Customer Satisfaction

I had the opportunity to speak one-to-one with many accredited DME suppliers recently at a pharmacy trade show. The majority had been accredited for more than a year, and many had questions about the challenges of maintaining their accreditation requirements.

As I was chatting with one supplier about maintaining his quarterly performance management requirements, another approached as we were discussing the requirement to assess customer satisfaction. The first supplier said he was having difficulty getting customer satisfaction surveys returned by mail from his customers. Added the second, “We had trouble getting surveys back, so we stopped doing them.”

He said his company had distributed customer satisfaction surveys when it first became accredited, but after three months, very few had been returned. So, the surveys weren’t tallied and the results weren’t reviewed.

I was surprised when this supplier so casually offered that his company wasn’t making any effort to complete the requirement. It was clear he felt the task was simply a good idea or maybe an option.

But it’s more than that. Let’s review the CMS performance management requirements.

In its final quality standards, CMS defines the performance management outcomes that an accredited supplier must track. These include:

• Beneficiary satisfaction and complaints;
• Timeliness of response to questions, problems and concerns;
• Impact of business practices on adequacy of beneficiary access to items, services, information;
• Frequency of billing/coding errors; and
• Adverse events to beneficiaries due to inadequate service(s) or malfunctioning equipment and/or item(s) (e.g injuries, accidents, signs and symptoms of infection, hospitalization).

I took a few minutes to remind the supplier of these requirements and emphasized that they are indeed requirements, not suggestions. On accreditation surveys, your accreditor will ask you to produce a copy of your quarterly and annual performance management data. If you don’t have it, you will be cited with a deficiency and, at the very least, you will need to create a plan of correction to show how you will stay compliant with these requirements.

It’s not always an easy process. So, how do you do it?

Some very large suppliers contract with national survey organizations or automated call services to poll their customers. These are efficient services to use, but not necessary for small- to medium-sized providers. Customer satisfaction can easily be conducted by simple means, whether via paper or telephone.

You can distribute written surveys in at least three ways:

1. Provide a copy with every new item purchased/rented.
2. Mail surveys to selected customers monthly or quarterly.
3. Provide surveys on the retail counter with a box for completed surveys to be returned.

If you provide a copy of the survey for the customer to complete off-site, it is imperative that you also provide a self-addressed, stamped envelope for return. But don’t send out self-addressed envelopes with stamps on them; that’s far too costly and will add an unnecessary expense.

The most cost-effective method is to open a business- reply mail account with your local post office. This account requires that a small balance to be deposited into such an account. Funds are then debited only when your return envelope is mailed back. Expecting that a customer will return your survey without providing postage lowers the chances of having any surveys returned at all.

If you provide an area on your retail counter for survey completion, be sure to provide pens, a clipboard or writing area and a secure box where surveys can be retuned. Don’t require that your customers hand a completed survey to a staff member.

Whichever method you choose to provide written surveys to your customers, allowing anonymous completion (with the option to add their name) is the best way to obtain honest answers.

Many suppliers conduct telephone surveys to assess customer satisfaction. This can be accomplished in a short, dedicated amount of time and can be a very effective way to obtain results. The success rate of phone surveys is high since providers can routinely reach most of their customers at home.

One key to success with phone surveys is that the staff making the calls should be cheerful, polite and work with a scripted survey to ask patients a limited number of specific questions. They should also do their best to keep the conversation short.

Always pose your survey questions with a range of answers. Stay away from questions that require only a yes-or-no answer. The goal of the survey is to look for ways to improve, not just to meet the requirement.

There’s no way to improve on a “yes” answer, but there is plenty of room for improvement when a customer is given a range from 1 to 5 (where 5 is “excellent”) and answers a question with a 3. Their assessment of a 3 (which might be described as “good”) would most likely have been a “yes” if posed in that manner. A 3 offers the opportunity to work toward a 5, or “excellent”.

It is important to understand that one single process might not be enough. Many suppliers find that they have to gather data by using a combination of these survey processes. That may sound overwhelming or troublesome, but it doesn’t have to be.

Suppliers having difficulty gathering data might choose to conduct the process differently each quarter. They might provide paper surveys to all of their new customers during the first quarter of the year, place surveys on the counter for the second quarter, perform a telephone survey to new customers in the third quarter and mail surveys to new customers in the fourth quarter. Others may rotate who they send their surveys to, such as polling oxygen customers in one quarter and wound product customers the next, etc.

Whatever your process might be, make an effort to survey new customers rather than surveying the same customers over and over. (Pharmacies should include all of their customers, not just their DME customers, since they care about the satisfaction of all of their customers.)

Even if you have only a few new customers each week or month, getting their responses is important to assessing success and identifying areas in your operation that may need improvement. If you need to “mix up” the survey methods you use in order to get results, then plan to do so. It doesn’t matter which methods you choose, only that you gather this customer satisfaction data.

Read more Accreditation Now columns.

Mary Ellen Conway, RN, BSN, is president of Capital Healthcare Group, LLC, Bethesda, Md., which provides health care management expertise in accreditation preparation and survey follow-up, operations assistance, design of quality improvement programs and outcome measures. She can be contacted by phone at 301/896-0193 or through www.capitalhealthcaregroup.com.