The Importance of Customer Service in the Medical Profession

Have you realized recently that the medical profession has downright atrocious customer service?  As a people-oriented service-intensive industry, one would think that medical professionals would provide a pretty high level of customer service. You know, like the service industry does. As it turns out, this is patently false.

In the real world (which includes basically every industry known to man except healthcare), when the vendor shits the bed, they need to perform some kind of service recovery to retain business.  This could be for defective products, bad advice, long waits, incorrectly listed price, the list goes on.  When I worked in hospitality, we gave shit away all the time to upset guests.  Because we not only cared about how they viewed us, but we cared about their level of happiness.   

If you look at the below graph, you will see that the medical sector performs basically zero service recoveries.  (Note: this was created using conclusive, peer-reviewed data.)

Think about it for a second.  What other industry would you be expected to wait upwards of an hour after your scheduled appointment as standard practice?  Where else is it remotely acceptable for your vendor to refer to you in the third person when you are literally right in front of him?

How is this possible?  Brainstorming rationally, we can come up with these hypotheses:

 H₀:This Medical Professional genuinely doesn't give a shit about your level of satisfaction with their service
 H₁:This Medical Professional has a monopoly on the market
 H₂:This Medical Professional can't afford to adequately staff his support team

(There were other hypotheses, but I got lazy.)  Let's go ahead and knock H₁ and H₂ out right now because they're clearly wrong.  First of all, because we do not live on the moon (or in the middle of North Dakota), we have access to more than one doctor.  And furthermore, the barriers to switch medical professionals (unless you have an HMO, which I don't and neither should you) are low.

Also, MDs clearly aren't broke.  Let's stereotype for a second, and assume that all doctors drive new Mercedes-Benzes and play golf on Wednesdays.  And although we know that not all of them drive Mercedes, we know that they can afford them.  So they can clearly afford to hire and pay competent staff.  Furthermore, if doctors did not make a substantial amount of money, we would expect to see a drop in applications at Medical schools nationwide.  In fact, the inverse is happening.

Therefore we prove the null hypothesis and are left with the incontrovertible fact that your doctor doesn't give a shit about you.  And furthermore, because we know that the barrier to switch in the healthcare industry is low, we can iterate out that every doctor doesn't give a shit about you.  Let me illustrate:

As you can see here, Doctor Cost of Giving a Shit (COGS) has a perfectly inverse relationship with how much free time said doctor has.  And, if I could draw your attention back to Chart #1, there's no monetary cost for not giving a shit.  Ceteris paribus, doctors can minimize COGS by providing the minimum care and maximum free time.  It's economics.

This graph illustrates another reason why doctors have no incentive to improve their customer service.  For our purposes, pressure to improve means pressure by superiors.  Before I explain this graph, let's ponder on this scene from Office Space:



The problem is that doctors' bosses are almost always doctors.  And you know what that means? They don't give a shit about your customer experience either--as long as you don't a. kill anyone, b. get sued, or c. get them sued.

So how can we rectify this?  Must we incentivize medical pay based on something other than the number of tests that they run on you?  It could be almost like a tip based system that servers get.  Based on your bill of tests, you may elect to tip (which really means pay) your doctor up to 100% of what he currently makes.  Suddenly the medical industry is now customer oriented.  Just like the service industry.  Just like it should be.

I understand that in order to become a medical doctor it requires something like seven years of schooling plus three years of residency, and that your social development has been retarded as a result.  But you had, at the very least, 17 years to practice normal human interaction.  And if you can't pick up something as simple as giving a shit in 17 years, what makes you think you can pick up this doctoring shit in 10?