Internet-Powered Customer Service for Your Health Organization
by Kevin P. Richardson, President, MedRocket, Inc.

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About the Author - Kevin Richardson is a healthcare marketing consultant, executive coach, and writer who provides fresh perspectives and expertise about online healthcare marketing. Sign up for his FREE "MedRocket Ezine" newsletter and discover how to profitably attract and serve healthcare consumers online. Subscribe at http://www.medrocket.com.

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If you've spent time roaming the Web for specific information or just for fun, you've probably experienced first-hand the varying degrees of usefulness of Web sites. And it's certainly a quick education in what some organizations think passes for customer service on the Internet.

Providing information on demand is an important role of the Web, but we would probably all agree that simply putting a few brochures out on the Internet misses the main advantage of using the Web in the first place.

For marketing and public relations professionals, the Web is unlike any of the traditional communication vehicles we've used in the past. In one multimedia package the Web combines the depth of print, the flashiness of broadcast, and the segmentation of direct advertising. The Web calls on our organizations to raise our level of customer service to the highest levels.

I like to compare the Web to a telephone. Used efficiently, it allows for a personal conversation between the organization and a single customer. A visit to your Web site is like one of your customers making a person-to-person call with your entire organization. The impression you make when you answer that ringing telephone communicates volumes about how you value your customer.

Some Customer Service Examples

If you want to visit a Web site of an organization that is thinking beyond brochure-ware and capitalizing on the very personal nature of the Web, take a look at Federal Express, Hilton Worldwide, Adobe, Saturn, Aetna US Healthcare, and the American Civil Liberties Union. They each have carried their mission and customer service philosophies over the Web in style

Don't equate the visual appeal of these sites with their customer service abilities. All of the graphical window-dressing and technological baubles in the world don't make up for poor customer service. However first impressions do count for a lot. So it's helpful to objectively evaluate your own Web site from a customer's viewpoint. Make sure your site is easily navigated, has a pleasing non-offensive graphic look, and is optimized to be fast- loading for a browser using a 28.8k connection to the internet.

The following are some strategies that you might consider adding to your health care organization's Web site to improve customer service. Start small and try a few. Experience will tell you which of the strategies can also save your staff time and resources.

Speak their language. Most marketing communications professionals have struggled with the issue of how to provide collateral material to customers who do not speak English as their primary language. By its nature, the Web is a virtual melting pot. People of all nations and languages use the Internet to communicate for business and pleasure.

Fortunately for us, someone has already invested in the technology to allow a Web visitor to read a page that may not be written in their native language. Pay a visit to AltaVista, one of the better search engines on the Internet. The pages returned in response to an AltaVista search have a link attached to them that says "translate." Clicking on this hot link allows you to translate the document between English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. It actually does a pretty good job, though it's certainly not as accurate as having a professional translator interpret the text.

Using this technology, it is possible to offer your Web site Visitors the option of translating any page from your site to one of the other languages. For example, if you have a large number of Spanish-speaking clients in your region, you might choose to incorporate an "Espanol" button on each English page of your site. It's a fairly simple matter to use the AltaVista translating servers to do the translating on-the-fly. A word of caution though: While the technology works reasonably well for general translations, you wouldn't want to use the technique to translate sensitive medical information documents. If resources permit, it's always better form to have a professional translator - a real person -- check the translated material for the possibility of cultural or medical faux pas.

Offer a fast-track registration. The computer software industry encourages customers to register newly purchased software on the Web. Take a look at Microsoft for example. Most computer users accept this Web registration process as an easy, efficient, and quick way to do The job. Organizations in other industries such as healthcare can Use the same technique and make registering for courses and services easier on the customer.

Web-based registration can eliminate the filling out and mailing of registration forms, reduce telephone calls, and circumvent waiting in line to register at a health care facility and in similar situations. Since the Web server is able to capture all of the information directly into a database, it doesn't require someone to read and manually enter information from a registration postcard. This saves time and money.

Assess your customer's situation. The anonymity of the Internet is a major attraction for many people. There they can assert their opinions, share feelings, and ask questions they might otherwise not ask, including questions about their personal health. Whereas a man might be reluctant to ask his doctor about a prostate problem, he might feel perfectly comfortable taking an anonymous health risk assessment at your hospital Web site.

Assessments can be as simple or as sophisticated as necessary and can be created for any disease or illness, such as heart disease, breast cancer, diabetes, AIDS, or migraine headaches. Along with the results of the assessment, the Web server can refer the person to his or her doctor for follow-up, or recommend specialists and hospital programs and services. Appropriate links to other Internet resources an also be provided.

This assessment -- a simple form of an expert system -- can serve as a decision tree for helping your customers decide which action they should take. Should they contact their customer service representative? Should they upgrade their software drivers? How can they "fix" their problem. Help them focus quickly on their problem, and give them a number of possible solutions. This not only gives clients immediate feedback, but can actually help them put their ducks in order for when they do have to call your company and speak to a real person.

