In any industry, customer experience is today’s business benchmark. Providing a great experience to your customer is more important than ever and helps set yourself apart from the other players in your field. In order to improve customer experience in healthcare, we must first gain a deeper understanding of what healthcare consumers truly need. Although the industry has been talking about consumer-driven practices for at least a decade, healthcare is still in the early stages of its Consumer Revolution. In this blog post, we’ll explore why great customer service is essential and what healthcare professionals can do and are doing to improve it.
Why is great customer service important especially in healthcare?
Healthcare is a complex system, and patients need all the help they can get to navigate it.
First and foremost, great customer service is essential for maintaining patient satisfaction, especially in medical industry. Studies have shown that patients who have a positive experience with their healthcare provider are more likely to stick with that provider and recommend them to others.
In addition, great customer service can help to build trust between a medical organization and its patients. When patients feel like they are being treated well, they are more likely to have confidence in the organization and its staff. This trust can lead to improved patient attitude and compliance, and therefore improved treatment.
Finally, good customer service is simply good business. wellness providers who offer excellent customer service are more likely to attract and retain patients. This can lead to increased revenue and a more successful business.
3 ways to improve customer service in healthcare?
Value-based care is a central focus in the healthcare industry. As the industry grows, it becomes increasingly important to deliver a retail-like experience that will keep patients and members coming back. However, creating a seamless user experience can be difficult when data is spread across disparate systems. This causes users to have to interact with multiple systems, which is inefficient and often frustrating. A well thought out patient-centric experience, personalization, and live assistance can help improve customer service. Let’s look at these in detail below.
1. Personalization :
People appreciate experiences that are created exclusively for them. Personalization in healthcare can now be extended as far as predicting potential health risks and providing round-the-clock remote live assistance. The use of technology and AI has made it easy to hyper personalize and one excellent way to do that is by using SitePal. SitePal can be integrated into your website, email marketing campaign, kiosks, apps, etc. to improve and add a human touch to the customer/patient service experience.
2. Live assistance :
In recent years, there’s growing evidence that worsening health and mobility difficulties make remote healthcare consultations more desirable for many patients. According to a report by Cisco, 74% of patients are inclined towards a virtual doctor than a face-to-face appointment. Hence, expanding and enhancing live healthcare assistance by voice or video chat solutions is the need of the hour for most healthcare businesses.
3. Flawless experience :
With the advent of new technologies such as AI, cloud solutions, live interactions, and big data, healthcare providers are now able to offer a more seamless and end-to-end patient experience. However, in order to truly provide a flawless end-to-end experience, it is important to also improve interactions between the healthcare provider and patients over various touchpoints. By doing so, health facility providers will be able to retain patients at each stage of the customer journey, from choosing a health protection provider to scheduling appointments, receiving personalized health care advice through AI, to remote consultation and treatment.
The Takeaway
Great customer experience is pivotal in the healthcare industry because it helps to build trust between patients and providers and helps make a complex system accessible. By ensuring that patients feel valued and listened to, healthcare providers can create an environment of mutual respect and rapport, and by doing so actually improve medical treatment as well.
In conclusion, through the use of innovative customer experience platforms like SitePal, healthcare providers can improve patient retention rates and offer a more personalized and customized healthcare experience.
