Dear system,
At first glance, you appear optimized for patient care and respect. At second glance, I wonder if you’re optimized for billing efficiency.
You make important checks that suggest you care about my privacy. You ask my birthday, you ask my address, and you ask for my name. I appreciate you thinking about my privacy and being sure you have the right patient. Thank you.
You make it efficient for me to check in. I don’t fill out as much paperwork as I used to. You ask if I have different diseases, and here you fail. I, as an actor in the system, might have no idea if I have or don’t have a disease. In fact, I may be the very wrong person to make such a claim without more evidence. I recommend you adopt a mutually exclusive and comprehensively exhaustive framework to your questions and add the option: “Unknown.”
You ask me to do things like leave personal items in lockers. You also let me know that you’re not responsible for my items that you do not allow me to keep on my person. Have you taken a step back to observe the obvious paradox?
Last thing, when confronted with a concern about my privacy and the desire to keep valuable things on my person, your staff says things like “maybe you shouldn’t have brought that…” Here, you fail again because your system isn’t optimized for my satisfaction or success. If it was, you would call me in advance and prime me to be successful. “Hey, so you have the most successful event, here’s what we recommend and why…. oh, just so you know, at this particular location, here’s what to expect….” Imagine that. level of personalization before an event?
Even though I don’t pay you directly, I am a consumer of your service. And as a consumer of your service, I believe it’s possible to optimize for my success… and success doesn’t mean satisfaction.
Many customers are happy and satisfied paying nothing for service. That’s not ideal. What’s ideal is customers realizing more value than their investment and getting the outcomes they hoped for and more. Optimizing your system for maximum success ensures repeat customers, increased trust, probably less complaints (which are a cost), and (hopefully) more revenue or better margins.
The tweaks are easy and obvious. Your level of commitment is the x factor.
Best,
David
