Four Seasons’ Quality Of Life Programme Wins Silver National Customer Experience Award

Four Seasons Health Care’s ground-breaking Quality of Life Programme has won silver in the UK Customer Experience Awards 2015. The award recognises how it has raised the game in listening to residents’ to give them the experience they want.

The awards showcase best practice by companies across all sectors to improve their customers’ experience of their services.

Four Seasons is leading the sector in pioneering the use of technology to collect immediate feedback about care and life in its homes, so it can quickly find and fix issues or niggles and do more of what residents like. Its more than 320 homes are equipped with iPads that are linked to purpose-designed software systems. A touch screen satisfaction questionnaire with space for additional comment enables residents, their families and visiting health professionals to tell the company what they think. The system is also available for care teams in homes to comment about their workplace experience.

Congratulating Four Seasons, Neil Copping, Managing Director of Awards International, said: “This is an outstanding example of how a company in the care sector can improve the experience of its customers and make a real difference to their quality of life.”

Tim Hammond, Chief Executive of Four Seasons, said: “Since we started the pilot in March and as the programme has been gradually rolled out to all our homes we have already received and acted on a total of well over 30,000 comments from residents, relatives and visiting professionals . The insights they give are invaluable in helping us to improve our services in the ways our residents want. We are receiving very encouraging feedback. During this time we have seen our customer satisfaction levels increasing from 92% to 95% as we find and fix issues quickly.”

Another element of the Quality of Life programme that is a first in the sector is a Thematic Resident Care Audit (“TRaCA”) which managers can complete electronically. This is based on the resident care experience and supports the find and fix approach. Comments from residents, relatives and care professionals link into the audit and this data can be seen at all levels of management from the residents’ bedrooms up to the boardroom