Complaints: How the Home Care Industry Can Use Them to Improve Service
Complain, complain, complain. When I was a Branch Director or a Senior VP for Nursing, there were days when all I heard were complaints from my clients. On really bad days, even my staff joined in! It seemed like it was a contest to see who had the biggest grievance. Ever had days like that? As a result of too many days of multiple complaints, I decided to start tracking them so I could identify trends and come up with solutions that were permanent corrections. This was how the “complaint log” came into use — a logging system where all complaints from staff and clients were entered.
When I introduced the complaint log to the office staff, we agreed as a group upon what would constitute a complaint that would be entered into the log. We discovered that frequently people did not complain so much as state a concern. We decided that we would place all concerns and complaints in the log. Every person had a log on their desk and was expected to submit it to the office manager once a week. The responses would then be collated to monitor trends.
In the first 6 months of using the complaint logs, we discovered some very interesting things about our staff and our services.
For example, we found that some callers were being placed on hold for several minutes before someone got back to them. It wasn’t good customer service and was very irritating to the caller. The existing rule was that all phone calls were to be answered by the third ring; however, as a result of tracking trends in our complaint logs, we discovered that when the receptionist went on break or to lunch, the backup staff who were to answer the phones were not as prompt. The complaint logs revealed that callers being left on hold occurred most often during these lunch and break times. Since we were able to narrow down the times of occurrence, we were able to investigate the reasons. We discovered that the schedulers were expected to function as relief receptionists. However, they were not relieved of their duties of staffing and responding to field staff and clients. Frequently, they were on the phone with one of the clients or a field staffer when another line rang and they could not get to it, or they put the caller on hold so they could finish up their conversation. With this information we developed a better system that allowed for the person on relief to be responsible only for receptionist duties. The complaints of being put on hold and multiple rings before a call was answered disappeared. We would never have known that we had such a problem with the phones if we hadn’t been tracking the complaints. And, as the Administrator, I would never have known either, since I rarely had the opportunity to take the phones.
Over time, we were able to identify and correct other problems, such as incorrect pay for the field staff that turned out to be a clerical issue, and continued staffing of caregivers to clients who had asked to not have the caregiver back. These issues were identified, investigated, and solved – all because of the complaint log.
Next week, I’ll explain how tracking complaints can help you identify opportunities to grow your business.
Category: Ginny's Blog