With the recent updates made to star rating measures for hospitals, clinics, providers, and insurers based on CAHPS and HCAPHS scores, more and more healthcare providers are now considering investing in improving their Customer Experience.
Communication, customer service and even your messaging are more important than ever, but the actual key to growing your healthcare business and providing your patients with exceptional customer experience is often overlooked.
What Really Happens in Healthcare
If you work in healthcare, you know that various areas get different feedback, but that feedback isn’t always communicated in between departments. With everyone constantly busy jamming on their work and dealing with their own things, the few meetings you do have can be very superficial, and not go into some necessary details.
As a result, this can hurt your customer experience and net performer scores, which will in turn have a negative impact on your organization’s growth.
What if you Invest in Marketing and/or Branding?
The immediate thought when business is down is usually to invest in marketing and/or branding to get more people in the door and make sure your messaging is on point to attract the right people.
While marketing and branding are a crucial part of any business – especially in healthcare, where lack of understanding is a constant drum beat among patients – it’s also important to work hard at being responsive to your patient’s particular needs.
You can have the best quality content out there, have it being shared across multiple platforms, even have it drive the right patients to your practice – but if your customer experience is lacking, it won’t be long until you face the same issues again.
Your growth will eventually stagnate, as it’s 5x more costly to acquire a new patient than it is to keep an existing one.
What You Need is Exceptional Customer Experience
It’s easy to feel like you need to boil the ocean and do everything, but that will eventually dilute your effectiveness.
In order to grow your business, you need to focus on maintaining your current patients first, before you start thinking about acquiring new ones. Think about it – if you’re bringing in new leads before you work in your customer experience, what will happen is you’ll keep losing them out the back door, getting stuck on a vicious cycle.
And you know what piece is often overlooked when working on improving customer experience? Your employees. And we can tell you from our own experience – employee engagement and culture are the foundation of any effective Customer Experience.
How a Dedicated Customer Experience Team Can Help
The good news is – you don’t need to do it alone. You don’t need to suddenly become an expert in customer experience and find the time to train all your staff to follow new best practices and drive better patient experience and retention.
Boss Lady Consulting has helped many healthcare businesses – from non-profits to Fortune 100 companies – and we’d be happy to help your business too.
We’ll help you leverage your customer data and insights, make your team the experts in driving patient satisfaction and engagement, and make sure they become your biggest brand advocates. Sometimes it’s as simple as how you answer the phone!
If you’re interested in learning how Boss Lady Consulting can help you reach (and even surpass) your goals, we invite you to book your FREE consultation call today!