This course helps you implement the easiest training for your team so you can significantly improve patients’ telephone experiences.
- Do you ever worry that when patients call your organization, the phone experience is not quite what it should be?
- Do you want to improve the quality and consistency of the service you provide over the phone?
- Have you put off telephone skills training because your colleagues think they don’t need it? Or they don’t have time for it? Telephone Rapport solves this problem because the skills are specific and relevant, highly observable, and apply to everyone. Clinicians, non-clinicians, everyone. Together, we’re going to put concept into action immediately.
- You can address telephone professionalism with a course that doesn’t take people off the phones or away from their pressing responsibilities.
- Telephone communications are rich opportunities for relationship building. In a phone conversation, you get information you can’t get any other way.
- Personalization and meaningful interactions are key to building and maintaining relationships that patients can recommend to others. Telephone Rapport teaches your team how to create rapport during phone conversations, even when their time is limited.
“Telephone Rapport has helped me to slow down and listen to the caller more. I did not realize how much I was rushing the caller until these suggestions. I even use Telephone Rapport with some of my co-workers when they come and ask questions. Thanks for your tips each morning – they help me be a better scheduler every day.”
Chahazara J. Bender
AU Medical Center
Augusta, GA
Telephone Skills are in my DNA
At the risk of sounding 300 years old, my part time job during high school and college was Switchboard Operator at Quincy City Hospital in Massachusetts.
When I became a hospital vice president, my responsibilities included Communications. I selected and coordinated implementation of a new telephone system for our 260 bed hospital.
A few years later, I was speaking for the Case Management Society of America’s Wisconsin Chapter. Marilyn Smith, an Educator from Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, attended the conference and then recommended me to be the only external speaker for the Mayo Clinic Service Collaborative.
During our first planning call, I outlined the two hour presentation I planned to give. Telephone skills were mentioned as a minuscule part of the curriculum and almost dismissed as unnecessary. However, everyone at the Mayo Clinic is open to learning from others. We agreed it would be a part of my presentation. One of the Collaborative teams decided to use my techniques for more effective telephone calls as their service improvement initiative. When the Collaborative teams met six months later, the group that worked on telephone communications demonstrated remarkable results in staff and patient satisfaction. In the planning calls for the following years, I was advised to “include those telephone skills everyone liked so much.”
In 2015, Yale New Haven Health established a centralized call center for providing information on employee benefits. I was hired to work with their newly formed call center team before the center opened.
When researching my book, Higher HCAHPS Scores: The Willing to Recommend Approach, I reviewed thousands of social media posts and was disappointed to see how few of the positive comments and how many of the negative comments were about telephone care experiences.
All of my work experience is in health care. I understand how busy your work life is and I specialize in techniques that take little or no time.
Give me a few minutes a day for two weeks and watch how these skills will change the way you feel about telephone calls.
Telephone Rapport – what’s included:
- A daily lesson sent via email to each of your staff members. You have the flexibility to choose the start date and schedule. There are ten lessons and three additional bonus lessons included.
- Pre-written emails you can send to your team to introduce the patient experience initiative and then engage them throughout the course.
- A leader’s guide for each lesson with helpful ideas about how you can reinforce the training.
- Bonus: A peer coaching program you can use to sustain improvements after Telephone Rapport concludes.
What’s not included:
Rather than tell your team everything they need to know and then give them a test so they can prove they’ve learned it, Telephone Rapport provides bite-sized, easily digestible techniques they will apply immediately. This program is for you if you are more interested in what your team is applying rather than whether they can answer test questions correctly.
This course is designed to help callers feel respected and important. The course does not focus on the angry or difficult caller. However, consistent use of Telephone Rapport techniques will reduce the number of “difficult” callers.
Is Telephone Rapport for you? It absolutely is if…..
- You know your team could be doing better on the phone, but you’re unsure how to to make it happen.
- You’re ready to take your patient experience to the next level and drive greater access and higher patient experience scores.
- You need a patient experience initiative and have run out of ideas.
- You know patient experiences on the phone could be better but you don’t have the time to pull people away from their work to have a class.
- Your time is tight and you’re looking for the most effective and efficient telephone skills training.
- You’re looking for easy to understand, sustainable teachings that can be implemented immediately.
You’re ready to take on better phone experiences, and like the idea of having the work done for you, including a peer coaching program to sustain the improvements.
Tuition:
In choosing this course, you will support your team in changing what they do, not just what they know.
Your patients want to feel cared for every time they call. Here’s your opportunity to make it happen with a minimum investment of time and money.
Select your Telephone Rapport option based on your employee count:
Have questions? Please email me at susan (at) susanbaker (dot) com.
Thanks for reading this far and for your interest!
Susan Keane Baker
P.S. If you’ve been wondering what you can do quickly to better meet patient expectations, Telephone Rapport is the course for you.
Every customer interaction is the chance to build a lasting relationship. Have the kind of phone calls that make your patients want to tell other people about you by sharing the positive experience they had.
