In medicine, patients not only require accurate diagnoses and prescriptive care but also a good customer experience. If you want to ensure that the patients’ experience is exceptional, refer to the playbook of the latest customer experience programs.
When looking for a new doctor, many refer to online reviews: How do other patients rate the dermatologist or the dentist? The comments there are usually narrow. Some of the reviews praise the doctor, while others complain about waiting room times that are too long and consultation times that are too short. From the medical point of view, rating platforms such as Google Reviews or Yelp are both a curse and a blessing: feedback is always helpful to further develop a medical practice or service but bad feedback reflects one opinion at a point in time.
So how can doctors ensure that their patients provide constructive feedback without publicly venting their frustration online?
By utilizing state-of-the art customer experience tools and technology! For retail products and services (delivered in the physical world or online), Customer Experience programs have been the standard for years to gather comprehensive contextual feedback, quantify the customer experience, and use this data to drive growth. The same methodology can be applied to the healthcare sector—and in this case it is called the managing the Patient Experience.
What exactly does the Patient Experience cover?
The Patient Experience encompasses the entire experience that patients have with the healthcare system. This includes experience with doctors, nursing staff, office staff, call centers, care in hospitals or with therapies. It measures the quality of the healthcare system based on factors that are important for patients, such as making appointments, waiting room times, communication, information and service delivery.
How can you measure the Patient Experience? As already mentioned above, Customer Experience programs, such as Voice of Customer are particularly suitable for healthcare measurement and improvement. Voice of Customer is a tool in which
Quick Customer Feedback can be collected. Customers can access a questionnaire using a QR code or link and provide quick feedback on their visit. The data is then collected in a dashboard and processed by Artificial Intelligence as the feedback is analyzed, categorized and ranked. Voice of Customer is particularly suitable for the health sector due to its quick and easy setup imposing little time demand on healthcare professionals and their IT departments.
What are the advantages of a Voice of Customer program in the health sector?
Those who offer their patient-customers a platform for feedback can dissuade negative feedback from being shared on platforms such as Google, Yelp or online provider directories (e.g. WebMD, Zocdoc). This not only improves your ratings, but also your performance because via the feedback from your patients, you can recognize unused potential in your practice and implement it quickly and easily. A feedback and improvement loop is established to continuously improve the patient experience!
How is a Voice of Customer program in the health sector structured?
A Voice of Customer program usually consists of a quick survey with a few multiple-choice questions or rating service elements from 1-10, as well as one or two open-commentary questions for patient feedback on a specific topic, praise or wishes. You can determine the questions yourself or work them out together with our experienced experts. A Voice of Customer program is ready to use in a few hours and is relatively inexpensive. So, what are you waiting for?