Match Customers with the Right People. Telephone-based physician referral services are used by many health care organizations. Carry the idea to the Web to let patients take advantage of searching your referral database for physicians, sales representatives, or service offices. Some basic healthcare examples are Deaconess Hospital (Evanston,IN) and the Massachusetts Medical Society database .

Searching the database allows searching for a physician or representative by any combination of criteria -- name, city, Zip code, State, insurance coverage, language spoken, or specialty. The database can be adjusted to favor physicians starting/building practices over mature practices. The search results can also provide relevant links to the Web site. Analyzing a log of the search criteria also can yield interesting demographic information.

Let Web visitors have it their way. Every visitor to your Web site has unique interests and needs. Discovering and using these individualized preferences has been a somewhat elusive marketing goal in traditional marketing for many years. Now on the Web, cultivating an interactive marketing relationship with a single person is not only possible, but it's being done every day. Witness the proliferation of customized "My" this and "My" that, such as My Yahoo and My Netscape.

Even for companies without million-dollar web budgets, the technology exists to ask visitors a series of questions about their interests and then create a profile for a customized page that the visitor sees whenever he or she revisits your site. If you've used the Microsoft Personal Information Center or created a custom news and headline page, then you've used this type of technology.

The Bank of America Web site lets bank customers build their own bank according to their financial needs. Since the pages on a customized site are dynamically created for every visit, it always will reflect the latest news and additions to a site. On a health Web site, if an visitor has young children at home, then their custom page may have a selection of Pediatric information, and general adult health information. A visitor's profile can be changed by them at any time.

Show them the way. So you already offer maps and directions to your facilities? How about offering customized driving directions and a map from any clients' home to any facility in your network. Impossible? Not if the visitor gets them from your Web site. Yet another benefit of using the Web for customer service.

Quite a few services on the Internet provide this service for free. A few of the better services are Map Quest and Maps On Us . All you have to do is visit their sites and they will show you how it's done. Basically, you incorporate an interactive form on one of your Web pages. The form has several text areas that a visitor can fill in, such as their starting address, city, and state. They press a submit button, and the mapping software at the mapping host site returns driving directions and a map to your facility. This provides a valuable service for customers and reduces the time it takes to answer calls and read or fax directions.

Write a letter or two. E-mail remains the simplest ,most-used, and arguably the most useful Internet tool. It is one of the most versatile vehicles a communicator has at his or her disposal. Even without a Web site, an organization can use e-mail to communicate with its customers. If you can use a word processor, you can compose an e-mail message. Four of the more common ways to use e-mail in customer service are autoresponders, reminders and alerts, newsletters, and surveys.

An autoresponder is a powerful little tool that your mail server uses to send back a canned reply to every incoming message. It can be used to set an expectation of when they might receive a complete response, or as a mail-back service. For example sending a blank email message to services@yourcompany.com could return an email document summarizing all of your services.

Reminders and alerts are offered through many Web sites. A user enters his or her email address to receive an alert when a Web site is updated, or when information is added that they will want to read. Barnes and Noble, one of the large Web-based booksellers uses E-nnouncements to let readers know when new books in certain areas of interest are available. Health care organizations could use the technique to create an e-mail reminder service for mammograms, eye exams, physicals, etc.

Electronic newsletters are useful vehicles for keeping customers up-to-date. If customers can read about something in an e-mail newsletter before they read about it in the newspapers, so much the better. The newsletter has to be useful information, not junk. Be sure to state in every issue how to stop the future delivery of the newsletter. Another idea is send a monthly e-mail newsletter to business leaders in your community from your CEO. Keep it short and to the point. Highlight improvements to services, changes to health care environment, and other hospital news.

Conducting a targeted survey with only a single question is efficiently done via e-mail. It's easier for someone to answer an e-mail message than to fill out and mail a paper survey. Your return will probably be much higher too.

The basic rules in using e-mail for customer service are to: keep the messages simple, keep the files small, and ask before sending. It's best to ask permission to send promotional e-mail to someone, or have them sign up for periodic mailings. Unsolicited email is called spam in the Internet community, which is rude, unprofessional, and can result in some nasty public relations problems.

Listen to the grapevine. The use of research to improve service to customers is crucial. The Internet offers many ways to find out what people are saying about your organization, about your competitors, and about health topics of interest to your customers.

What are they saying? To find out what your customers (or competitors) are saying about your organization on the Internet, check DejaNews to search more than 16,000 internet newsgroups for any mention of your organization's name. Then surf over to the Drudge Report. This political site is perhaps the easiest way to read newsfeeds from the major wire services. It provides links to API, UPI, Reuters, and other major wire feeds. You can use the same technique to find out what they're saying about your competitors or any health-related topic, as well.

