3 October 2016
Four Seasons Health Care has been named winner of Overall Best Customer Experience in this year’s UK Customer Experience Awards. It was chosen by the judges ahead of more than 750 companies across all sectors of industry for its Quality of Life programme.
Quality of Life is a technology based customer feedback system, which has collected over 110,000 pieces of feedback from residents and families in the past 12 months. The changes implemented as a result have led to customer satisfaction levels of over 97% across Four Seasons Care Homes.
Four Seasons was also winner in the award category for “Insight and Feedback – A Focus on Understanding.”
Tim Hammond, Chief Executive, Four Seasons, said: “It is a huge endorsement for our Quality of Life programme to have been selected as the best customer experience programme in the UK and it’s a credit to the 20,000 people in our care teams who have used it to listen to the 16,000 residents in our homes to understand how we can give them a better experience and make them happy.”
Neil Copping, host of the Customer Experience Awards, said: “It is the first time that a company in the care sector has won this award and I think it is very significant because, while quality of care is most important, there is more to giving people living in care homes the best customer experience. Four Seasons understands this and is embedding a customer focus and service culture that has resulted in a substantial increase in levels of customer satisfaction.”
The Quality of Life Programme uses technology that is exclusive to Four Seasons to give insights into the day to day experience of people in more than 300 care homes. Residents, their families and health professionals can use iPads that are linked to purpose-designed software systems, to tell the company what they think about any aspect of care. The information is transmitted in real time to the Home Manager and Regional Manager. This is very different from the paper-based surveys conducted across the industry once or twice a year, where feedback is usually out of date by the time it is collated.
Tim Hammond said: “The feedback we have received has enabled our care teams to find and fix over 70,000 issues or niggles. Most of these are little things which make a big difference to someone’s daily life. They have included always cutting the rind off someone’s bacon, changing the time someone’s medication is delivered, re-decorating a room to a resident’s taste, giving a choice of two meats for the Sunday roast. When the majority of our residents are of the generation who don’t like to make a fuss, our Quality of Life Programme has helped us to uncover customer needs that they might otherwise not have expressed.
“Since we introduced the programme into all of our homes last year our average customer satisfaction rating has increased from 92% to its current level of just over 97%. The programme has meant less paperwork for care home colleagues, freeing up their time which is better spent with residents.”
Notes
The Quality of Life programme software was developed in partnership with Optimum Health Technology. More information can be found here.
The UK Customer Experience Awards is one of the most important events for customer experience professionals. The Awards are judged by panels of independent business men and women, using scoring methodology and criteria, endorsed by Cranfield School of Management.
Four Seasons Health Care media contact:
Bob Mitchell, T: 07976 514833 / E: rmitchell@mww.com