When measuring their customer experience, healthcare providers compare themselves to each other and benchmark their customer service accordingly. This sets the bar in the wrong place, according to an article on the Forbes website.

It’s time to benchmark healthcare customer service against the best across all service-intensive industries, because that’s what patients and their loved ones will do, the article said.

"Every patient’s interaction with healthcare is judged in part on the basis of expectations set by the best organizations in retail, foodservice, the hospitality industry, financial services and other areas where expert players have made a science and an art of customer service. And one of the best ways to improve the patient experience is to consider the world your oysterbed of inspiration: to open your thinking to include models outside as well as inside of healthcare," the article said.

In the customer experience, the first and last moments are what a customer is likely to hold as permanent “snapshots” that represent the whole event for them in memory.

This means it can be hard to recover the goodwill of a patient or family member whose first impression is:

• Spending a long, tense time finding a parking space (and when she does, the space he finds is a six-minute walk to the front door — and he’s on crutches)

• Signage in the building that is confusing (once he finally does manage to hobble the six minutes to the front door)

Read the article.