Interactions with healthcare providers are incredibly personal experiences and as a result, patients expect especially high levels of care from healthcare organizations.
Unfortunately, as PWC reports, 51 percent of healthcare consumers are not satisfied with their overall consumer experience.
For healthcare organizations, this dissatisfaction could ultimately have a negative effect on the success of the business: A Deloitte report found hospitals with excellent patient satisfaction survey ratings had a net profit margin of 4.7 percent on average, compared to just 1.8 percent for hospitals with low ratings. It turns out good healthcare customer service can help to improve patient satisfaction and improve your hospital or health system’s bottom line.
Healthcare organizations should start considering their patients as customers. Patients are one-time consumers, while customers develop long-standing relationships with organizations. From the customer’s perspective, the call center is a primary voice of the healthcare organization and often sets the tone of a first impression. It’s also essential for creating a personalized experience.
Modern call centers combine digital marketing with traditional call center capabilities to provide deeply personal experiences. This type of call center, which we call an engagement center, is context-aware and aimed at delighting and retaining patients.
Let’s discuss three ways engagement centers improve the customer experience:
1. Create a Customer-Centric Experience
In a sophisticated engagement center, representatives act as concierges by integrating existing patient data from the healthcare CRM platform with new information via the current inquiry. With quick access to this information, engagement center representatives can personalize their customer interactions.
A healthcare CRM takes past inquiries and call center activities, including class and event registrations, campaign inquiries, provider referrals, and appointment scheduling requests, and creates comprehensive caller profiles. When engagement center representatives have access to these caller profiles, conversations can be tailored to the caller’s specific needs, demographics, location, behavioral patterns, and prior interactions.
For example, when a customer calls to ask about a wellness seminar they received a postcard for, the agent would see what postcard they were sent and easily access information for the class. At the same time, the agent could double check if there’s another class available closer to the caller’s home, since that information would be in the console. This way, the agent could be proactive and offer the closer class as an option, delighting the customer. The agent is then able to register the customer in that moment for the class and send text messages or emails with details and reminders.
Personalization is particularly important in healthcare marketing because the industry revolves around something very personal – your health. A more personalized engagement center experience increases the likelihood that the customer feels comfortable with and trusts their provider. A comfortable, trusting patient is more likely to return, more likely to be proactive about their health, and more likely to recommend your organization to others.
2. Support a Cross-Channel Journey
Customers interact with healthcare organizations in a variety of ways, including on your website, social media, the phone, and in person. In order to capitalize on these interactions, healthcare marketers can apply patient data to determine what future communication a customer needs and prefers. A centralized platform that stores and analyzes data can aid in personalizing these interactions.
Additionally, engagement center representatives who have access to patient information via a CRM are able to better serve callers by supporting their cross-channel journey. Say, for example, a patient with a chronic condition calls the engagement center, and that same patient has been referred to your organization by a provider, downloaded a pamphlet, and signed up to receive direct mail. Armed with this knowledge, a representative is more aware of potential questions the caller might have, can avoid repeating information the caller already knows, and point the customer toward the next interaction in their journey.
This type of personalized, proactive service is becoming the expectation, doing this well improves the overall customer experience.
3. Nurture Leads and Patients
In marketing, nurturing refers to reinforcing relationships with consumers at every stage of their journey. This process keeps your organization at the forefront of consumers’ minds, makes them feel important and valued, and increases the likelihood of acquisition or retention. In fact, companies that excel at nurturing generate 50 percent more leads at 33 percent lower cost to themselves.
For healthcare marketers, nurturing is particularly critical because not all health decisions are quick ones; patients oftentimes need time and information before moving forward with a care plan. For example, the bariatric and orthopedic specialties may see lead attribution periods of 1-2 years between initial contact and clinical conversion. Nurturing during this process ensures qualified consumers don’t fall out of the process.
Engagement centers can be included as part of the proactive nurturing journey. Consider the following examples:
Leads
The goal of lead nurturing is to guide prospects along the path to becoming patients. To engage qualified leads, healthcare marketers can trigger outbound calls via the engagement center. Outbound calls are a great way to interact with leads, reminding them of your organization, and providing them with useful information. For example, if you have a New Mover’s nurturing program, you might trigger an outbound call after they respond favorably to your welcome call-to-action to see if they need any help finding a new primary care provider. You might trigger another outbound call if they don’t schedule an appointment after a certain amount of time.
Patients
Healthcare marketers also need to put programs in place that help retain and reactivate patients. The benefit of retention nurturing is the organization stays top of mind if the customer needs additional services. Previous patients need to be nurtured to ensure that they continue a relationship with your organization.
Patient retention should mostly follow that individual’s specific journey, keeping in mind which types of services the patient has previously used. After collecting patient data through interactions and inputting it into the CRM, healthcare marketers can then plan strategic nurturing outreach.
Customer nurturing efforts can be done via a marketing-connected engagement center. Following up with a patient post-clinical encounter, such as calling about post-op expectations and care or reminding the patient to schedule a follow-up appointment, are ways the engagement center can reach out to nurture current patients.
The engagement center can also function as a source of scheduled outreach during times when the patient is not immediately pre-or post-clinical. This sort of long-term marketing outreach can be planned and then executed through the engagement center.
Final Thoughts
Data shows that a positive customer experience is incredibly important if organizations want to attract and retain customers. An optimized engagement center improves the customer experience by doing just this - creating engaged consumers. When it comes to health, an engaged consumer is a more proactive consumer, and a more proactive consumer is a healthier consumer.
But engagement efforts don’t just benefit customers. From the healthcare marketer’s perspective, customer engagement efforts can secure revenue for their organizations, thereby improving their bottom line. Because of their benefits to both patients and companies, it behooves healthcare organizations to optimize and focus on their engagement centers.
Bio: Gary Druckenmiller, Jr. is Vice President, Marketing Practice Lead at Evariant. He functions as lead strategist, digital marketing thought leader and C-level executive sponsor for all of Evariant’s enterprise clients, primarily focused on advising health system leadership of opportunistic methods to improve their digital presence and interactive growth potential. Prior to Evariant, Gary served as Vice-President for Harte-Hanks, responsible for healthcare digital strategy and deliverables including multi-channel campaigns, paid digital media, social media, CRM and analytics. Gary has been with Evariant for 8 years and can be heard often on the hospital marketing speaking circuit. Gary has a bachelor’s degree in marketing from Bentley University.