IROs and Customer Satisfaction

One of the key elements of our business is making sure that we consistently exceed our customer's expectations for quality, turnaround time, customer service, and the other measurements that we have established for our business. Indeed our recent customer satisfaction survey came back indicating that we had better than 85% of our clients that rated us excellent or above average in all major categories. Despite this, it's still not good enough for us.

Our goal is to consistently improve our customer satisfaction. It is that culture of continuous improvement that an IRO needs to have in order to correctly adapt to the demands of today's marketplace. Customer satisfaction translates into many operational initiatives in quality, response time, investment and phone systems, tracking procedures, etc. in order to identify, escalate, and quickly resolve issues so that our clients are completely satisfied.

An IRO needs to be highly responsive to it's customers. One of the distinguishing features of the best IROs is that they have doctors that are available to provide free consultations to their clients over the telephone as a part of their client relationship. Some IROs don't even have in house doctors and rely only on contracted specialists to provide the independent reviews. We found in our business that our clients appreciate us because of our ability to put our own medical staff on the phone with them quickly and consistently to answer their questions while providing that level of expertise and interface, even if we're just translating information from our other specialists on reviews.

An IRO needs to have a commitment to continuous improvement and customer satisfaction. That translates into a variety of investments that need to be made in order to meet the needs of today's health insurance payer.