taken in. The surgeon simply came out of his room, called the other guy’s name and took him in. There was no eye contact with me, no acknowledgement of my presence or existence on the planet.

And as for the Receptionist (there’s that special breed cropping up again) – nothing. Head down, doing whatever it is that Receptionists do when they are not interacting with patients.

I left. My schedule did not allow for me to sit in a waiting room for an unscheduled hour.

I emailed the doctor and explained that I would be seeking a referral to another surgeon.

I also said that I fully understood that the nature of a doctor’s job can mean that unexpected delays may occur. However, when they did, it would be good practice to advise waiting patients of this and to offer a courtesy apology for the delay. After all, isn’t that one of the items on a Receptionist’s Job Description?

Frankly, I am tired of the “Doctors as Gods or otherwise superior beings” syndrome and it remains alive and well, impacting on the lives of their patients everyday, not least as we wait to be called into the imperial presence of the great man (or woman). If you have any doubt of this, take a quick squizz around www.ratemds.com where patients can rate and comment on their doctors. The comments are not validated by the site so there are clearly the odd nutters, whingers and moaners there (bit like talkback radio really) but they do, nonetheless, offer a glimpse of the kinds of experiences that patients have in a number of countries around the world including New Zealand.

And there is a bigger picture which is an important and powerful one for us all to pay attention to.

In order to ensure that we achieve optimum performance in our businesses, we must pay attention to designing, implementing, monitoring and constantly refining, the entire customer experience. From the point of initial exposure, to the first contact, to every subsequent contact and every element of that contact thereafter, we must not leave the customer experience to chance. Rather, we must design it and manage it in the way our customers need/want it to be.

You may be the finest doctor on the planet but if, in the end, it is just two damned hard being a patient of yours, it will, I promise you, cost you dear.

Brian H Meredith