Developing Occupational Health Care Services For Better Customer Satisfaction : a case-study- Lohja Occupational Health

Abstract

The renewal of Good Occupational Health Practice in Finland brings new challenges and triggers self-examination among occupational health care providers. Successful renewal of occupational health care practices emphasizes activity, commitment and trustworthiness from occupational health care providers but also from the customer companies. For this co-operation to work effectively, communication in a common language increases its’ importance furthermore. Since purchasing occupational health care services is required by law, this is a field of active and secure seller’s market. For now, a few private occupational health care service providers are battling for customers, but new service providers are launched frequently. Since laws and regulation dictate the services to be provided, means of competition are few.

Lohja Occupational Health (LOH) found itself in the situation of increasing competition in 2014. Though their operational principle as an association based, non-profit service provider differs from the competitors’ operational principles, LOH wanted to find out their strengths and weaknesses in the field of occupational health care services and to canvas a base on which to build on their future actions to increase customer satisfaction. This was done with an anonymous customer satisfaction e-questionnaire, targeted to the service suppliers of the customer companies. With 28 send questionnaires and 54% respond rate, the customers of LOH seemed to be quite happy with their service provider. However, a few development areas could be lifted out for further consideration.

One of the main development areas was to increase communication with the customer companies, including recurrent canvasing of customer satisfaction and increasing transparency of occupational health care services and responsibilities. To increase smoothness of processes especially in customer contacts, adopting LEAN thinking and strengthening the interpersonal skills of personnel would also increase customer satisfaction. One of main strengths of LOH is the fact that it is owned by customer companies which allows close communication and customer participation in decision making. Increasing customer knowledge of law dictated limitations to occupational health care services, this co-operation could be increasingly fluent and would remain one of the unique strengths of LOH.