Saturday, April 3, 2010

Where Have I Been?

It has been a week or two since I last issued a blog. Frankly, I've been tied up with a project for a pharmaceutical company. They asked me to create a few training manuals for their sales teams. One of the training modules concerns providing excellence in customer service. In my research, I was surprised to see so much material regarding the little discussed of internal customer service.

When we hear the term customer service, most of us think about the service we provide to our customers or clients. Internal customer service is the recognition that our employees are customers of the owner and management, and the employees are customers of each other. This recognition is important because the better customer service we provide our team members, we improve our external customer service, business efficiency which leads to greater profitability.

Simple steps to improve your internal customer service include:

  • Communicate, Communicate, Communicate - be proactive in communicating with co-workers about your expectations of them and them of you.
  • Management must build a sense of teamwork - Likewise, staff members must understand how their actions, or inactions, affect their co-workers ability to complete their tasks.
  • Eliminate work silos - the medical practice is a business and should operate as a cohesive team.
  • Managers, treat your employees like customers. Providing your employees excellence in customer service fosters excellence in external customer service.
  • Create a rewards system in your office. Rewards can be as simple as a monthly award all the the way to cask bonuses. Make sure you set the expectation and reward the observed activity.

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