Healthcare organizations are idly hanging onto net promoter (NPS) and customer satisfaction scores (CSAT).
Why? For some, it’s because they don’t know better. For others, they refuse to enter the next era of customer listening because of fear. They take the quick and easy path, preferring to stay in their comfort zone.
And comfort zones rarely confront and welcome innovation. When companies, like in healthcare, fail to innovate, they are also failing to satisfy their leaders, board members, and stakeholders who lack confidence in NPS and CSAT data.
Five years ago, before we had the technology that could harness data and generate insights from customer interactions, these scores served an essential purpose.
But now? These survey-based metrics no longer paint accurate customer experiences (CX)s: NPS and CSAT surveys are failing the business and customer outcomes.
They fail because they:
- Don’t contain the context that is needed for the business to drive positive change.
- Lack representation of the customer base.
- Fail to eliminate survey-based data in results.
- Are a measurement of a memory, instead of measuring the moment of the experience.
Healthcare organizations have begun to take notice of surveys’ shortcomings, from what we are seeing. Fortunately, there are newer, better ways for them (and other organizations) to gather and analyze the valuable information NPS and CSAT surveys can’t capture.
Enter conversational intelligence solutions, which enable healthcare providers to gain a more holistic view and deeper understanding of patient experiences.
First, let’s talk about why healthcare organizations have maintained their reliance on customer surveys for so long. The results do have historical significance. Then, I’ll introduce conversational intelligence solutions, which enable healthcare providers to gain a more holistic view and deeper understanding of patient experiences.
The Value of Customer Surveys
There are several key reasons why customer surveys and insights remain critical indicators for healthcare organizations.
- These questionnaires provide direct feedback from customers (patients and members) about their experiences, satisfaction, and friction points. Thus helping organizations understand how well they’re performing and where they fall short.
- These surveys capture customer perspectives, priorities, needs, and preferences: insights assisting organizations to meet customer expectations more effectively.
- The information collected highlights opportunities to enhance care quality, service delivery, and communication, informing areas for improvement.
In the healthcare industry, CX is also linked to clinical outcomes and patient safety. Positive experiences are associated with higher satisfaction, treatment compliance and better health outcomes.
…acting on customer feedback is critical for healthcare organizations to deliver patient-centered care in a competitive industry.
When surveys reflect more negative sentiments, organizations can respond appropriately to promote better experiences.
Survey results also demonstrate accountability and transparency. Sharing results publicly shows customers that the organization values their feedback.
Lower customer satisfaction scores can decrease retention rates that create customer churn, incurring penalties on the organization that impact reimbursement, and negatively affect brand equity that lowers reputation.
However, higher customer satisfaction scores support organizational growth and sustainability by building trust and reputation, helping customer retention, and strengthening relationships.
Many surveys provide benchmarking data so organizations can compare their performance to competitors and industry averages, fostering continuous improvement.
Finally, U.S. government and regulatory programs like Medicare’s Star ratings and Value-Based Purchasing Program (VBP) require patient experience data to assess quality and tie reimbursement to performance.
Survey Limitations
Because they generate concrete metrics required by certain organizations, surveys will likely play a role in CX measurement: at least for now.
Clearly, acting on customer feedback is critical for healthcare organizations to deliver patient-centered care in a competitive industry. And traditional surveys don’t deliver the data needed to take action efficiently and effectively.
NPS surveys are used to measure customer loyalty and customer recommendation. Often, the language used makes it difficult for decision-makers to find specific pain points in the CX.
CSAT surveys use a ranking system to measure satisfaction with the product or service. Common issues associated with these surveys include their inability to capture actionable data. That is because they listen to feedback from patient memories (rather than measuring a moment) and they lack additional context behind a score.
Is there value to these surveys? I’m beginning to grow more skeptical. While simple, we are seeing macro trends – declining response rates, saturation of survey requests and bad survey design and methodologies – in the survey world that are impacting the data.
Following these macro trends gives insight into overall customer satisfaction and factors that affect a customer’s quality of life. From a clinical perspective, this can look like:
- Higher satisfaction rates among those with minor surgeries (quicker recovery times, more known information upfront).
- Lower satisfaction rates for those who’ve experienced major or urgent surgeries (longer recovery times and long-term monitoring), which often leads to a higher desire to understand the post-surgery effects.
