Superior customer service, and the management of customer service behavior among Chestnut Global Partners (CGP) employees, service partners, and clinical affiliates is the most important ingredient of “quality” management. Quality, innovative care goes beyond “providing a program” and must address solutions to a customer’s problems and anticipate opportunities for meeting needs that customers may not even recognize they have. The challenge is being a service provider that does not produce a “thing”, the quality of which can be measured, weighed, and tested. The “quality” of an experience in using an EAP is inherently subjective and personal, and largely depends on the rapport between the customer and the counseling service provider.
In our type of service, empathy and conscientiousness are key to high levels of customer service. Although some aspects of customer service are tangible (e.g. is the telephone answered within three to four rings), it’s important to focus on “value-based” quality. So, “quality” happens in individual transactions between CGP “servers” and our customers. To provide excellent customer service in our line of business, caring is a must. Successful providers of EAP genuinely care about serving the “dual customer”: the employer or organization and the individual employee or family member asking for our assistance. In terms of how this approach manifests itself in our customer service policy, we give our employees and service partners a good deal of leeway and discretion in handling customer requests, and tend to error on the side of being “flexible”.