Baird's popular monthly customer service e-newsletter provides timely feature articles, book reviews and tips for making your service efforts stronger than ever. Feel free to reprint any of the following articles but please include the required credit lines.

Where do the vast majority of your patients and potential patients interact with you? Not in person. Not via email. But, by phone. That’s right – the telephone remains one of the most significant contact points in health care. Unfortunately, while significant, it is often overlooked as a crucial part of the patient experience.

Secret #1 ...

Consumerism is here, and the emergence of transparency in healthcare cost and quality is quickly changing the landscape for the nation’s hospitals. Consumers, armed with the responsibility of spending their own out-of-pocket dollars, will become much more discriminating purchasers of healthcare services. Hospital executives will not only have to focus on providing quality services at a competitive price, but they will have to differentiate themselves in a key area they’ve generally ignored – customer service.

Eight seconds. That’s how long it takes to form a first impression. If you think about your own interactions, you can quickly see the validity of this statistic. Whether at a job interview, a social event or a retail setting, we form impressions quickly. So do our patients.

Patients in a clinical setting take eight seconds or less to form an opinion about the facility, the care providers and their overall experience. What you don’t know about these experiences can and does hurt you.

There are many leaders in health care environments – each with an opportunity to exert positive influence on those who follow them. If you’re in a position to guide and shape the behaviors of those around you, here are some specific things you can do to help foster exceptional patient experiences:

No matter how many employees you have on your team, having even as little as one percent of those employees disengaged can have a significant impact on the bottom line. Recognition is one of several leadership skills that helps strengthen employee engagement and results in a measurable bottom line impact.

Sodexo has 110,000 employees and they are committed to being leaders in integrated food service and facilities management. I spoke at a Sodexo conference recently in Dallas and was impressed, as always, with how much they value recognition and the efforts they go through to make recognition as easy as possible for people in the trenches. Those efforts make a difference that directly impacts the bottom line. They’re a company that’s committed to investing in their people.

When it comes to employee engagement, one size truly doesn’t fit all – or even a majority of – your employees. Each of your employees has different motivations and drivers that impact how engaged they are with their work, with their colleagues and with your health care organization. The challenge for leaders, of course, is deter mining what those drivers are and then finding ways to provide employees with what they need to stay connected to their work.

Four Levels of Engagement

Through our partnership with the Center for Talent Retention, we have found that virtually every workforce can be categorized into four distinctive segments:

1) The disengaged
2) The somewhat engaged
3) The engaged
4) The fully engaged

Whoever coined the phrase; silence is golden, was not talking about a management technique. It’s widely accepted that positive reinforcement is one of the best ways to increase good behavior. But don’t be fooled into thinking that ignoring overtly bad behavior or marginal performance is the antithesis of positive reinforcement.