One of the most encouraging healthcare marketing trends going into 2018 is the shift to a holistic view of the customer. Traditionally healthcare marketers have hyper-focused on the early stages of the customer lifecycle – brand awareness and path to purchase. As healthcare gets more commoditized and disintermediators enter the fray we’re seeing this change. Achieving greater balance throughout the customer lifecycle to include on-boarding and activation, care management and patient engagement, and retention and loyalty is critical for healthcare companies to maintain market share and hit LifeTime Value markers. Over the next few years a holistic or ‘whole consumer’ approach to customer experience (CX) will separate winners and losers.
The state of healthcare customer experience is transforming. Today, there’s often redundant and siloed interactions, little personalization, and inadequate measurement. The healthcare consumer lifecycle is treated as series of disconnected events or fragmented interactions dealt with independently throughout an organization.
Customer-centric companies are using a cross-functional touchpoint analysis to document every interaction to construct a process map of customer engagement and a data map that delineates what, when and where customer data is captured. With this in place, companies can switch from an inside/out view to looking at CX through a customer lens…outside/in. The ‘big win’ is creating dynamic customer journeys that are personalized through segmentation and integrated across channels (e.g., telephonic, digital, retail).
Every touchpoint throughout the customer lifecycle must create a value exchange through a communication stream that deepens engagement and improves loyalty. And in healthcare, unlike retail markets, loyalty-driven CX needs to focus on interactions (vs. transactions) that leverage individual motivators as well as emotional and rational drivers of customer behavior. The payoff is not only better customer retention or ‘stickiness’, but a healthcare customer experience that produces happy, profitable customers.
Great brands build great experiences…and great experience build great brands! For healthcare consumers value is the combination or price, product, access, and service (aka convenience). To ensure a sustainable, relevant value proposition healthcare companies have to focus on the ‘whole consumer’ to attract prospects, convert them to customers, and then delight them to the point of loyalty and referral.