The intersection of various industries is inevitable. One of the most trafficked industry intersections is certainly that where technology meets healthcare. The world of healthcare is undeniably complex and can be extremely difficult to navigate. Not only for the professionals working in the field, but especially for the average everyday person attempting to find help or even just information. Technology has long been integrated into the world of healthcare, and has helped modern western medicine evolve into what it is today. As with many other fields, one of the major shifts in the healthcare industry is where the primary focus lies. Rather than lying with the hospital or the doctors, more and more, the healthcare industry is attempting to cater to the needs of the individual consumers. One way in which this is being approached is through more accessible technology that significantly improves the healthcare customer journey.
A customer journey is the entire encounter that any single customer completes with a company. For instance, something as simple as updating a policy is a full customer journey. As such, each and every company has a multitude of customer journeys through which they interact with their consumers. Along any customer journey there will be a series of customer touchpoints. Touchpoints are the instances in which a customer is actively engaging or communicating with that specific brand or a representative thereof. Keeping customer touchpoints along customer journeys frequently updated is an important maintenance activity, especially in the modern marketplace that sees rapid tech influenced advancements. As society moves toward an economy that’s more consumer-centric these customer touchpoints become even more valuable. This is specifically true in industries with healthy levels of competition. The more equal competition that exists, the more likely it is that a negative customer experience leads to the total loss of a customer, or worse yet, household.
Therefore highlighting the importance in providing an excellent customer experience across all customer journeys. There are many ways to improve and optimize customer journeys from easing the communication process, to improving brand tone and message, and even implementing accessible and user-friendly technology.
Crafting Healthcare Customer Journeys
The first step in optimizing a customer journey is defining the customer journeys that exist within your organization. This means taking a look at how consumers actually interact and engage with your brand, and pinpointing the areas in which there’s room for improvement.
The other half of this equation is understanding the marketplace and how current healthcare systems are already operating. This is important because it will help in designing customer journeys that are easy to integrate into the current workings and operations, while also being easy for the consumers to navigate. The added benefit to purposefully designing healthcare customer journeys is that it presents the chance to build in natural efficiencies into the organization and the customer journeys they utilize. Emphasizing efficiency in creating customer journeys is vital to showing the customer that you care, not only about them, but their time as well which improves brand perception, and makes a personal referral from that customer much more likely.
In addition to purposefully designing customer journeys to be efficient, easy to navigate, and customer friendly, updates to customer journeys should be implemented swiftly and wholeheartedly. This is to avoid confusion amongst customers, and ensure that operations are remaining consistent across the organization as a whole. Not only that, but by implementing updates to the healthcare customer journey in a timely manner, it’s less likely to lose any time to system crashes or other unforeseen technological obstacles. Finally, the more quickly your team is able to properly update and optimize the customer journeys that make up your brand, the sooner you’ll be delivering a more robust and positive customer experience all around. This, in turn, leads to a better brand perception, more frequent and more reliable personal referrals, and higher rates of internal productivity.
Benefits of Keeping Customer Journeys Current
Customer relationships are one of the most valuable assets that a company can hold. They’re specifically valuable because a relationship isn’t something that can be easily copied. Unlike formulas or recipes, each and every customer relationship that exists is unique in some way shape or form. Understanding that every customer is slightly different, and presents slightly different needs is integral to optimizing customer journeys that address individuality. One of the most popular ways to do this is through customizable messaging via a recyclable content library powered by automation, AI, and business logic. These technologies combine in order to take template messages, customize them, and automatically deliver them to customers over user-specified channels.
In addition to customizing the messaging based on data in the individual's user profile, messages are also customized and optimized for the specific channel over which they’re being delivered. In other words, a customer can elect to have their updates and messages sent to them via SMS, social, email, or phone, and the software will automatically optimize messaging for whichever of those channels a user has marked preferred.
Updating healthcare customer journeys doesn’t just save you time and money in the long run. It also bolsters customer relationships, increases personal referrals, and strengthens brand perception. Further than that though, modernizing your customer journeys will give you an advantage over the competition by placing the priority on the customer experience.
A Few Final Words
There is no denying that healthcare is one of the largest industries that exists worldwide. As such, it only goes to reason that the players in that field would want to leverage every advantage available. In today’s marketplace, that means putting the emphasis on consumer needs and the customer experience. Update your healthcare customer journey and show your customers you care.
The value of the consumer relationship continues to grow, as does the importance of keeping your healthcare customer journeys updated and modern. For more information on optimizing customer journeys, consumer engagement best practices, or anything else related to customer communication, keep browsing the Topdown Systems content library.