Communication and follow-up are a necessary step and one that might not always be found by only measuring the memory and not the moments.
Despite these macro trends, by their very design, surveys provide only the bare minimum information healthcare organizations require. Their value is limited because they:
- Only capture a specific moment, rather than the whole journey, limiting context on the actual experience.
- Provide ratings without explaining their reasons, restricting an organization’s ability to address root causes.
- Represent a reactionary snapshot of the customer base – and temporary emotions – rather than capturing an ongoing dialog.
- Act as lagging indicators of the CX because they measure perceptions, not actual interactions.
Healthcare organizations need to reimagine CX measurement with forward-looking, contextual insights to truly understand the CX. These surveys fail to provide an ongoing dialog exploring why customers respond positively or negatively and how organizations could improve future experiences.
How AI Can Help
To fully understand customers and stakeholders, healthcare organizations must evolve their listening strategies with real-time feedback and predictive analysis. And they must identify tools that leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to help deploy this evolution.
The patient journey requires a comprehensive understanding of it. The intelligent insights obtained empower organizations to take quick, targeted action to enhance the experience and outcomes across the enterprise: from leader to agent and agent to patient (and back).
By leveraging AI to listen at scale to the actual customer voice, organizations embrace a patient-centric approach. This enhances their ability to meld customer and business outcomes, strengthening brand perception, potential audience growth, and increased revenue.
And this isn’t restricted to U.S. providers. According to McKinsey & Co., Canada’s healthcare system could see upwards to a total of CAD $14 billion-$26 billion in annual net savings. They come from optimizing and improving population health management, decision-making support, and capacity management.
Critically, AI can help the CX by also improving the availability of staff.
For example, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) shared they are looking to use AI tools to help reduce healthcare worker burnout. Which, in turn, will save costs commonly lost in employee churn.
Enter Conversational Intelligence
There are other, more accurate solutions for capturing customer sentiment in the moment. Such a solution exists in conversational intelligence.
This technology focuses on analyzing and understanding human conversations by leveraging AI, including natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML), to extract insights from unstructured data. Data that is sourced from customer feedback and conversations between humans: including customer service interactions.
Organizations use conversational intelligence in several functions. These include identifying patterns, assessing sentiment, and providing real-time feedback to improve conversation outcomes.
By leveraging AI to listen at scale to the actual customer voice, organizations embrace a patient-centric approach.
By collecting unsolicited feedback, healthcare organizations can gain a more complete picture of the CX. This allows them to analyze quantitative ratings and qualitative conversations helping to uncover underlying factors driving customer perceptions.
This comprehensive approach enables data insights into the reasons behind customer satisfaction, frustration, confusion, and other sentiments. Without requiring extra effort from customers and employees.
Healthcare organizations can leverage these holistic insights to address the heart of CX issues and identify areas of opportunity for customer agent training and upskilling. In capturing unsolicited, bi-directional data, conversational intelligence elevates the customer journey in healthcare, by:
- Uncovering common themes in customer feedback, such as billing and authorization concerns, communication and documentation issues, the Eddy Effect (where one frustration or obstacle leads to another).
- Capturing the full context around customer-agent interactions to understand the entire story.
- Using AI to analyze a broad, unbiased sample of customer conversations rather than a limited subset of respondents.
- Collecting freely-shared, organic, unfiltered testimonials, including compliments.
In the past, organizations lacked the technology and the ability to navigate the sheer volume or level of complexity associated with analyzing unstructured data.
But with the rich insights provided by conversational intelligence and AI, today’s healthcare organizations can develop focused strategies and initiatives to directly address customer concerns.
A greater demand for AI-powered customer support services, shrinking chatbot development costs, and expanded omnichannel deployment opportunities are driving this growth.
Conversational intelligence and other AI tools are transforming how the healthcare industry measures and understands CX through rich, nuanced insights. By analyzing real-time interactions, organizations can uncover comprehensive insights about each touchpoint in the customer journey.
This analysis empowers data-driven decision-making grounded in a deeper understanding of the factors influencing CX across all interactions. These powerful insights unlocked through conversational intelligence equip healthcare organizations to make targeted improvements that elevate the overall CX.
