subject: Ways to Improve Customer Care for Unpleasant Services [print this page] Ways to Improve Customer Care for Unpleasant Services
No matter what the state of your waiting room may be, clients may still feel anxiety when waiting for their upcoming unpleasant appointment. Oncology, dental, urgent care, and emergency room waiting areas are places where the waiting patients anxiety level rises due to the impending appointment. However, your waiting area's aesthetic can help alleviate a little of that anxiety.
Revelations
The primary cause of the anxiety is facing the unknown. When patient are faced with a serious illness, the unknown element of the visit can really raise anxiety levels. There is the worrying and stress over the test result or anticipated treatment. Patients also self-diagnose, especially on the first referral to an unpleasant service.
You can help alleviate some of this anxiety by providing educational materials on the services you offer, conditions you treat, and inspirational materials like those on people who have survived cancer. This bit of revelation will take some of the guesswork out of the appointment while giving the patient materials to distract themselves from the impending appointment.
Manipulate Time
Time can be the ultimate enemy. Minutes seem to stretch into hours, especially before an unpleasant appointment. The ticking clock becomes an agonizing marker, instead of an aid. The quantity of people in your waiting room can also make time seem to stretch. Sign in sheets that have a time record and are left in the open don't help either.
Manipulate time by removing the clock or replacing it with one that does not have clear numbers. With the numbers removed, the clock is still a time reminder, but it is harder to just glance and get the time. The brain will perceive the time differently.
Segment your waiting room so that part of the group waits in one place and another group in another area. It doesn't have to be a separate room, just add a partition. This idea comes from amusement parks, who makes their lines for popular rides wind around in a zigzag pattern. You can never see up ahead enough to determine line size. The partition will fool the eye into thinking that the crowd is smaller than it actually is.
Another trick is to remove the sign-in sheet from public viewing. Patients perceive the time to be longer if they can guesstimate who is ahead of them and who is behind them. The wait becomes not only for their own appointment, but also for the appointments of two people before and after. This makes for a more anxious wait. Removing the sheet from public view help to manipulate the patient's time perception.
Distractions
Educational printed materials on your services, conditions, treatments, and inspiring survivor stories are one type of distraction. Another distraction is television programming and inspirational videos, which also educates. Doctors can buy interchangeable programming or periodically change the material. You can also dictate content.
Other distractions include books, magazines (but only if they are updated), toys for kids, puzzles, music, windows that look out on the town and more. Anything that takes the patient's mind off the impending appointment, no matter how long it works, will help reduce some of the anxiety.
You could say that the waiting anxiety is all in the patient's head. However, that doesn't make the condition any less serious. Patients suffering from anxiety experience elevated heart rates, blood pressure, clamminess, headache, vomiting, nausea, rashes and more. All of these can affect the treatment of the condition that brought the patient to the doctor initially.
By manipulating time and taking advantage of various distraction methods, your patients anxiety levels while waiting for their service will be greatly reduced.
