Designing Great Customer-Centric Experiences
[Author:
TERRY MAYTIN | VP, Market Development & Commercialization]
Digital strategy is most effective when undertaken at the enterprise level with broad leadership support, placing the consumer at the center of enterprise-wide strategy -instead of the health system, provider, channel or technology. Reorienting organizations to “think digital” requires championing a “customer first” mentality in the mindset of all key functions responsible for successful product and service delivery – whether customer-facing or not. Developing digital-only solutions is not the goal. Rather, “customer first” is all about designing great customer experiences to meet their needs and expectations. In other words, providing the best product or service, at the best price, for the most value, at the preferred location, time, and touch point.
For healthcare companies to be successful in a digital world, they must embrace the concept of digital consumers who value choice, convenience, savings and service quality over all else. Typically channel agnostic but often preferring online and mobile, digital consumers expect a seamless experience across all touch points. Channel choice is use case driven. Digital for research, transactions, mobility, and convenience. Human interaction for more complex tasks (e.g. prior authorization, issue resolution).
Successful customer experience design principles include:
- Developing a deep understanding of customer needs, pain points, preferences, motivations and behaviors. Sources for insights include direct customer feedback and focus groups as well as input from customer-facing CSRs, plan sponsors, B2B stakeholders, and competitors’ offerings.
- Rigorously testing concepts to avoid developing solutions for problems that don’t exist. In addition, anticipate customer needs even if not explicitly stated; give customers what they need before they need it.
- Adopting a persona-based approach to drive strategy, content, marketing, and UX design decisions. Define personas to embody logical customer groupings, taking into account various wellness stages (e.g. caregivers, healthy, worried well, acute, chronic, and complex) in addition to classic segmentation criteria.
- Designing intuitive interfaces and user flows tailored to each persona. Perform concept and usability testing during pre-development. Champion personas across functions to demonstrate and reinforce the customer-centric vision.
- Investing in analytics and reporting. Identify KPIs during requirements and fully instrument digital assets. Consistently monitor metrics and feedback to quickly identify errors, unhappy flows and potential enhancements. Integrate digital and non-digital analytics. Perform comparative analyses to measure ROI. Proving value is a fundamental challenge in value-based care and population health. Digital offers unique potential to distribute and collect valuable insights (e.g. behavioral, preferences, patient-reported data) to supplement predictive analytics, health economics and outcomes research.
- Constantly testing, learning and iterating to optimize customer experience, product performance and business outcomes. Pursue flawless delivery through CQI. Measure and monitor post-launch product and campaign performance.
Conclusion
The transition to value-based care along with interrelated Triple Aim objectives is transforming the role of digital strategy across the healthcare industry. Large consumer audiences are highly connected, motivated and increasingly engaged in their healthcare decisions. Payers require a larger B2C focus to attract, engage and retain customers via efficient online, mobile and email channels.
At the same time, payers are developing new care and payment models partnering with providers and pharma to improve quality and reduce costs. This has expanded the playing field for digital strategy to act as a positive, disruptive change agent. Recognizing this potential, external investment in digital innovation is at record highs. Payers must pursue a rational, balanced approach: data-driven decision making, lean startup methods, and external licensing/partnerships with technology and service providers whenever possible. Those who successfully leverage digital solutions migrating from volume- to value-based care will reap the rewards: increased margins, competitive advantage and customer loyalty.
In order to truly become digital health companies, organizations must embrace a “customer first” orientation across functions – with full C-Suite backing and support. Digital strategy is not necessarily channel specific, though information and processes need to be in harmony across all touch points. Customers’ channel usage and preferences often differ by use case and segments. The most successful strategies will deploy customer-centric, optimized experiences designed around personas and omni-channel service excellence.
The healthcare system is complex, fragmented and evolving rapidly. Design and implement digital strategy for the journey rather than the destination.
Related Articles:
The Impact of Value-Based Care on Digital Strategy
Industry Transformation and Consumer Adoption
The Rise of Connected Health as a Strategic Imperative
About Medocity
Medocity, headquartered in Parsippany, New Jersey, is a recognized leader in comprehensive virtual care products and services including chronic condition management, televisits, and remote patient monitoring. Our unique, innovative technology combines multiple telehealth capabilities onto a single, integrated care coordination and management platform, along with robust clinical intelligence including rules-based algorithms, alerts and decision support tools to help drive earlier detection and proactive interventions.
The Medocity platform is specifically designed to enable and improve patient-centered care delivered outside the hospital setting, particularly for patients at home who have chronic conditions responsible for more than 80% of the nation’s annual healthcare spend. By promoting patient-clinician engagement through shared connectivity and virtual technology, we enable rich, real-time interactions between patients, clinicians, care professionals and support teams. Virtual care. Real outcomes.™