Healthcare organization is struggling to provide customer driven quality service.
The key success of healthcare service is the ability to develop a comprehensive
healthcare service and deliver the best service direct to customer as required.
Coherently, the measure of customer feedback should definitely show good
perception of service fulfillment and satisfaction. As part of quality improvement
process, an outstanding healthcare organization should practice an effective
complaint management system (CMS) as the main voice of customer (VOC)
source, which directly mirror the quality of healthcare service. The CMS will act
as an essential decision support tool by providing seamless handling of
complaints, introduces systematic improvement process, thus enabling hospitals
to turn weakness into opportunities. However, Malaysian top public healthcare
organizations are implicitly not really put much efforts to have a kind of proper
CMS to treat complaints as critical and need immediate resolution. In other
words, the VOC might not be heard in right way and account as the customer
demand, expect and desire. This scenario may be the evident and reason why the
present states of public Malaysian healthcare service providers are still unable to
fully incorporate the customer requirement or complaint in to their strategic
agendas, which account all the customer needs and expectations. This paper
presents the current scenario of local public health care service with special focus
to their implementation of CMS or similar system, in conjunction with healthcare
constraints and VOC. Based on recent healthcare literature, an inclusive
comparison is made and discussed to justify the gap of improvement in healthcare
service. From findings, it is identified that complaint management practice is
lacking of systematic procedure to prioritize complaints by customers. To be
competitive, an alternative customer prioritizing approach mainly incorporates
the Quality Function Deployment (QFD) and Kana's Model is proposed
conceptually. The new mechanism concept is hope to effectively address a
complaint which not only satisfies the customer but also an opportunity to create
positive experience with customers, building a healthier foundation, stronger
brand value and avoiding legal penalties. It also provides fair balance
information for decision making while facing constraints such as operational,
legal, human resource and market pressures.
