4 Keys to Delivering A Retail-Like Patient Experience Journey

Embrace customer-centric, digitally enabled approaches like these, reinventing the patient experience becomes a competitive differentiator.

For patients, it’s as much a plea as it is an ultimatum to their providers, one in which they essentially are saying now is the time for the healthcare industry to collectively and collaboratively find ways to deliver the seamless, transparent and user-friendly customer journeys they have grown accustomed to as retail consumers. Patients are consumers, too, and as such, they are accustomed to having convenience and control in their digital journeys, whether they are interacting with a retailer or a healthcare provider. There’s a reason so many retail enterprises—as well as more companies in the healthcare industry—are abandoning their legacy communications networks in favor of modern digital network frameworks such as SD-WAN: because they provide the capabilities, bandwidth and to-the-network-edge security to deliver the flexible, seamless and robust omnichannel experiences that patients today demand. Offering flexible digital payments is another area where healthcare providers have an opportunity to differentiate themselves in the eyes of their patients by borrowing from the retail customer journey to provide options like Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL), where patients can pay a bill in installments. From choosing an appointment time, through check-in, check-out, payment and beyond—with text messages, emails, etc., to provide notifications, information about projected co-pays, links to payment options, results, etc.—the expectation that healthcare companies provide a seamless, transparent CX across the entire patient journey [supported by cloud-based communications solutions like UCaaS and CCaaS (contact center as a service)] is growing. For healthcare companies that are willing to embrace customer-centric, digitally enabled approaches like these, reinventing the patient experience becomes a competitive differentiator, giving them a clear edge in an industry where the quality of the patient journey matters more to patient satisfaction and business outcomes than ever before.