The reasons

Regardless of your best intentions to provide the highest quality patient care and customer service, there’s no escaping a harsh reality: You’re, occasionally, going to have to deal with one or more unhappy patients.
   Whether their per-spectives are valid is not the point of this challenge. The point of this challenge is to have an office protocol that improves the chances of a successful resolution without enduring lost patients and negative reviews. The key to this approach is defusing, not inciting, an emotionally charged patient. Responding to customer complaints in a defensive manner might feel satisfying, but it’s seldom good business.

The implementation
Here is a two-step process for addressing disgruntled patients:

1. Listen: Let the patient fully express their complaints without interruption. It doesn’t matter whether you agree with them. At this point, they just want their concerns to be heard.

2. Apologize: Yes, this is challenging. It is particularly challenging when
you don’t feel you’ve done anything
wrong. That said, remember that apologies aren’t always admissions of guilt. For example, “I’m sorry you had to go through this,” is not an admission of guilt.

In my experience, practicing the first two steps leads people to calm down and become more reasonable, making a successful resolution more likely. OM