CUSTOMER CARE SERVICE

Customer Care Service

Customer Care Service

The management of health care service operations involves decisions that are characterized as strategic, tactical, or operational. Strategic decisions represent long-term decisions focused on how the operations will ultimately create value. Such decisions are often expensive and time consuming to implement and/or change (Woodruff, 2006). In health care, strategic decisions begin with a careful definition of the mix and scope of service offerings. The remaining strategic decisions concern the resources, relationships, and processes to provide the service offerings. These decisions include the service delivery system design, facility location and capacity, supply and service chain partnerships, outsourcing decisions, and large-scale technology decisions (Slywotzky, 2008). For example, the strategic decisions for an outpatient surgery center include a clear definition of the level of care and the range of procedures that can performed, approximate facility location, and size, and primary affiliations. Tactical decisions are considered medium-term decisions mostly concerned with planning (Naumann, 2007).

These decisions include planned levels and skills of workforce, physical capacity planning, materials/services acquisition planning, and equipment maintenance and replacement decisions. For the outpatient surgery center example, tactical decisions would include a specific plan for staffing, facility size and layout (number of suites, number of recovery beds), and vendor selections for supplies and equipment (lease/own, maintenance, and so on). Operational decisions (also referred to as control decisions) are short term in nature and include the management of supporting materials, workforce scheduling, task assignment and scheduling, and patient flow management. For the surgery center example, operational decisions concern the coordination of all activities leading up to, during, and after the surgical procedure (Gardner, 2007).

The nature of the health care services makes them difficult to manage. The services have a high degree of customer interaction. This means the quality of the processes, workforce training, and facility are readily visible to customers. Furthermore, the services are directed at the customers themselves, which means that a service delivery failure will be annoying at best (waiting time) and dangerous or even fatal at worst (wrong medication given). At the same time, it is difficult to define what constitutes a “quality” health care service encounter, because many of the contributing factors are difficult-to-quantify, even emotional, elements. Also, customers have their own particular preferences about what contributes to a quality service encounter. For example, some patients greatly value spending time with providers, whereas others may see such time as wasteful. Even the ...