Authenticx
Importance of Customer Experience in Healthcare
January 3, 2022 by Kelly Karrmann
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According to Microsoft, 47% of consumers have made the choice to switch to a different brand due to bad customer service within the last year. That highlights the critical importance of customer experience, particularly around customer retention. Customer experience informs brand retention, customer loyalty, and strategic growth metrics.
In healthcare there’s a huge opportunity to better understand where customers and patients are getting stuck and confused in order to fix the root cause of these frustrations. For much of healthcare there’s no shortage of incoming data sources, but a lack of structure in effectively monitoring and drawing insights from this data.
At Authenticx we have coined these customer disruptions as the Eddy Effect. The Eddy Effect occurs when a customer’s desired or expected experience is disrupted by an obstacle that causes the customer to feel “stuck” in a problem.
Eddies may sound something like:
“It’s so confusing. You guys make this really difficult for us you know.”
“It just seems like there have been times where between you and other organizations and all the back and forth that the ball dropped.”
“So I need to now call my doctor to find our what’s going on?”
Shared from Authenticx dataSound familiar? Understanding the raw, unsolicited frustrations your customers are facing is a critical way to prompt meaningful change. In 2021, Authenticx found on average 25% of interactions exhibited an Eddy Effect with patients facing obstacles such as refill confusion, payment barriers, and coverage approval. For a more comprehensive report from the millions of customer voices gathered last year, Authenticx shared themes and insights in the annual Customer Voices Report (which you can download here).
Common Customer Experience Disruptions in Healthcare
Life Sciences
- Insurance benefits
- Coverage confusion
- Sources of financial assistance
Healthcare Providers
- Billing questions
- Status checks for claims, prior authorizations, and general care
Payers and Insurance
- Confusion on healthcare business practices
- Status checks for billing and claims
Take Action by Listening to Your Customers’ Own Words
With actionable insights, healthcare organizations have the data they need to strategically tackle the top sources of customer friction.
Combat negative brand perception
PwC reports 32% of customers stop doing business with a brand they love after only one negative experience. When customers express frustration, confusion, exasperation, or helplessness they’re raising a red flag and indicating a negative experience. By identifying ways to listen to customer voices, healthcare organizations can collect and aggregate data to help pinpoint negative experiences customers are voicing and provide insight on how to improve.
Improve low customer retention
After a bad customer service experience, 39% of customers will avoid a company for two years on average according to Dimensional Research. This is hugely detrimental to building customer loyalty and retention. A critical step for improvement is to analyze the current story being told in order to best identify where change needs to happen.
One example from an Authenticx client found 60% of their identified disruptions (or Eddies) were due to repeat customer status check calls. Customers were making repeat calls to the organization for next steps, both a waste of customer time and organizational resources. By proactively diagnosing problems facing customers, healthcare leaders can reduce current barriers in place that make customers reluctant to return.
Identify opportunities for strategic growth
In 2021, Authenticx saw on average 25% of customer interactions were due to an Eddy Effect disruption. These disruptions amounted to an estimated $323,000 in monthly costs to resolve (when considering organizational resources and call agent time). You can identify the costs and burdens of your customer friction (the Eddy Effect), too. Customer voices are essential in guiding strategic growth initiatives by helping to identify actionable solutions.
Examples of actionable solutions may include: new training for employees, educational resources for customers, digital investment, and means to track progress.
By prioritizing the importance of customer experience, healthcare leaders can impactfully deploy resources in way that’s strategic in building positive brand experiences and customer retention.
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!