Customer Service Excellence Standard

We realise how important it is to our clients to provide a responsive, timely, courteous, professional and quality dental service. Whereas these were assumed traits of most organisations a couple of decades ago, many of these qualities are not natural qualities of the modern day work-force. Antwerp Dental Group strives to maintain traditional values. It does so by training managers and staff to uphold the CSE standard, and provide evidence for doing so. Antwerp Dental Group subjects itself to external assessment annually. We achieved the CSE standard in 2016, and were the very first practice group to achieve the standard. To date we are amongst the minority of practices in England who possess this standard which consists of a multitude of standards nested against 5 critical criteria (shown in above diagram).

You can draw comfort from the fact that the standard is not achieved once and for all but needs annual validation and such the standard is :

a driver of continuous improvement
a continuous skills development tool
an ongoing independent validation of achievement

The full CSE Standards around the 5 Criteria :

Customer Service Excellence Standard

How we apply the CSE Standard

Criterion 1 Customer Insight

The Patient Journey

We have mapped our patient journey between Front of House Professionals, to Treatment Coordinator, to clinician, and as a practice, obtain feedback from each representative group with view to improve our service to you
Where possible, we seek opportunities to speak to our patients on a one-to-one basis to understand where we can improve our service
We routinely ask our customers to evaluate all aspects of our service, from the Front of House professional team to the nurse team to our dentist and hygienist team. Our willing patients fill out an online survey seeking their view on how our team have performed. Every quarter, we evaluate your comments and suggestions and reflect on ways to improve our service
We use Google Reviews and NHS Choices Reviews to understand levels of satisfaction with our service, identify strengths, and understand areas to improve
We set an annual target to improve our service levels

Criterion 2 The Culture of Our Organisation

Our Values and Client Commitment

We have a set of published core values which is our patient charter, and we judge ourselves on that charter
We regularly review our corporate commitment and individual staff commitment to that charter
We have a corporate commitment to privacy of patient data
We regularly discuss and implement changes to foster staff professionalism and attitude atlas every 2 months
We have an “employee of the month” scheme to recognise behaviours of our staff that underline our corporate commitment to customer service excellence
We regularly invite our staff members to contribute in making suggestions on how we can improve our customer service offering

Criterion 3 Information and Access

Professional & Honest Communication

We continually explore ways to improve how we deliver relevant information about our services to patients
As part of this corporate commitment, we have sought to provide a remarkably detailed website with a comprehensive list of services available in this and our sister practices
Where possible, we have provided real life video testimonials of services that have dramatically improved our patient’s welfare, quality of life and self esteem
For web enquiries, we use CRM software to track the progress of submitted web-forms
We strive to ensure pricing transparency and where possible, fixed price quotations for more bespoke dental services
We provide a free treatment co-ordinator service to ensure that our patients understand the information we provide for them, and help patients with treatment choices
We have done our utmost to facilitate contact wth us by means of telephone, e mail enquiry, online chat, and social media channels while doing all we can to still protect your privacy
We have a carefully co-ordinated system for intra, and extra-practice referrals

Criterion 4 Delivery

Standards

We embrace nationally recognised standards for dentistry, and evidence-based care and where possible try and improve on these
We publish a customer service excellence blog on our website to outline service improvements we have achieved over the year
We provide information carefully and considerately including consent and treatment plans to ensure that we deliver on our promises
We seek to deal with complaints respectfully and swiftly and we never seek to challenge or retaliate on negative online reviews. Instead we use this as an opportunity to learn about our customer’s needs
We quality assure our clinicians through teaching within Antwerp Dental Academy. This Academy facilitates peer review every week and this results in dissemination of clinical information on a weekly basis

Criterion 5 Timeliness and Quality of Service

Responsiveness & Quality

We use GDPR compliant CRM software to ensure that careful coordination of patient referrals
Where necessary, we promptly share patient information with our partners to facilitate rapid and timely dental services
We operate a “mystery shopper” exercise on our own practices to test quality and correctness of information supplied to our patients
The educational arm of our group, Antwerp Dental Academy has been set up to educate Practice Managers, Front of House Professionals, Dental Nurses, and Clinicians, both Dentists and Hygienists
We continue to work on a nationally recognised standard to continue to raise the bar on our professionalism, and comprehensiveness of service
We continually re-map our patient journey to improve the responsiveness of our service and how we interact with our patients

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