Title: Your Clients: Use Them or Lose Them
Author:
Section/SPIG: Health Administration
Issue Date:
Are you delivering exemplary service in your organization? How do you know?
It's all too easy to deliver lousy service; examples abound. We all can cite chapter and verse of the various snafus that can occur when an enterprise and customers come into close contact. Often we laugh wryly about the stories we have heard, but often we laugh in quiet corners where only our closest colleagues can hear us.
With many government and related agencies making content and interactive forms accessible to customers, there are plenty of opportunities for problems to occur leading to desperate clients. Unhappy clients can have a great impact on your work, as many businesses have found out to their dismay.
Our clients are very smart and are desperate to be helpful - if only given the chance. So how do we get our clients to take the time to give us feedback, to give us suggestions and to generally keep our feet to the fire? Here are some tips for encouraging interaction from our clients when they visit you on the Web.
Ease of navigation is critical to your clients feeling good about your organization. Easy navigation means that if they have a problem with a page or filling out a form there is an obvious way to get help. The operative word is "obvious" because many times the link for making suggestions, complaints or commendations is not all that easy to find. In desperation many hit the "sitemap" or site index to see if there is some way to contact a human.
Easy navigation means information should be where people expect to find it. Don't offer visitors too many choices. People get confused and will give up and leave your site.
Provide free information. Visitors to your site expect to get information they can use either to make a decision about a product or service or to use in their work or home lives. High quality free information will bring visitors back to your site.
Create a memorable tag line. This helps people remember what you stand for and what is available on your Web site.
Make an emotional connection. Yes, emotion belongs on a public health Web site. The human factor means that you or public health colleagues should be shown working on important public health problems. Public health is about human problems. Show humans at work solving those problems. This also builds a trust relationship with your clients. Make sure the images are high quality.
Do not use a database of FAQs or a help database instead of a complaint form. Most of the time it is too hard to find a problem exactly like the one your client is facing in the database or FAQ, and it takes way too much time for them to look. The longer it takes to get a solution, the more likely the individual is to leave your site, usually unsatisfied and often angry. People want real people to answer their questions and they want answers now. Use a complaint form and reply as soon as you can.
Complaint/compliment forms should include an optional field for the individual to enter his/her name and a separate field for their e-mail address (should they wish to include them, and folks often will), possibly a short subject line and plenty of space in a field for describing their problem. Way too often the space allocated to the problem description is only five-six lines long. This is way too small and can confuse people because they cannot see what they've already written even with a scroll-bar. Be sure the text that the person writes wraps in the field and is not just one long string of characters in a very long line.
Acknowledging complaints. When the individual takes the time to submit a complaint or suggestion or commendation, the form should be programmed to send an acknowledgement e-mail immediately. The person responsible for reading complaints should forward the e-mail to the most likely person to be able to solve that problem. In any case, problems should be dealt with preferably within 24 hours but not more than 48 hours. You do not want your visitors thinking that you do not care what they have to say, or even worse, that you are negligent. Even negative suggestions should be taken seriously and replied to.
Want to minimize demand on your time? Hiding phone numbers so deeply on your Web site that your clients cannot find them is the best way. But it does infuriate clients.
Solve the problem (one way or another). The person answering the comment, problem or criticism can do a lot to keep customers happy just by acknowledging their problem. Oftentimes a thank you for identifying a previously unknown issue or bug and a statement that the IT folks are working on it is enough to satisfy the person. Better yet is to go out of your way to be sure that the client is left with a positive feeling about the interaction.
These days customers are notoriously fickle (and they have a right to be fickle). If there's another place they can go to get a good or service they will go there rather than dealing with confusing forms or navigation, too many choices, or the inability to find the information they want, right now!
Enable swift winnowing of content to facilitate clients zeroing in on just the information they need. The longer visitors to your site have to spend looking for content, the less likely they are to stay on your site and the less likely they are to go away satisfied. Make it easy by running usability studies where you ask your own staff to find something on your site that they wouldn't often use.
Surveys and polls. Reach out to your clients through brief surveys or polls posted on the home page of your Web site. Ask clients to respond to a poll on a topic of interest to them and to your organization. Make the results of the poll immediately accessible. Change the poll every week to maintain interest and to get feedback on topics of importance to the organization.
Use surveys and polls judiciously to get information you need to make decisions, change policy or just get more in-depth feedback on agency concerns.
Get your clients to do it themselves. Companies are mastering the art of "getting you to do it for yourself." From scanning and bagging groceries to paying for hardware purchases at large "Home Depot" type stores, companies are asking customers to do more for themselves in an effort to keep prices down. In increasing numbers, health care sites workers can access data from a single place, and patients can check on lab results or schedule appointments online.
Can you think of ways to get your clients to help themselves via your Web site, and by doing so, help you?