Best little piece of customer service advice for front desk personnel at your physician office

A piece of customer service advice I give my clients is for the front desk staff is smile anytime they talk – answering the phone or greeting a patient. If you have to make it policy, then that is fine, but I believe a "smile" solves so many problems:

- Hard to be negative when smiling
- Translates through the phone
- It is so very welcoming
- It sets patient at ease
- It changes the attitude of the staff member
- Patients that are in a foul mood immediately start to calm down

Basically, if we all smile when talking to people it would improve human interaction as a whole.

I know that it sounds cheesy to you, but the University of Texas at Dallas once paid a lot of money a few years back to a consulting firm to improve customer service. There were a lot of ideas implemented, this being one of them. A follow up survey of staff and students indicated improvement and meetings amongst the different departments revealed that smiling had perhaps the biggest impact on this improvement as it set the tone.