Today Healthcare organizations are changing the way they have functioned in the past towards the term “experience”, it's no longer the case where healthcare mostly hovered around the fact that it is their duty to make patients better, not happy. Now Healthcare organizations are trying to work sincerely to improve patient satisfaction and the patient experience. Improving patient experience can often feel like a moving target guided by a variety of factors. 

For example, even though the healthcare organizations have been talking about improving patient experience and patient satisfaction for a long time now, not much difference can be seen since the industry lacks conclusive research that proves the connections between patient satisfaction and outcomes, because patient satisfaction survey providers often use confusing language, leading to diverse patient feedback analysis. Patient feedback is critical to ensure quality healthcare and patient satisfaction. It helps you gain insights into the patient experience, it also helps identify opportunities to close gaps in care and improve overall reputation.

For healthcare organizations, patient satisfaction circles mostly around looking after their health, quality of service and care, and even compliance. The healthcare market is highly competitive and requires constant efforts to keep up, and often delivering a good patient experience to a high volume of consumers can get difficult to manage and can further impact the bottom line. Improving patient experience requires focus, but it does not have to be difficult or expensive.

Focusing on patient feedback is important in so many ways, it gives you access to direct issues faced by each individual patient. Especially during unprecedented times like these, wherein the entire world is fighting back a deadly Covid-19 situation. It is even more important for healthcare organizations to understand how their patients feel about their services, once the pandemic will be over, we hope that to be soon, these efforts will pay off with good online reviews and a better, well-improved patient satisfaction score.

Today when there are so many options available for one to choose from, it becomes imperative to understand that the reality is that patients today expect exceptional services — they want the best surgical skills and the best bedside manners. They look for better quality care and an easy-to-understand registration experience. Not only do they want it, they expect it. And undoubtedly now what we have is the most likely patient generation in history to go ahead and seek services elsewhere if they receive a below-par-experience while interacting with your organization or visiting or staying within your system.

“An appetite for extraordinary, multi-sensory experiences, hyper-personalization and co-creation, are changing consumer dynamics around loyalty and forcing brands and organizations to shift their approaches and programs," said Kevin Quiring, managing director, Advanced Customer Strategy, Accenture Strategy, in the press release.

Three short and simple ways to improve patient experience in healthcare

1. Embedding “personalization” to improve the customer experience is the key to improvement:

Making every customer feel like the most important customer can help raise the numbers and improve their overall experience. Reaching out to your customers is essential to know. Also, when and how to reach out to your customers with the right set of questions, in fact, according to Accenture, 81% of consumers want brands to understand them better and know when and when not to approach them. This will help gather information about how your customers feel, this will never go out of fashion, taking proactive measures to learn about customer experience can possibly give you an upper hand and enough data to build strategies that are effective and can resolve issues almost in real-time, giving you an edge and better opportunities to improve retention and significantly decrease churn.

2. Offer multiple channels for support:

One of the most important points is to provide properly on-time support to your customer's queries and concerns. Many of the brands suffer a blow on their reputation only because they miss this important point. Providing multiple channels to your customers to reach back to you in case they have any issues big or small, helps them gain more trust, also, optimizing wait and response time can prevent the customer churn rate successfully.

3. Use data to personalize survey questions:

Feedback matters the most. Throughout the customer journey, customers create multiple touchpoints and leave behind enough data that can be utilized to your benefit and to improve your services, especially in the healthcare industry, it is more important to focus on asking personalized survey questions. Also, it is vital to use benchmark metrics in your surveys like CSAT & NPS, these metrics can provide you insights and help you provide solutions to your customer queries while also retaining them.

At Dropthought we believe that to build a sustainable relationship with a patient, we must value their feedback. We believe in building a situation-based and feedback-centric patient and employee engagement plan that will not only help healthcare organizations to leverage the data collected abundantly but also if done right this can turn into a long-lasting opportunity to keep your audience intact and keep the revenue bar up and running. Your patients can express their opinions through the surveys and provide suggestions about your overall services throughout their patient journey.

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