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.

You can use an inexpensive page scanner like the Brother model MFC-3100C (now superseded by later models for less than $150) to do this kind of scanning. It’s actually a multifunction machine—fax, printer, copier and scanner. And while it’s a pretty lame printer that will kill you in ink cartridge costs, it’s a quick, sharp little scanner—in color or in black and white. It’ll scan up to 20 pages at a time. (By the way, it’s also a great tool for archiving your National Registry applications, again, in PowerPoint files.)

Recording

You can obtain several kinds of acoustic couplers or other such gizmos designed for telephone recording, including an inexpensive one from RadioShack designed to record from your cell phone. But the simplest approach is to use an office phone with a speaker mode function. Switch the phone to speaker mode, place the recorder anywhere near the phone, and the recorder will store a high-quality record of your conversation (or a customer’s voice mail).

The DS-330 will store hundreds of sound files in five separate folders, or a single file totaling up to five hours of sound. It can record dictation-quality sound (filtering out background noise) or conference-quality (when you’re recording more than one person at a time). It’s also designed to accommodate voice-recognition software like Dragon’s Naturally Speaking or IBM’s ViaVoice. Those two products can convert high-quality voice recordings into text and then insert the text into a word processing program like Word, Word Perfect or WordPro.

It’s important to ask for a caller’s permission prior to recording them. But invite a caller to dictate a message for training purposes, and you can transform them from a complainant into an enthusiastic supporter.

I can think of three more capabilities of a recorder like this: Incorporating communication center tapes into an investigation or training program; as an on-scene investigation tool for accidents and incidents; and real-time, on-scene documentation of patient refusals (legally, the highest-risk calls we run, and our documentation of them is our greatest weakness).

In fact, we know at least two paramedics who carry devices like this one to work with them every shift.

The DS-330 will operate for 11 hours on a pair of AAA alkaline batteries. It will store up to 199 files in each of five folders and has a large, backlit display. Its dimensions are 4.25" x 1.5" x 0.8", and it weighs less than three ounces with batteries. It comes with a soft carrying case, but we keep ours in a hard, clamshell-type carrying case made for storing eyeglasses.

Please feel welcome to contact the author with questions about the equipment or processes described here.

Disclaimer: None of the manufacturers whose products were named in this article had any awareness of or contributed anything to its preparation.