When it comes to measuring satisfaction, hospitals regularly use surveys to measure patient satisfaction, but how about other customers? Former New York Mayor Ed Koch was fond of asking his constituents the question, "How am I doing?" If you'd like to ask your customers the same question, your Web site is a perfect place to start the ball rolling by implementing a poll or survey for vendors, physicians, media, or any other of the organization's customers.

How about a virtual focus group? Improve your Web site through an on-line focus group. Participation in the group can either be live, and time-limited; or take place at the participants' convenience over the course of a week. If the Focus Group is not taking place live, then the facilitator should check in on the status of the group each day, posing questions to keep the discussing going, and keeping it on-course. An added benefit of running a focus group on the Web is that the end product is a transcript of what everyone wrote, and the responses given to the facilitator's questioning.

There's no reason why an on-line focus group concept couldn't be used to explore customer attitudes and opinions about other topics. For example, if through a simple sign-in form on the main page a group of site visitors indicated an interest in cardiac care, then in the future you could ask them to take part in an on-line focus group on building a new cardiac center.

Speak up so I can hear you. Many Web sites have ignored the use of audio as an important part of sites' content. From a customer service perspective, the human voice adds a valuable dimension to a Web site. It says: "There are real people behind this Web page." Web surfers are so used to the utter lack of sound on Web sites (tacky midi sound doesn't count), that they are pleasantly surprised when they hear a human voice. Check out the "A Minute for Kids" audio features of the American Academy of Pediatrics and DocTalk health radio at Stanford for an idea of the possibilities.

If you want to set your site apart, one way to do it is to include audio messages that can be controlled by the visitor. Go beyond the usual recorded message from the president and create some useful audio health content. The quality of streaming audio, namely RealAudio and Macromedia Shockwave has improved to the point where it can now be used to provide real content, instead of just technological flash appeal.

Remember, some people will prefer to receive information audibly, rather than visually. Some visitors to your site also may be vision-impaired. Heightened customer service means thinking about their needs in the same way we must consider providing content for non-English speakers.

Journalists are customers too. Consider setting up an area of your site especially for members of the media. Be sure to let them know that it's available, and how they can reach it. For some ideas, check the Xerox media area at or the Daimler Chrysler Corporate Media Relations site. As any reporter will tell you: They can smell hyperbole, fluff, and propaganda a mile away. So make sure the area includes timely information that will be useful to the working press. Cut to the chase. Keep the page size small so it loads quickly.

A site that caters to journalists should include immediate access to news releases, a news release archive, press kits, executive biographies, and down-loadable photographs. Including audio news releases is another way to pique the interest of media coverage in a topic if the audio release is done well. It's also a good way for electronic media outlets to "screen test" the speaking style of a health expert.

Since you want the media to locate you quickly for interviews And other information, make it easy for them to reach you. Make contact information, including names, titles, telephone, fax, and beeper numbers obvious. Incidentally, it is completely within the capabilities of today's technology to allow someone to beep your personal pager from the Web with an important message. If you go this route, get an alpha-numeric pager. It's a great customer service technique for the media, as long as they don't abuse it, and as long as you answer your pages.

Put your expert on-line. Host an on-line question and answer session with one of your experts. Promote the event to the media, to employees through your in-house publications, and to clients through direct mail and other vehicles . It's a good technique for building relationships with clients. It also let's them have access to experts in their field. As for the technology involved, there are many interactive chat programs available that run on most Web servers. As an alternative, consider using a site that's designed for hosting on-line chat-type events. For no charge, many portals and search engines/directories now offer chat services. You can create a private chat room for your event at Yahoo. It will take the technological pressure off. An added benefit to this route -- it's not necessary to have your own Web site.

Promoting the on-line availability of one of your health experts Can create a flurry of media attention, especially if it hasn't been done before in your area. Many daily newspapers now feature on-line events alongside listings of television programming. Most of the events listed feature big-name authors, actors, and musicians that will be held on the major on-line services such as America On-line. So a local expert on a local Web site might be innovative enough to draw media interest.

A few words of caution though. First, make sure your site is hosted on a server that has the bandwidth and capacity to accommodate many simultaneous "hits." Second, have a live training session with the expert prior to announcing the event. Have the Public Affairs and Marketing staff log in as participants asking the expert some questions. Make sure the software works as expected and that the server doesn't bog down. It's always a good idea to have a few pages of one-or two-sentence paragraphs covering a broad selection of questions and answers in the given area. In many cases, the answers can be copied, pasted, and customized for a response to questions from Web visitors. Be sure to offer the on-line transcript from the session on the Web site after the event.

The interactive nature of the Web allows us to improve relationships with our customers and inform them, serve them, and know them in ways that would have been next to impossible prior to the Web era. Companies that embrace the technology the improves customer service may benefit from a real competitive edge.

Are you ready for the challenge?

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