Customer experience is something we weren’t really talking about in healthcare 10 years ago. What’s changed? Why are we hearing so much about it now?

I think this is because healthcare is awakening to the realization that “engagement” is not the same thing as “experience.” The focus for healthcare delivery for so many years was simply to manage care encounters — a patient coming in with a problem that needed immediate attention. There was little incentive to direct resources at anything other than making patients better and keeping operational costs down. And any focus on the patients’ experience was directed at keeping them engaged in their care and treatment programs.

Whether a patient had a difficult time getting registered, getting someone to answer the phone or getting a meal delivered to the room after a study or procedure didn’t matter as much. It wasn’t going to hurt business. Where the mindset “It’s our job to make the patient better, not happy” prevails, a customer experience culture cannot truly exist. It’s kind of like asking someone if he or she would rather have a doctor with exemplary surgical skills or one with a winning bedside manner. On the assumption that patients would always choose the former, healthcare hasn’t had to worry too much about its bedside manner. But the reality is that people actually want both — they want the surgical skills and the winning bedside manner. They want quality care and an easy-to-navigate registration experience. They want accurate diagnostic services and Netflix in their rooms. And increasingly, not only do they want it, they expect it. They are also the most likely patient generation in history to seek services elsewhere if they have a substandard experience while interacting with your organization or visiting or staying in your system. This now extends to the interactions with customer service on billing and claims as well as scheduling follow-up visits. Patients are waking up to the fact that they have a right to expect value for their money, whether they pay the bill or their insurer pays on their behalf.

You mentioned customer experience culture. Where does healthcare need to address this when it comes to CX?

As I alluded to before, culture is really about the mindset of the organization. If you ask people, a universal complaint you will often hear is how much they hate waiting in lobbies and exam rooms at their doctor’s offices or clinics and having to fill out yet another form with the same information. That speaks to issues of service delivery. But you will also hear patients say that they don’t believe their doctors care how long they’re forced to wait for their appointments. That speaks to culture. Customer experience is, at its core, customer care. This is why you can’t create a CX-centric culture if you are not actively seeking and leveraging the feedback of your customers. How important is voice-of-the-customer insight to the way you change, build and refine experiences across your enterprise? And this is where technology can help or hurt you. You can enable device-driven patient check-in solutions and position interactive digital content in your waiting room, but if your patient still has to wait an hour to be ushered to an exam room, you haven’t really addressed experience.  As Cary Cusumano, one of my CX design colleagues at Verizon, says: “Technology cannot fix a broken customer experience culture, but it can make a healthy one even stronger.”

How do you address culture and shift your focus to an omnichannel customer experience?

The commitment to delivering consistent, meaningful CX has to include everyone in the organization, from the executive suite to the clinical teams to the customer service and IT department. No area of the enterprise can afford to claim that the responsibility for customer experience lies outside of its purview. And when it comes to technology, budget needs to be allocated to build out a robust CX strategy — not just on solutions that support clinical care, supply chain, billing, etc. To drive experience across all channels will require a CX design strategy, a plan for integrating organizational data and customer intelligence, and an ability to leverage that information into delivering experiences that actually make a difference to the customer — ones that can be measured by and refined by customer feedback.

What can technology do to help drive better CX in healthcare?

Well, the good news is that in the right culture, the patient experience can be impacted at every touch point in the organization, and with the right platforms and applications, you can deliver everything from interactive digital signage to augmented reality experiences, or even just a more streamlined, engaging patient portal on your hospital website. Expanding your definition of CX also means looking at your patients in the context of their caregivers and families — because they are customers engaging with your brand, too. For example, how do you care for, add value to and deploy innovation to support the family members throughout the entire process — or equip a caregiver with at-home discharge instructions? Well-positioned CX technology can enable, educate and even entertain, but only within a culture committed to using it to drive real outcomes.   

“The commitment to delivering consistent, meaningful CX has to include everyone in the organization, from the executive suite to the clinical teams to the customer  service and IT  department.”

 - NANCY GREEN, VERIZON ENTERPRISE SOLUTIONS

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