For a laboratory outreach program, customer service is not a department. Rather, excellent customer service is an outcome that benefits patients and clients. Excellence in customer service flows from three foundational elements: organizational support, engaged employees, and appropriate systems and infrastructure.

Organizational alignment

Your organization’s mission, vision, and core values are tremendous assets for creating a customer service culture.

Aligning employee actions and service initiatives with your organization’s values and priorities will provide visibility and position the laboratory outreach program as an asset for your organization. Leveraging existing service standards will also ensure that laboratory outreach customers have consistent experiences across your organization. Of course, it is important to ensure organizational standards support excellence for the laboratory. If the existing standards fall short of laboratory goals, it is entirely acceptable to build on your organization’s standards to deliver a higher level of service to laboratory outreach customers.

The laboratory outreach program is reliant on many other organizational departments, making it necessary to collaborate and make excellent customer service a shared priority. Departments such as patient registration, billing, courier logistics, supply management, and information technology management may impact the outreach customer experience, influencing their impression of the laboratory outreach program. Collaborating with these areas to achieve the outreach program’s customer service goals offers an opportunity to elevate customer service across the organization.

Employees

While employee hiring and training often focus primarily on the transactional or technical aspects of the role, it is also important to consider interpersonal skills, such as empathy and compassion. The stress and unhappiness of an employee having a bad day will influence everyone they encounter, and a single negative customer interaction could cause that customer to take their business to another laboratory.

Interpersonal skills are important even for employees with minimal or no customer contact.

Those skills influence their ability to support co-workers who do interact with customers. When all employees feel supported by each other, your culture will benefit and better support excellent service. It is important to train and coach all employees to develop these skills, but it is especially important in the context of managing negative customer interactions. Having them prepared can ensure a stable and successful outreach customer service interaction even when challenges arise.

Systems and facilities

Where employees work and the processes and procedures they follow matter to customer service. A supportive infrastructure that supports functional needs to deliver exceptional service is essential. Take for example employees responsible for data entry, where accuracy and precision are critical. A noisy environment with distractions or processes that also require them to answer telephones or handle pneumatic tubes will likely lead to increased errors, resulting in inaccurate results and billing for customers. Another example is your call center. It must have basic equipment and systems for staff to perform their role. This includes a quiet work area that is not physically located in the middle of a frenetic specimen processing department; cordless headsets, which allow employees to move around the work area; and dual computer monitors to more efficiently manage customer inquiries.

Another area to consider related to processes and policies is the cross-training of staff. It may help meet staffing needs, but it can be difficult to maintain employee competence and confidence in their role, negatively impacting the service delivered by increasing errors or employee turnover.

Having defined roles and specific job descriptions will ensure staff proficiency and a higher level of service delivery.

Customer service in a laboratory outreach program doesn’t just happen; it requires effort. It starts with developing a customer-focused culture that is aligned with organizational goals, and it requires a supportive infrastructure and physical environment that make it easier for staff to perform their roles. Finally, make sure you support laboratory staff with training and tools to succeed in effective service delivery. When staff, processes, and the physical environment are all fully leveraged and aligned, the outcome is excellent customer service.