How to deliver a great care experience

WHAT DOES BEST-IN-CLASS CARE LOOK LIKE AND HOW CAN WE ACHIEVE IT?

The Aged Care Royal Commission highlighted the pressing need for providers to transform their organisations around their customers to deliver an improved care experience. This imperative for change is driving providers to aspire to deliver a great caring experience, but how can this be achieved?

What is a ‘care experience’?

A care experience is the way you deliver care to your care recipients—the intersection between your customer experience and employee experience. It is about outputs from both the tangible and intangible aspects of care delivery. Tangibles such as ensuring a care recipient is physically provided for in a safe and healthy environment, and intangibles being caring for their emotional, psychological and spiritual needs. And it’s about the business operating environment that underpins service delivery.

Supporting someone to live their best life also includes taking advantage of opportunities beyond the traditional provider care delivery model. It includes connecting with ‘the natural supports’ that provide social and emotional connection, a sense of community connectedness and self-worth, and the confidence to live independently. Building these natural supports into a seamless care contract—between the provider, the care recipient, family, friends, neighbours and community— is a crucial part of providing the ultimate care experience.

Create your ideal customer experience

Start with your customer experience and know the wants and needs of your customers to craft an ideal experience that meets their expectations.

1. Know your customers. Improve customer satisfaction by improving the communication your care recipients and their families get from individual care workers and management.

Use technology to enable family members to directly communicate with each other, the care recipient and staff. 2. Delight your customers. Understand then transform the customer journey by applying good use of technology to

bring about the changes you want. Ensure your customers have personalised, real time access to the information they need, when they need it. This enables them to manage the care they receive giving them a similar customer experience to the one they get from the retail and banking sectors. 3. Collect and manage customer feedback. Give your customers an easy way to provide feedback, compliments and complaints and review organisation policies and processes should they choose.

Create your ideal employee experience

Your employees deliver care to your customers and play a key role in the quality of that care delivery. Support your employees to support your customers and you will win at both.

1. Empower your employees. Enable decision-making ability and unblock any pain points in the employee journey by improving systems and processes. Integrate multiple systems for a seamless and consistent flow of data.

Ensure employees have personalised access to all the information they need to do their jobs well. Provide access to best-practice policy and audit resources, and embed a streamlined feedback process. 2. Value employee ideas. Employees feel valued when you listen to their opinions and ideas, are more engaged and more enthusiastic in their work. Streamline communication between individual employees, teams and management to boost employee happiness. 3. Automate repetitive employee tasks. Free staff from time consuming administrative tasks by utilising digital technologies to improve operational and cost efficiency for your organisation, as well as quality of life for those in your care. 4. Train your employees. Ensure your employees have the customer service skills and behaviours they need to deliver quality care, not just speed and efficiency.. Ensure they have access to online resources to upskill and for refresher training.

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The benefits of going digital

Taking advantage of the efficiencies and benefits delivered by a digital system can boost the effectiveness of your care experience and ensure everyone in your organisation benefits. Your care recipients get more choice and responsive care delivery with improved care outcomes. Their family members and friends feel involved and kept up-to-date. Your staff get the information they need when they need it making them feel more satisfied and empowered. And your board and management get reassurance from improved oversight and control.

Creating a great care experience takes thorough planning and organisation-wide commitment, but the outcome is worth the effort.

John Perkins is CEO, Checked In Care. For more information visit www.checkedincare.com.au

Improving both your customer experience (cx) and employee experience (ex) will help create your ideal care experience (care x).

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