Healthcare: Raising the standards of customer experience through real-person communication

Identifying the difference between customer and patient experiences in healthcare and why they shouldn’t be confused is integral to organisations delivering their services to people. Healthcare providers should not value customer experience higher than the patient’s, or vice versa, realising the difference is the crucial first step.

• Receiving medical care or treatment from a healthcare professional is defined as the patient experience.
• A broader contact with the healthcare system beyond the care or treatment can be defined as the customer experience.

With this in mind, it is important that both elements work in tandem to ensure a smooth customer journey. Healthcare providers must constantly be looking to ensure that not just their quality of care is of the highest standard, but also that their customer communication lines are accessible, friendly, and efficient. Given its importance, what should providers be doing to improve the customer experience?

Human-first approach

For a successful customer experience, a human-first approach should be placed at the centre of operations. This isn’t to say that tech stacks need to be abolished, but the two must work in harmony for the best results from the customer/patient’s point of view.

Customers have little patience for robotic, laborious solutions that fail to provide tailored responses in their time of need. Ensuring that customers receive the balance of automated solutions from technology, and the understanding and know-how from a human, is a craft in itself for many healthcare providers. Adopting this approach will bolster the customer experience for so many, both in the short- and long-term. Enhancing the customer experience will do the same for the full experience, i.e., the customer plus the patient experience; neglecting will damage the full experience.

The need for innovation

A human touch will invariably be well-received by customers. But this approach must be supported by innovative solutions. Investing in the right solutions can reduce overheads over time – enabling providers to offer more competitive prices for their customers.

Ensuring customers can access tools such as out-of-hours webchat, smart booking assistants, and tailored virtual assistants will hold healthcare providers above the competition when offering the very best customer experience.

Yes, the human element of the customer journey is a vital cog. Real-person communication lines can create a level of understanding, empathy, and trust that an automated response can’t. But technology and innovation can easily support customers in better utilising the full potential of healthcare and minimise the effects of waiting times.

Keep it simple

For customers, simplicity is integral and cannot be overlooked from the perspective of healthcare providers. With so much information being fed to the customer, coupled with the stresses and anxieties they may be experiencing at the time, seamlessness is key.

A successful 360° communication offering in healthcare needs to be manageable for the customer, but the team must be incorporated into the thinking as well. If customers experience any issues at the front end of operations, then those managing the back end of the solutions should be able to mitigate any issues they may encounter at any given point.

This simplicity means customers are not held up by potential outages or delays. The last thing they want is to experience a lack of understanding or information when it comes to their healthcare provider needing to get communications back up and running again. Sometimes the most effective thing is having a conversation with a real person at the end of the line, where information can be exchanged efficiently, and nothing is missed that might be with a chatbot.

Far too often, customers experience lengthy, unresponsive services from their healthcare provider. These moments of simplicity and effectiveness should not be a rarity, but instead be placed at the centre of operations.

Considering both customer and patient

Providing quality medical care is, without doubt, an integral requirement of healthcare providers. To achieve a premium customer experience, organisations must understand the needs and concerns of their customer.

Looking beyond patient care, make sure strong foundations are in place for a successful customer experience. For example, if a clinic provides easy-to-use, targeted communication tools, then a patient can use these tools when they need to go through the process of treatment or a check-up.

Patients typically start as customers or evolve into this demographic after receiving direct medical consultation from a provider. Understanding that aftercare following treatment will mean a patient needing to come back as a customer is likely. If the new customer understands that their provider has effective tools in place to improve their experience, then the customer retention rate will continue to improve as a result.

A journey of two paths

When prioritising where a healthcare provider should invest and improve its services, it must remember that the customer and patient journey cannot be merged.

If a clinic is struggling with efficiencies and processes, then it could be time for the customer journey to receive the necessary funding and support it needs to retain customers in the future, or for a review and restructuring of the processes.

The patient experience requires effective and accurate consultancy and/or treatment. To support this, the customer experience has to complement the broader mechanics of the healthcare service.

Without a human-first, streamlined service for handling and managing communications and appointments, customers are less likely to commit long-term or continue with the same healthcare partner in the future. Yes, patient care is a priority in healthcare. But the value of effective communication from the customer perspective can no longer be overlooked by providers. A high standard of customer care is not exclusively essential in retail and hospitality, but increasingly so in the private healthcare sector.