The other day a good friend and I were discussing a bad customer experience that he had recently had at a well known restaurant. In a word, the customer service and resulting experience were awful. Actually, the customer experience was beyond awful it was dreadful. It is surprising given the weight that restaurants place on customer service and word of mouth value. This got me to thinking about the customer service in healthcare. Is there anything more maddening than arriving at a physician’s office on time and then having to wait for an hour or in some cases more because the physician is running late? There are typically no apologies or considerations that you, the consumer, may have other commitments. Actually, there is something more maddening… arriving 5 minutes late to the same physician at the next appointment only to be told “you are late and need to reschedule because the Doctor can no longer see you.” Now how is that for customer service?

I think about this quite a bit right now because the word “consumerism” is rapidly making its way into the vocabulary of the healthcare market. With customer satisfaction scores and Zagat ratings of physician satisfaction, it becomes apparent that the majority of healthcare providers haven’t quite figured out what a consumer of healthcare services may actually look like or expect. If patients are becoming consumers, then healthcare providers need to understand that with that will come a certain set of typical consumer traits, such as the demand for value, better customer service, willingness to switch, and word of mouth impact.