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Secret shoppers can scope out your customer service

Practice Management. By Mike Norbut, amednews staff. July 26, 2004.

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When you're with patients, you still need to know what's going on throughout your office. While you're the most important person the patient talks to, you probably aren't making the first or the last impression.

Satisfaction surveys are good for emotional feedback, but some physicians also use secret-shopper techniques. Whether it's hiring someone to grade your staff on how long they let the phone ring or keep people on hold, or calling on your own to gauge responsiveness and accessibility, it's just another way to anticipate issues patients may have.

With satisfaction grades becoming a vital element of physician scorecards and patients consistently proving they are willing to go elsewhere, doctors need to be conscious of the practice's overall image, consultants said. Sometimes, though, that feedback can come too late.

"I'm a big believer in going to your customer and finding out what you're doing right or wrong," said Barbara Reich, a health care marketing consultant in New York City. "[Secret shopping] is a tactic a lot of doctors can use."

Others may already be using it. For example, Cleveland-based Medical Mutual of Ohio used to make secret shopping a regular way to test accessibility of the 15,000-plus physicians in its network. The insurer still makes after-hours calls to test answering services.

Accessibility monitoring is one piece of Medical Mutual's overall quality improvement program, and the measurement process has helped physicians concentrate more on those issues, said Robert Rzewnicki, MD, chief medical officer.