The Secret Consultant

Education and training are everywhere. Just turn around and you will find another consultant to help you build your business. Make another turn and someone will be ready to help you locate new customers, keep the old ones, create the right contract, motivate your staff, audit your organization or develop a compliance program.

We are all out there — me and a long list of colleagues who are ready to help you. Maybe if you work it right, you could invite all of us to your company and than you can take a year off! We have answers to questions that haven’t even been asked yet. Hey, we’re smart.

But I have a secret for you. I have a consultant who works for free, is willing to talk to you, has lots of opinions and brings you advice and information like no other. These consultants come in different sizes and shapes, will arrive at your door by car, bus or transported by a friend. They are consultants who get little respect since they don’t send you a bill and have no fees. But what they have to say can make or break your business.

Who are they? Your customers. Have you built their advice into your business planning? Do you talk about them at staff meetings when you review business reports and when you discuss what makes your company great? While you sometimes spend hours working a claim denial, how much time do you spend listening to a referral source who is about to “deny” you their business?

Where do you locate these voices? They lie in comments from your referral sources, patients and retail customers. It is time to create a more aggressive plan for soliciting and reviewing these all-important messages.

• Carefully listen to every comment made by customers who enter your store, including possible complaints they might have about your store environment, about their conversations with your customer service representatives or the difficulty they had in seeing your signage from the street.
• Don’t rush a complaining or talkative customer off the phone. He or she could share advice and recommendations that I would be selling you. If a customer believes someone was rude, that may just be the case. If a customer tells you your phone rings and rings and rings before someone actually picks it up, that may just be the case.
• Listen carefully to your referral sources. While they may not be afforded a customer satisfaction survey to complete, what they say in a conversation about a problem could be the reason they take their business somewhere else. When referral sources tell you they have something to share and that it’s really not important, but … Trust me; it may very well be very important. There is a reason they are sharing this information with you, and it’s because there is an issue that concerns them.

I wish when we hired people we could actually verify whether they are good listeners. When we ask someone if they listen well, they always say yes. But staff who don’t listen well can be more devastating than a reimbursement cut. You spend money doing background checks on potential staff but fail to consider whether potential employees can interpret what they hear.

Do they know when a customer says he or she is a little upset that it translates to “I am furious?” When a referral source says, “I just don’t understand how you got this wrong,” that really means, “I am thinking about giving my business to another home care company.” When a patient says, “I want to report that you keep getting it wrong,” that might mean, “I am going to let my doctor know you don’t know what you are doing.”

I guess you didn’t know I was bilingual, but being in the customer service training business for a million years has clued me in to the fact that when someone says he or she is only mildly upset, that really means there is a storm of anger hiding inside.

Listening is an art form that you must develop. How well do you listen? Too often, many of us are just waiting for a break in the conversation so we can speak rather than listening to the messages of our customers so we can know what we should be speaking about.

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