The Voice of the Home Care Client: Keys to Improving the Customer Experience

Listening to the voice of the client helps your home care business reap the benefits of listening to, acting on, and responding to what clients are saying about your services. When it comes to consistently delivering quality home care service, knowledge is power.

Use these customer service feedback techniques to gather higher quality information that will prevent service issues and identify opportunities for you to raise the bar in customer service for your private duty home care firm:

1. Create a great feedback survey. Sites like SurveyMonkey make it easy to create simple, effective surveys your customers will use. In your survey, ask your most important questions first (in case clients don’t take the time to complete the entire questionnaire). Make sure you offer opportunities for open-ended responses, so that your clients aren’t forced to use rating scales that don’t fit the feedback they want to provide.
2. Ask the right questions. Think like a client when writing your questions, targeting their biggest “pain points” in receiving care from you. If you’re unsure where to start, there are tons of free online resources available – including great starter questions you can customize for the needs of your business.
3. Actively solicit both positive and negative feedback. A well-designed survey should encourage your home care clients to tell you what you’re doing right, as well as what you could improve. Make sure you ask questions to help you: identify new business opportunities; uncover service issues you were not aware of; garner content for testimonials and client success stories.
4. Put the survey where clients will find it. Don’t relegate your survey to a dark corner on your Contact Us page and call it a day. Include links to the survey on all your client materials. Here are a few suggestions: brochures, business cards, information folders. The more visibility your survey has, the higher your response rates will be.
5. Provide multiple feedback channels. Some people prefer not to fill out surveys, so make sure you welcome their feedback in any form that’s convenient for them – be it a phone call, an email or a face-to-face chat. Remember, the best way to gather as much high quality feedback as possible it to make it as easy as possible for clients (satisfied or disgruntled) to express their opinions.
6. Train front-line staff and caregivers to ask for feedback. The people who regularly speak to your clients the most should be trained to ask basic satisfaction questions – daily. If they uncover potential problems or service opportunities, have them escalate the issue to the appropriate person. And if they hear a great comment from a satisfied client, train them to ask for permission to use the feedback in your marketing materials!
7. Think outside the box. If these efforts don’t produce the results you want, consider holding a focus group or surveying clients via telephone. Proactive measures like these are more expensive, but they may help you gather input from clients you might otherwise never hear from.

The lesson here? Don’t ignore the voice of the client! Get your head out of the sand, fingers out of the ears, and find out what your clients think about you. When you know what your clients are thinking, you are able to fix more problems, retain more clients, win more business and demonstrate your commitment to delivering what your clients truly want.