Delivering exceptional customer service, or not, can mean life or death to your practice.

While good customer service can catapult your practice into chiropractic stardom, bad customer service can shut your doors quicker than you can say, “subluxation.”

So, has the concept of customer service become so cliché that you overlook the obvious? Is it something you actually check on, measure, or reinforce?

According to the Customer Service Best Practices Survey, this is true for a few of the survey takers. Yet out of the 467 chiropractic practices nationwide contacted for this survey, some of the results uncovered may surprise you.

Initial findings         

An expected conclusion one might assume to be true in this type of study is an increase in customer service provided in correlation with an increasing number of years in practice.

An experienced chiropractor could be expected to have greater success in providing patient care and leading employees, simply because he or she is assumed to have developed and honed the skills to run a practice more effectively.

• Overall customer service. This increase in rating proved to be true, but with an overall increase of only 0.4 percent, indicating that service is perceived to be high in all number of years in practice (See Fig. 1).

Subjective ratings by the participating doctors (and one office manager) on the level of customer service their practice provides ranged from a perfect 10 down to a five, with one rating of a five and two ratings of six in the entire study.

Fourteen percent of all practices surveyed gave themselves a rating of 10, indicating no room for improvement in the area of customer service. All the remaining offices considered themselves to be worthy of a seven or higher in customer service.

• Adding more staff. Additional logic that might follow this line of thinking is the more staff members on hand to serve patients the higher rating of customer service would be present and could be provided by more “hands on deck.”

This “logic” proved not to be true as the customer service rating declined without exception when staff was increased (see Fig. 2). In addition, when staff increased the time in their role, or tenure, the customer service rating experienced a downward trend, indicating that more is not necessarily merrier (see Fig. 3).

• Patient complaints. When doctors were asked how many patients complained — about anything — 52 percent said less than 2 percent.

While 22 percent said between 3 percent and 5 percent complained, 6 percent of the practices reported percentages between 10 percent and 40 percent — with these latter practices also mentioning being a member of one of many chiropractic coaching programs and able to articulate the method by which they actually tracked numbers.

Full story