I’m convinced that to truly improve the customer experience, you must go far beyond measuring satisfaction and loyalty. Experiences are created by multiple touchpoints across the whole continuum of care… from the first encounter with your brand through the last. Advertising, website, employees, doctors, nurses, physical environment, follow up, billing – all have an impact on the total experience. Until we get serious about each and every one of these touchpoints, the customer experience will suffer.

Healthcare leaders appear to be finally waking up to this reality. I was encouraged to read some of the comments from hospital executives who attended the HealthLeaders Media 2009 Marketing Experience conference in Chicago. They were challenged to think about how they could create ambassadors for their brands. Here are a few of the comments shared in a post by HealthLeaders Marketing blogger Gienna Shaw:

• Provide exceptional service—that is the best marketing.
• Ask your patients and staff—they will tell you.
• Ask patients at discharge, “What could we have done better?”
• Understand their needs and exceed them.
• Market in a way that differentiates you from competitors.
• Anticipate their questions and be consistent with answers.
• Don’t ask patients how they feel when they are laying on a gurney.
• Do something meaningful, memorable, and unexpected.
• Find something that patients generally identify with and follow that theme.
• Put the patient first.
• Personalize patient experiences every time.
• Give team members “permission” to customize the experience.

Now let’s turn those ideas into ACTION! But how?

Measuring satisfaction is good, but measuring your customer’s experience is better. Satisfaction research alone is no guarantee that there aren’t cracks in the customer experience, and where there are cracks, there are opportunities for customers to become dissatisfied.

I believe effective customer experience research includes the following components:

1. Must actually talk (have a dialogue) with customers NOT simply survey them online or with paper
and pencil.
2. Must capture customer thoughts/feelings as close to the point of intersection with the brand as
possible. May include action research or ethnography.
3. Must be measured over time and link actual behaviors with attitudes about the brand
experience.
4. Must engage the customer in the conversation that they want to have NOT in the conversation
you want them to have.
5. Must have a mechanism for capturing strong customer stories that can be shared with
others.
6. Must place more emphasis on finding the emotional connection with the brand and the emotional
drivers of brand decisions than on the functional benefits.
7. Must include periodic reporting of the individual customer experience. Taking your customers’
brand temperature over time enables you to make immediate changes that can give the brand
positive lift.

Measuring customer experiences over time can help you improve marketing and operations, develop new products and services, and create ambassadors for your brand at the same time. Can your satisfaction surveys deliver that sort of return on investment?

Are senior health executives really committed to creating better customer experiences, or are they just saying what we all want to hear?

I just read a recent HealthLeaders Media study that says patient experience is among the top five priorities of senior health executives.

Given my latest experience with our current healthcare delivery model, I hope they get started soon!

My wife needed outpatient surgery on her hip. On the appointed day, we dutifully showed up at the local hospital at the unseemly hour of 5 a.m. for her scheduled 7 a.m. surgery. Following registration, we were taken to a private room, and she changed into one of those flimsy gowns that hospitals are famous for…except this one had holes in it. (what does that say about respect for a patient?)

And then we waited. And waited. And waited some more. Finally, after numerous inquiries, we learned that our surgeon had switched the order of surgeries for the day. Finally, at 2 p.m. she was taken down for her one-hour surgery. Wouldn’t a little communication have been helpful?

We finally left the hospital after 7 p.m. that night, tired and with a less than positive impression of the hospital and the doctor.

Apparently, I’m not alone. Discontent with the current healthcare system is growing. A new study from Deloitte indicates that healthcare consumers want to be more engaged and gain greater control over their healthcare decisions. The Deloitte study finds:

• Nearly 40% of consumers rate the U.S. healthcare system a D or F
• A quarter of consumers have skipped care when they were sick or injured; two in five of them did so
because they simply could not afford it, were not covered by insurance or thought the costs were
too high
• Three in 10 switched medications in the past year; 38% switched to save money
• 53% of consumers would like employers to be required to provide health insurance for employees
• 37% favor a mandate requiring every American to obtain health insurance either through direct
purchase of through an employer or government program
• Seven in 10 say they would participate in a wellness program if they were given financial incentives,
such as reduced insurance premium or monetary reward
• 13% of consumers have visited a retail clinic this year and 30% said they would do so if it cost 50%
less than seeing a doctor in a doctor’s office
• 42% want access to an online personal health record connected to their doctor’s office
• 65% of consumers are interested in home monitoring devices that enable them to check their
condition and send the results to their doctor

Sounds like consumers know what they want, and many of them are demanding to be heard. So if you’re a healthcare provider or a health plan, you should probably be asking – do I know what my patients and/or customers want? Am I engaging them in a way that makes them want to tell others? Or are they unhappy and ready to tell anyone who will listen?

Consider these websites…all devoted to giving disgruntled customers a voice:

Physicianreports.com

RipoffReport.com

Complaints.com

PissedConsumer.com

What are your customers saying about you?