Kristin Baird

Kristin Baird's Speech Descriptions

Kristin Baird brings more than three decades of experience to her presentations that cover many aspects of healthcare customer service and marketing. She can teach you to see your organization through the eyes of your customers and see exactly where you can improve your customer service offer.

Kristin teaches the correct way to shadow a physician so that you are in the best position to assess their successes or otherwise in customer care. She advocates a self-sustaining, train the trainer approach that will result in physicians receiving valuable feedback and positive outcomes of patient care.

With a first degree in nursing, Kristin has many valuable insights into the nurse-patient relationship and its pivotal role in patient satisfaction. She can help nurses to see just how valuable their contribution to the overall healthcare plan is, and how they can strategize for the most positive patient experiences.

Quality through the Eye of the Beholder
Every encounter with your customers should build trust in your organization, yet countless prime opportunities end up eroding patient trust when employees make certain comments or simply don’t engage the patient with the right words and actions at the right times. Knowing how your customers gauge quality and being able to identify specific moments of truth will help you build a loyal following and reap greater personal satisfaction in your work.

This fast-paced, fun session will help you see your organization through your customers’ eyes. You’ll identify critical moments of truth and determine small steps that will help you make great strides toward service excellence.

What will you learn?

• How to identify opportunities for enhancing the customer experience
• How to use an experience-mapping exercise to compare patient expectations
• How to link the customer experience to organizational mission, vision, and values

Physician Shadowing and Coaching
The physician/patient relationship is vital to a positive patient experience. The highest-performing organizations are those where physicians display core skills that consistently engage patients, resulting in positive outcomes. Physician shadowing and coaching is an effective method for standardizing a positive patient experience while also providing physicians with useful individual feedback.

Our approach is designed to accomplish the following:

• Align shadowing and coaching with core strategy
• Gain support and buy-in from key stakeholders
• Identify and learn from internal best practices
• Be self-sustaining by using a train-the-trainer approach

The Nurse/Patient Partnership
Nurses are pivotal to the patient experience. As America’s most trusted professional, nurses have a unique role in delivering safe, high quality, and memorable care. The Nurse/Patient Partnership encompasses a comprehensive approach that prepares both staff nurses and nurse leaders for an organized and accountable approach to improving the patient experience.

Objectives for staff nurse sessions are to:

• Define the desired patient experience and raise empathy for the patient and family
• Examine how nurses influence the patient experience (and, ultimately, HCAHPS scores)
• Explore 4 essentials of a positive, memorable patient experience
• Review GREAT CARE as a tool for systematically managing patient encounters
• Demonstrate GREAT CARE using role play scenarios
• Create a personal action plan for success

Objectives for nurse leaders are to:

• Review the Nurse/Patient Partnership curriculum
• Examine the nurse leader’s unique role in improving the patient experience
• Learn a simple, but memorable coaching method to hold staff accountable

Reclaiming Your Personal Passion for Nursing
"Reclaiming Your Personal Passion for Nursing" has been adapted from Kristin Baird's best-selling book. This presentation reminds all nurses of the value and deep history of their profession, as well as the challenges and rewards that come along with being a nurse.

What will you learn?

• The power of nursing
• How to appreciate every encounter
• How to connect with patients and create memorable experiences

From Florence Nightingale to Nurse Ratched...
...and everything in between. The nurse's role in patient satisfaction is pivotal. As those in frequent communication with patients, nurses truly are the keepers of the patient experience. In this presentation, nurse audiences will learn the value of providing great service to their patients and better understand how they can help guide and plan for consistently positive patient experiences.

What will you learn?

• What the "patient experience" means
• Service's impact on HCAHPS scores
• The importance of rounding
• G.R.E.A.T. Communication tool

Making the Grade: The nurse's role in shaping the patient experience
Nurses are pivotal in shaping the patient experience, yet many may not see how it's the small things that make or break the experience and resulting satisfaction scores. This presentation is designed to help frontline nurses understand healthcare from the patient perspective and master techniques for engaging patients and their families.

Raising the Bar on Service Excellence
Five leadership skills needed to move your organization from good to great....

