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How Healthcare Industries Can Improve From Negative Customer Experiences

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Everyone needs healthcare services, but they often don’t look forward to dealing with them. In fact, many people carry a lot of stress and anxiety when visiting the doctor and dealing with their health.

Part of this is likely because people simply feel nervous around doctors and are worried about finding out something bad about their health. But an even bigger part of it is the lack of overall customer experience in the healthcare industry.

However, with the advent of digital innovations that have recently propelled the healthcare industry forward, customer experiences are changing. Still, simply implementing new digital tools and systems won’t fix things entirely.

While telehealth services will certainly help, the key to providing excellent customer service is to listen to your patients and genuinely consider their feedback, which is something that can be more easily done with technology.

Why Customer Experience Matters

The healthcare industry has long been overdue for an upgrade where customer experience is concerned. While technological advances have been occurring in the healthcare industry for years, these innovations have primarily been focused on the backend of things, not the external, front-facing services that pertain to the customer experience.

But the experience a customer has is just as important as, say, a doctor using an advanced tool to perform a life-saving surgery that gives the hospital credibility and popularity. At the end of the day, the healthcare industry wouldn’t exist without customers or patients that need medical services. Customers will choose to work with another provider or facility if they continually have a bad experience.

If you want your healthcare business to continue attracting and retaining new customers, you have to find better ways to provide more value to the customer. This doesn’t just mean adopting new technologies — it’s using those technologies to enable better communications and relationships with your customers.

How the Digital Age is Transforming the Customer Experience in the Healthcare Industry

There are many ways that the latest digital innovations have led to a transformation of the customer experience in the healthcare industry. With things like online portals, chat tools, big data, cloud solutions, and Artificially Intelligent (AI) systems, the customer experience is now more seamless, hyper-personalized, and frictionless.

One of the biggest benefits is that technology and this push for better customer experiences in the healthcare industry have led to improved communications with customers. When doctors or other medical staff can more easily communicate with their patients, as well as learn from patient feedback, it can lead to:  

• Reduced wait times;
• Improved doctor-patient trust;
• Fewer misunderstandings;
• Better patient care;
• Higher rates of customer satisfaction.  

All of these things mean more revenue. When customers are happier and have consistently better experiences, they will leave more positive reviews, which will keep them coming back as well as attract new patients to your business.

How to Turn Negative Customer Experiences into Consistently Excellent Customer Experiences

Many sites have already covered the general idea of how to use digital innovations to improve the overall customer experience. But our focus and intent here are to put the spotlight specifically on the improvements that can be made where the intersection of technology and customer communication is concerned.

More specifically, these tips are about how to utilize digital systems to learn from customer reviews and feedback, as this is where you can gain the most insight into what you need to change to give the customers what they want so they can have better experiences overall.

1. Provide Numerous Channels For Communicating and Collecting Feedback

Gone are the days of the basic patient survey forms handed out in-office. Now, there are many different ways that your business can interact with your customers and collect their feedback. And the more options you provide, the more data you can collect that can help you make more improvements.

You can use Ai-powered chatbots to communicate with your customers and learn about the issues they are having. You can send out emails asking for feedback. You can collect feedback through online patient portals. You can create a place on your website where customers can send messages and leave comments. You can look at the customers’ comments and reviews on Google.

You can even collect data about how your customers are feeling on social media. Most consumers today use social media, so you can guarantee that if you are using various social media sites, like Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook, for your business, your customers will follow you and leave comments and reviews that you can use as insightful feedback to help you better understand what your customers want and need.

2. Handle Negative Reviews Appropriately

When you start paying closer attention to what your customers are saying, you are inevitably going to come across some less-than-pleasant negative reviews. However, it’s important to handle negative comments in a professional manner.

For example, you do not want to lash out at a customer, no matter how scathing their review is. Instead, it’s important to try to view each and every review as critical feedback that you can learn from. Remember, if a customer is that upset to leave such a bad review, it is probably because they are feeling frustrated and unsatisfied with the service that was provided.

So, make sure you acknowledge the review respectfully and professionally. Keep the review private, and do not share your interaction with the public.No matter how bad the review is, try to learn from it to reduce the chances of such negative reviews going forward.

3. Make it Personal

While there are many tools available now that enable healthcare companies to communicate and collect feedback without ever having to speak face-to-face with the customer, you should continue delivering a human element with your services. In other words, do not rely on smart technology to handle everything for you.

Customers still prefer personalized, face-to-face interactions. So while you might have chatbots that can deal with customer problems for you, it’s still necessary to allow for live-video chats or phone calls to collect feedback when you can.

If customers feel like they are given the runaround when they try to connect with a live person, this can make them very frustrated and leave them feeling very dissatisfied. Your customers want and need to feel seen and heard by a real person who can exhibit empathy.

So, while you can and should utilize all of the many digital tools at your disposal to make collecting customer feedback more convenient, make sure you still leave room for live interactions.