Just as we design the touchpoint experience, we can also influence the level of personalization customers feel and even affect the perception consumers shape, especially when we know what they value. I have worked with healthcare clients from startups to large, for-profit hospitals with the sole focus of maximizing profit margins through the improvement of patient experience. This article details an effective customer experience strategy across the six components of patient experience for healthcare providers.

Perception
Perception is all about what the public thinks of a healthcare provider. At its core are the emotional responses to a company’s touchpoints. A 2015 Forrester report suggested that emotion contributed most to customer loyalty in 17 of the 18 industries studied (including healthcare). From our research and understanding of what drives customers, we’ve found that the primary emotions they value are to be known, respected, helped, and empowered. Further, they desire a feeling of transparency and simplicity when dealing with healthcare providers.

During each phase of the patient journey, there are touchpoints that directly impact perception. In the explore phase, an undifferentiated treatment plan, unnecessary tests, and a lack of patient knowledge can adversely affect how a patient perceives a facility. In the visit phase, a negative closing experience can derail previously positive interactions.

We can’t emphasize enough that a lack of transparency and unclear communication contribute to many patient decisions. What you think you convey or communicate, and what a prospect perceives you are communicating are entirely different. We recommend audits of the prospect experience, by communicating with touchpoints throughout the experience, and then “testing” what was perceived during the exit interview.

Personalization
Personalization requires enabling both a personal experience (what customers can create) and a personalized experience (what companies do to improve a customer’s experience). According to Accenture’s 2015 Healthcare Technology Vision, 73 percent of health executives surveyed say they are seeing a positive ROI from their investment in personalization technologies. The world is moving to a “segment of one.” As technology caters to an individual’s context, environment, social network, and the body’s inner workings through wearables and handheld devices, customer expectation increases. People have little tolerance for a world that does not cater to their wishes or doesn’t know who they are in a meaningful way.

In our work, we’ve found that the value of a personalized experience is multi-fold. Personalization helps people make decisions, saves them time, and connects them to the information they care about. The provider that knows me best – and shows it through services and recommendations especially for me – is a provider that is valued. It’s probably not surprising to hear that the most important aspect of personalization to patients is the ability to choose their doctors. We also found the opportunity to “co-create” areas of their treatment plans was of significant emotional value.

When a patient visits an office, one of the greatest inhibitors to a personalized experience is pushing the same services specifically to increase margins. Patients are smart. Not only do they recognize the hard sell, they feel disrespected that a provider has the knowledge of them and chooses not to use it.

Process
Process is the culmination or series of touchpoint interactions with people, platforms, and the physical environment. When stitched together, they either become a beautiful symphony or a bunch of discordant notes. We shouldn’t think of improving process from merely an efficiency lens. Rather, we should design process for delight, clarity, simplicity, and empowerment of our customers.

When we’ve worked with healthcare providers and mapped their customer journeys, we’ve consistently seen many barriers, including the sheer number of employees a prospect touches, printing and faxing of information, multiple schedule changes, and required three-day evaluation visits. Further, the rigidity of procedures, processes, and programs creates misalignments for patients and caregivers and leaves the impression that customers have little, if any, control.

What would it be like to create a beautiful symphony experience for your prospects and patients? An audit of your onboarding process is an excellent place to start. Onboarding procedures, many dictated by the provider, usually result in a massive, paper-based binder of information. How can you improve upon this and make it as transparent as possible? We also strongly recommend that providers offer patient advocates who are able and willing to help patients navigate the insurance process, one of the unwieldiest aspects of healthcare.

Physical Environment
A customer’s experience in a physical setting is determined by a large group of factors, including the appearance and behavior of other customers, the environment’s overall atmosphere, and the building’s physical location. The benefits of a well-designed space are endless, from employee well-being to lowered patient injury and infection rates. According to the Healthcare Financial Management Association, the University Medical Center of Princeton’s hospital redesign attributed to lower infection rates, lower nurse turnover, and avoidable re-admissions. Moreover, a 99th percentile in satisfaction scores was reached (2014).

For some people, particularly prospects that perceive themselves as “less sick,” the environment experience is the overriding factor in not treating with a specific provider. During the Visit phase, prospects consider a provider using all of their senses, including what they can smell, see, and hear.  Environments that are perceived as crowded, outdated and even dirty are dismissed. Our research indicates that a provider is perceived as crowded when clusters of patients are in a small lobby, a perception further emphasized when a hospital requires prospects to shuttle between a hotel and hospital because there is no space for the patients to wait.

People
Great customer experience is made possible by people. From the time a prospect walks through your doors until the time she leaves as a healthy patient, she desires an advocate that has her best interests at heart. Not surprisingly, the desire for a single point of contact extends to the journey a patient has with a provider. Employee efforts must be aligned to a common vision because it takes only one negative interaction to lose a customer. The large number of roles and handoffs by providers creates confusion as well as missed opportunities for patients. More importantly, they hurt the bottom line, as 87 percent of patients want one point of contact to help manage their health (Accenture, 2015).

Customer experience isn’t just about when to introduce staff during the customer experience journey, but also how they are introduced and the messages they convey when they appear. For example, according to a 2010 Healthland.com report, “For the 20 patients whose physician sat [down] during a consultation, the comments were overwhelmingly positive (95 percent), with patients frequently expressing that they appreciated how the doctor took the time to sit and listen. In contrast, those doctors who stood got positive reviews far less often (61 percent).”

Platform
A company’s platform, both digital and print in all of its manifestations, provides more customer touchpoints than any medium and offers the greatest opportunity to design the customer experience. While a lot of information needs to be conveyed, a reliance on print rather than technology may create barriers. It’s important to note, though, that “digital solutions do not replace human interactions; they complement them. Together the digital and human elements of service deliver the multi-channel experiences that customers demand (Accenture, 2015).”

There is overwhelming evidence that customer expectations can only be answered with a digital transformation strategy. For example, “70% of users with major chronic conditions say that utilizing health technology has had a significant impact on their behavior (Deloitte, 2015).” And Gartner Researchshows, “that companies who automate lead management see a 10 percent or greater increase in revenue in six to nine months.”

Patients desire a digital platform that serves as a unified location for all case-related information. A reliance on either paper-based communication, or multiple digital locations leaves both patients and staff struggling to track progress or react to unexpected changes.

In Conclusion
Whether your organization is new to designing the next generation patient experience or is a patient experience leader, it can always be further improved for greater mindshare and market share. These six components of customer experience serve as the foundation and lens through which providers need to audit and address patient experience.