Digital Recorder Helps Track Customer Feedback

If history consistently teaches us anything, it’s that when all you do for a living is serve people, you need to be nice to them. If you don’t, they can—and will eventually—get rid of you. Always.

Consequently, it’s important for every EMS system to solicit and respond to customer feedback. That has never been easier than now, thanks to some solid technology from Olympus and some underrated software called PowerPoint.

Think you know PowerPoint? Every lecture you’ve given or attended in the past five years has depended on it. But PowerPoint has capabilities that most people don’t use. It’s designed to let you incorporate text, graphics, audio and video in one or more frames, which you can then shuffle, edit, display and print in a wide variety of ways. Most people only think of it as a presentation program. But in many ways, it’s also the most flexible and efficient archival tool in history.

Olympus is another heavy hitter. During the last five years, the European-based camera manufacturer has evolved into a maker of all things digital. They pioneered the technology of small digital sound recorders that will capture just about anything you can hear—including telephone conversations with unhappy customers. Then, using the same company’s proprietary software, you can download the resulting “DSS” audio files from the recorder to a computer and edit them for archival. The DSS standard is Olympus’ native digital sound format. It enables you to store high-quality digital sound in very small files compared to the much larger “WAV” format with which you may be more familiar.

The DSS software comes free with a number of recorder models. The Olympus DS-330 is widely available and because it’s been out for a while, you can find it for approximately $130 at your local office supply store, or possibly even less if you shop the Internet. The price includes a USB docking station that can quickly cable the sound files to either a Mac or a PC. You can use the same software to save the recordings as WAV files, then easily embed them in any Microsoft application (and lots of others). Later, you can play these high-fidelity sound bytes during your quality review process or as teaching adjuncts.

It’s one thing for a young EMT to hear a superior drone on about how an attitude or a behavior might affect a patient’s EMS experience. It’s another to hear the voice of a real patient telling them the same thing.

Scanning

You can store scores of complimentary cards, notes, letters and feedback forms in a single PowerPoint file for each employee, and integrate that information in your field evaluations. Our service posts those on designated bulletin boards once a week, then scans the forms and inserts them in employees’ PowerPoint files. The files are cumulative, and once a month we copy them to CDs for reference by supervisors and department heads.

We track and investigate negative comments separately. These warrant private consultation with crews, and a quick response to customers (like, within five minutes after you identify them).

You can scan written feedback as black-and-white “TIF” files. A good resolution to use—in case you need to print something later on—is 400–600 pixels per square inch (ppi). Why so high? Because a black-and-white file contains only black pixels and white pixels. Using a lower resolution would produce files that look choppy on screen and even worse in print. You can get away with lower resolutions in greyscale or color, but not in black and white.

Those TIFs can be combined with your own written documentary, plus sound and photo files in a PowerPoint presentation file, and stored on CD or DVD as your permanent record. If you need to reexamine a case in the future, it’s all there in one place. Even a file containing 100 or more full-page scans of that kind will load quickly and predictably on a low-end Pentium 4 or a Mac G4.