HOW DO I CAPTURE THE VOICE OF THE CUSTOMER?

Often I am asked by healthcare executives how to effectively capture the voice of the customer.  The one medium that keeps coming to their mind is surveys.  While I like surveys, they are on the low end of my list, because often a survey polls on what the organization’s perception of value to the patients is, rather than what the patient actually values.

Is that really the voice of the customer?  Sounds like “my” voice imposed on the patients.

One of the more advanced techniques Six Sigma folks use is “Quality Function Deployment”, pretty much a mouthful, but simply said it is a tool that it starts at the beginning with defining the patient’s needs, a self- ranking by the patient of their needs,  tying it all together is the technical factor on how it was satisfied for each of the patient’s needs and finally rounding it all out is the strength of the relationship between the what the patient needed and how they got it.

Is this the only way to get the patient heard?

Is there medium approach that captures both the qualitative and quantitate?

Each situation is different and healthcare providers need to find the niche medium that fulfills the following:

• A sustainable and robust process to capture information from the stakeholder (patients)
• Collate the data,
• Conduct analysis
• Interpret the results
• Develop actionable goals
• Finally-execute the project to realize the goals.

At the end of the day you should have someone (group) that is accountable and a system that is credible, reliable, precise, accurate and your go-to tool in making prediction based on responses about future trends.

Please let us know what has worked for you and more importantly not worked for you, so that we all can learn!