Every practice, business, and organization needs a Customer Experience program.
These are crucial, not only to make your day-to-day processes easier to manage but also to make sure your clients leave happy and wanting to return to your place of business.
In short: Happy Customers -> Return Customers -> More Revenue
In today’s post, we’ll go through the 4 reasons why you need to consider setting up or improving your Customer Experience program, especially if you work in healthcare.
Reason 1 – Loyalty
Healthcare has an average retention rate of 40%. If that wasn’t bad enough, when you get into some of the specialties like orthopedics, it drops to about 25%.
We know the cost of patient churn can be high, and something that many health providers worry about, therefore making sure your patients have a good experience at your practice should be a top priority since it builds loyalty and encourages them to come back to your practice.
In 2020, a global consumer study showed that 20% of people would leave a brand after one bad experience. On the bright side, almost 80% also said they would be open to give the brand another opportunity if they made it right.
Reason 2 – Engagement
We’re talking about your staff. Most employees want to be part of something that matters, especially in healthcare. They want to be part of a successful organization, a mission that is doing good things and making a difference in the lives of others.
For that reason, working on your employee engagement – making sure they know exactly what you stand for and ensuring they have all the necessary tools to do their work and support your mission – plays a big part in customer experience.
This is because your employees are essentially the face of your brand. They’re the ones dealing with customers day in and day out, and if they don’t have the tools and empowerment they need to do a great job, your customers won’t have a great experience at your practice.
In other words: you can’t change your external customer experience without aligning as an organization on your commitment to doing what’s right for the patient…and ensuring your team is empowered and prepared to follow through on that promise.
Reason 3 – Reputation
From Press Ganey to CAHPS scores and Google reviews, we know there is a LOT of feedback in healthcare. This is great news because it not only allows you to learn something from all of it, but it also helps you improve your reputation and word-of-mouth sharing.
And we all know that word of mouth is the number one trusted referral for healthcare, whether it’s online or in person, so reviews and reputation matter!
When a customer has an exceptional experience, they WILL tell others about it. In turn, your reputation grows and improves, as you continuously deliver exceptional experiences to those who are visiting your clinic, and it becomes a positive, growth cycle.
Reason 4 – Growth
The organization that will have lasting impact and growth in revenue, as well as a sustainable competitive advantage, is the one that has invested most intentionally into developing a customer experience program.
We’ve heard the news about healthcare ratings – that CMS has quadrupled the weight of the customer experience questions in healthcare. There’s a lot of market reasons why, but it also is what’s right for the consumer, and what will lay the foundation for your growth.
You could have the best product and the most amazing service, but if it’s delivered from a crabby, crusty, and unresponsive staff or system, it doesn’t matter. People are not going to return, let alone tell others good things about it.
So if you are looking for true growth, reputation, brand revenue, and volume referrals, that’s going to come to you by way of an exceptional customer experience.
The question here is: does your organization have the right tools to make this work? Does your staff know how to triage customer experience? And do you have the ability, bandwidth, and visibility to make it right if there was a miss?
At Boss Lady Consulting, we have an assessment that we do for organizations like yours to help evaluate your readiness and maturity.
Depending on your goals, we’ll help you identify where your opportunities are and what your next steps should be. We’ll help you lay out a roadmap to guide you on that journey to your goals so that you can take one intentional step after the other.
We invite you to book a no-pressure exploration call, where you can ask us questions and talk about your business. Even if we don’t end up working together in the long run, we would still be happy to provide you with a few thoughts onwhat you could do to grow, and where your true opportunities are.