Have you ever wondered why some organizations seem to master the art and science of great patient satisfaction and employee engagement while others struggle for years without progress? What is it about the successful organization that makes it rise to the top? On the flip side, what are the poor-performing organizations missing?

In this fast-paced, information-packed session, Kristin Baird reveals the five skills mastered by leaders in some of the most service-centered healthcare organizations in the world. She will highlight some of the key points from her recent book, Raising the Bar on Service Excellence: the Health Care Leader's Guide to Putting Passion into Practice. Participants will gain a better understanding of what actions are needed in order to move their leadership practices from good to great. You'll learn to align priorities, take away tips for holding critical conversations, and the secret to hiring for service behaviors.

Coaching for Service Excellence
The link between management and performance improvement....

It takes more than one training session to build service skills. If your service initiative just isn't getting any traction, maybe it's time to look at leadership. Weaving customer service practices into the fabric of an organization requires on-the-spot coaching between supervisors or managers and their team members. Are your managers equipped to deal with performance issues? Do they understand how coaching is linked to service improvement? Are they committed to leading the initiative and making it work?

Customer Service in Healthcare
Five steps for creating a culture of service excellence....

Baird shares the five most critical steps to creating a service-centered culture in healthcare settings. Her audiences leave energized with a multitude of take-home ideas for implementation.

Baird's passion for excellence stems from over two decades of experience in a variety of healthcare settings as a nurse, manager, and in senior leadership. A skilled an engaging storyteller, Baird shares real-life examples of the good, the bad, and the ugly. This presentation is appropriate for anyone working in healthcare. It is a popular program for helping employees at all levels of the organization see their vital role in customer service.

C.A.R.E. Model Training and Coaching
The Baird Group has experienced and skilled trainers with separate modules for staff and managers to remind them to C.A.R.E. (Comfort, Access, Restroom, and Environment check-ups on each round):

• Frontline training using the C.A.R.E. model links service, safety, and quality goals
• Nurse leader training on the C.A.R.E. model reinforces hourly rounding through coaching

Building Leadership Skills that Foster Service Behaviors
Leadership skills are the backbone for any cultural change. Baird will get you planning some practical steps for fostering an environment that will help shape positive attitudes among employees and reap the benefits of greater patient satisfaction. Her fast-paced session will leave you with fresh ideas that you can begin to implement today.

CSI Meets The Flintstones: Using new information to change old ways

Baird takes an innovative approach to understanding and managing the patient experience. In her light but informative style, she'll help you see your organization through new eyes. Using case examples from mystery shopping, Baird demonstrates how moments of truth shape the patient experience and impact trust.

Service Recovery: Picking yourself up when you fall short
Whether it's lost information, long wait times, or confusing directions, when something goes awry in a service encounter, your customers are left feeling disappointed and vulnerable. Do your employees understand that they hold the key to winning over a disappointed customer for life? Are they comfortable handling service problems?

Words that WOW
Customer service is the backbone of any healthcare organization, but sometimes time and tasks can get in the way of providing the most compassionate and helpful care to your patients. In "Words that WOW," your staff will learn how to master service situations and keep service top-of-mind during even the most stressful times:

• Understand verbal and non-verbal cues from patients
• Practice empathy statements
• Words that wound
• Words that work
• Words that WOW your patients

You'll Have Them at "Hello": Phone skills that WOW
Phone communication is often the first part of the patient experience. Over the phone, it takes just seconds for your patients to develop an opinion about your staff’s care, knowledge, and willingness to help—areas you can’t afford to be downgraded by your consumers. And in today’s value-based purchasing environment, your patients’ perceptions of these first impressions mean everything.

What will you learn?

• How telephone experiences can make or break the first impression and build loyalty
• The five essentials of a great phone encounter
• Hiring, training, coaching, and performance appraisals with your frontline phone staff
• Gold standards to uphold for every current and future phone encounter (reflections of company-wide customer service standards)

Handling Difficult Calls
A consistently positive patient experience means consistently positive scores. And on the phone, consistency is integral to maintaining happy customers and their continued business. This session instructs staff about how to handle phone encounters with difficult situations, when their organization’s reputation is on the line.

What will you learn?

• How to handle common difficult call scenarios
• Understanding a difficult call from the caller's perspective
• Understanding a difficult call from the attendant's perspective