Future Healthcare Success Is Rooted in Exceptional CX
We know that better customer experience (CX) in healthcare better engages customers and patients, improves care outcomes, and reduces costs. But there are several factors contributing to lagging CX in healthcare. The most common pitfalls we observe with healthcare organizations (HCOs) are that they:
- Have a limited understanding of customers’ wants, needs, and behaviors. Healthcare firms have been slow to capture, adopt, and leverage the voice of the customer (VoC). This makes it difficult for HCOs to truly understand their customers, let alone create experiences that meet customer expectations, needs, and wants.
- Focus on digital channels at the expense of overall customer experience. Because of the emphasis on cost-cutting, healthcare firms tend to invest in digital channels while neglecting investments in physical channels.
- Do not control the end-to-end customer experience. The complexity of the ecosystem in healthcare — which includes many partners with disparate and disconnected systems — leads to fragmented customer journeys.
Healthcare must approach customer experience, including patients and members, the same way that other industries approach CX. As we know, you cannot monitor what you do not measure.
To do this well, healthcare organizations must first identify how they measure up — and do so in real time. By creating and leveraging a comprehensive CX measurement framework, healthcare organizations can drive change that improves performance and CX — while also having an impact on the bottom line.
By measuring what happens during the experience, how customers perceive the experience, and what they do as a result of it, healthcare organizations can identify the toughest issues their customers face — and move from metrics and insights to meaningful action.
Prioritize These Seven Initiatives for a Path To Success
Get ahead of your competitors and incoming disruptors by prioritizing your investment in CX now. There are seven key initiatives that all healthcare organizations can focus on to get their CX program on the right track from the outset. These include:
- Aggregating existing data and insights.
- Adopting a prioritization framework.
- Incorporating insights and feedback into the design process.
- Making clear communication a priority.
- Personalizing experience based on deep insights.
- Marrying the customer journey and supporting ecosystem.
- Empowering employees and clinicians with the right digital tools.
Download Forrester’s complimentary guide on the seven ways to deliver exceptional healthcare CX to learn more about each of these initiatives.
Forrester senior analysts Faith Adams and Arielle Trzcinski authored this article, which can also be found here.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CDOTrends.
