Customer Experience
Complicated Processes are Confusing Healthcare Customers
November 4, 2020 by Kelly Karrmann
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Healthcare customers are telling you what you’re not doing well, you just need to listen. On average, 50% of all customer interactions include an unsolicited mention of at least one specific reason they are unhappy with your brand. Identifying and resolving these brand detractors is crucial for healthcare organizations.
Being aware of unsolicited, negative feedback about your products or services means that you can take targeted action to address your customers’ challenges. Aggregating sources of brand detractors gives you a better sense of what’s driving negative brand perception so you can develop a strategy to improve it.
According to data from our 2020 Customer Voices Report, common brand detractors for the healthcare industry include digital experiences, website portals, service, and customer journey processes. Most problematic, however, is that 1 out of every 3 brand detractors mentioned by customers relate to confusing bills or complicated processes.
Customers are confused about charges, insurance coverage or lack thereof, how billing works, and how to navigate services like Medicare, insurance, collections, social service organizations, pharmaceutical programs, or claims processing.
This might sound like:
- “So I’m confused. I want to get clarity from billing on what we owe.”
- “I will say they have created a monster when it relates to understanding what to order… You are kind of ordering in the dark.”
- “You guys make this really difficult to know. It’s so confusing.”
It’s evident there is a disconnect between healthcare processes and the customers they’re designed to serve. Either these processes don’t actually or consistently solve customer problems, or they’re not being implemented and communicated effectively.
Implications
Processes are falling short and the burden is being placed on contact center agents to fill in the gaps. On 33% of calls, agents must serve as educators for healthcare customers. It becomes their responsibility to translate corporate policies into language customers can understand. This often requires that agents have mastery of services and processes beyond the scope of their primary business unit. It also requires agents to act as empathetic listeners and complex problem solvers on behalf of their customers.
Every time a customer calls to express frustration or confusion around a corporate policy, it costs your organization money and presents the risk of losing that customer for good because of a poor experience. Rather than empowering customers to pay their bills, company resources must be deployed to help them navigate a confusing process.
Your organization must pinpoint where healthcare customers are getting lost so you can modify policies to support, not stress, your agents, and customers.
About Authenticx
Authenticx was founded to analyze and activate customer interaction data at scale. Why? We wanted to reveal transformational opportunities in healthcare. We are on a mission to help humans understand humans. With a combined 100+ years of leadership experience in pharma, payer, and healthcare organizations, we know first-hand the challenges and opportunities that our clients face because we’ve been in your shoes.
Want to learn more? Contact us!