SOMERS POINT — You know those little customer care surveys you get after visiting the hospital? Fill them out. They make a difference.
“I’m sure everyone has survey fatigue,” Shore Physicians Group Senior Director Bob Gordon said. “When you come to our office, you’ll get a survey. We do treat those surveys very seriously.”
It doesn’t matter if a response is major or minor; Shore Physicians Group (SPG) and Shore Medical Center will respond.
“We try to identify if someone says there isn’t enough parking or the office was cold or that somebody was rude to me,” Gordon said. “We do take it seriously. We do research that, we do address the situation, and if some of that feedback is on the providers, the doctors, we do talk to them about it. Customer service is very important to us.”
“You don’t just come into the hospital and then leave the hospital and you’re kind of forgotten about,” Shore Medical Center Chief Nursing Officer Jill Shultz added. “We kind of follow that experience from the day you enter (a doctor’s) office to the hospital until when they’re discharged. You probably got a phone call or a survey in the mail.
“Those surveys that we send out really bring the feedback to us on how we can change and improve if we need to,” she said.
“We also have a patient experience team so we have advocates in the hospital as well,” Shultz said. “If we have any minor issues, we try to take care of them while the patient is in the hospital because it is better to take care of those issues in real time rather than have someone go home and into the community and talk about the issue they have.”
“We work closely with our patient experience team and we have advocates who go out and visit our patients every day on the floor to make sure their needs are being met and if there is anything else we can help them with,” she said, “and even after they’re discharged what type of needs they may have. It could be getting food or getting transportation home. We help our patients with all those kinds of things.
“Your stay doesn’t end when you leave this building. It continues with that follow-through to make sure your needs were met and you’re satisfied,” she said.
Word of mouth
Gordon said SPG works with Brian Cahill, hospital marketing director, who gets all the surveys, organizes them, identifies trends and potential problems “and what we’re doing well.”
Customer care, Gordon said, is “important from start to finish. Word of mouth is important.”
Cahill said every survey Shore Medical Center has done and every survey they have read concludes word of mouth is one of the top three reasons people choose a medical facility.
“This is a small community,” Gordon said. “A lot of the services that happen here come by referrals. If your neighbor got their knee done, you’ll ask, ‘Who did you see? Where did you have it done?’ So there is a lot of word-of-mouth referrals.”
“If you had a bad experience, you’re going to relay that so it’s very important to us to provide a great experience and if for some reason you did not have a great experience, let us try to address it and fix it,” Gordon said. “Sometimes you don’t always get it right the first time, so we’re willing to admit our mistakes and fix the problem.”
Before his career in finance, he worked in hospitality.
“I’m very familiar with keeping the clientele happy and addressing their needs as they come up,” he said.
– By DAVID NAHAN/Sentinel staff