In today’s evolving aged care landscape, understanding your customers is integral to success. The Aged Care Royal Commission emphasised the need for aged care providers to focus on their customers and transform their organisations accordingly.
One critical driver of continuous improvement is to proactively seek feedback from customers. This helps aged care providers to gain valuable insights and act to improve service offerings before things escalate into a complaint.
While effective complaints management remains critical to enhancing overall customer experience, the key to breaking the complaints cycle is to be proactive in asking customers to share their experience and to act on this feedback to help reduce the number of complaints received in the first place. This translates to a win for all;
- Care providers really understand what their customers think and feel about their service and know precisely where to target their improvement programs for maximum impact;
- Customers feel listened to and know their input matters; and
- Care providers can produce evidence to the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission that they have a well-rounded system to capture and act-on customer feedback in line with Standard 6 of the current aged care standards (or Standard 2.6 of the new strengthened aged care standards).
The importance of customer feedback for aged care providers
Standard 6 of the current Aged Care Quality Standards (and Standard 2.6 of the new strengthened aged care standards when these come into effect) require care providers to manage and respond to feedback and complaints. The standard mandates a system that supports consumers in making complaints or providing feedback, ensuring it is safe, accessible, confidential, prompt, and fair.
Expectations on care providers in relation to feedback and complaints will increase with the new strengthened standards, which also expect care providers to report outcomes from feedback to their customers and staff and monitor the effectiveness of their complaints resolution process.
A well-rounded feedback program aligned with business needs helps care providers to fulfil their obligations under Standard 6. Feedback helps identify customers’ needs and expectations, guiding care providers to improve their customers’ experience and measure organisational performance against competitors. Capturing both qualitative and quantitative feedback provides comprehensive insights into customers’ preferences and behaviours, aligning with the Aged Care Quality Standards.
A high-quality feedback and complaints function involves:
- Evaluating how well the organisation currently gathers feedback using both active methods (surveys, focus groups, interviews) and passive methods (live chat, support calls, social media, online reviews)
- Robust systems and processes for managing feedback including the ability for customers to provide their feedback anonymously
- Interpersonal skills of the care provider’s team to handle feedback effectively
felicx insights and reflections
felicx offers an innovative suite of products that provide both subscription and bespoke options, each meticulously designed to deliver deep insights, transparent feedback and a comprehensive understanding of the care experience.
Our products are aligned with aged care standards, supporting compliance reporting for providers.
Our partnership model with care providers (shown above – pink steps are felicx led parts of the process and blue steps are care provider led parts of the process) has proven highly beneficial to our clients. It allows our clients to focus on improvement programs driven by the feedback we collect and analyse.
Our clients use the customer insights felicx independently collects and analyses to communicate outcomes with both their clients/residents and with the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission. They can measure their performance over time and see how their improvement programs translate into customer satisfaction metrics.
If you’d like to transform your customer interactions and elevate your service delivery contact us today to learn how we can help you break the complaints cycle, meet your compliance obligations and exceed customer expectations.