Keys to Success – Setting Standards, Maintaining Consistency
- Posted on: Mar 15 2022
- Leave a response
One of the major keys to success for your practice is to provide your patients with outstanding customer service, day in and day out. Consistency is key, patients expect outstanding products and services each and every time they visit. To maintain consistently great service, you need to set standards. Standards can take the form of written checklists, step-by-step instructions, or detailed training manuals. The idea is to provide guidelines for employees on how to correctly perform tasks and work processes. This ensures that every employee has a core understanding of how to properly perform a task so that it is executed consistently.
Setting standards can help your staff function better. Standards help increase job knowledge and improve communication. They remove the grey area about who is responsible for performing a task and how it is properly executed. This helps maintain treatment quality and consistency. When staff understands tasks more fully, they perform better. This helps morale and improves patient experience. Processes and procedures tend to erode over time as short-cuts worm their way into repetitive tasks. Having formal standards and operating procedures help prevent this. Training costs are reduced, and safety is improved because there are written guidelines to refer to. This also helps ensure knowledge is institutionalized which facilitates future growth.
Begin by developing position descriptions. Move on to detailing treatment procedures for each of your treatment offerings. Put together employee behavioral standards that emphasize providing excellent patient service. Other areas include facility sanitation, safety procedures, inventory control, security, sales procedures, cash handling, etc.
Patients appreciate consistent, outstanding service. Taking the time to develop standards can go a long way to providing the consistency that is key to a successful practice.
For assistance in assessing your practice or developing standards, please contact Cheryl Whitman, CEO of Beautiful Forever, an aesthetic business-consulting firm at : 561-299-3909 or by email at: Cheryl@beautifulforever.com
Posted in: Articles
