Blogs
For over a decade we have been helping a diverse range of businesses in restaurants and pubs, large and small, to improve their offering for their guests. After all, it's in the best interests of a business to carefully monitor its customers' responses in order to ensure it is providing the service that people expect and deserve, and that this inspires positive word-of-mouth to drive future trade.
Things work a bit differently in the public sector, and for good reason. Hospitality businesses generally have a surplus of supply and need to engage their guests in order to match the supply with demand. But hospitals are publicly accountable for every penny they spend and this adds complexity to the way they are governed and how they manage demand for their services.
However, in the last ten years, there has been a steady development in the degree of choice available to patients - as a result, a hospital's reputation is more important than ever before. And reputation can change more rapidly than in the past with the prevalence of social media. This has to be the best driver for improvement in the quality of hospital food. But hospitals tend not to be very good at creating simple channels of communication for their patients - some have effective public and patient involvement programmes but not a rapid feedback mechanism from patients that allows managers to keep their finger on the pulse (so to speak!) and to take appropriate actions to drive up standards.
It's time to change that. But not with a long boring survey that few can be bothered to complete. On behalf of our clients, we collect thousands of responses every week from regular customers. So it isn't difficult. There usually needs to be an incentive to provide feedback and it would be important to carefully choose how this is done. And care also needs to be put into the design of the site used to collect the feedback. Once it is simple for the service user (which is usually a more appropriate term for 'customer' in a hospital environment), then we have significant amounts of data to do clever things with alerts and analysis, engaging the decision-makers who have the influence to bring about change. If such an initiative is taken up by multiple hospitals, it also becomes easy to benchmark performance and drive further improvements.
The general public generally agrees that restaurants and pubs have dramatically improved their food offering in the last decade. The public sector has an opportunity to catch up by using some of the tools and methodologies available to their contemporaries in the private sector.
