How Well Do You Understand Your Consumers’ Experience?

Driving Volume Growth Through Consumer-Centered Marketing Strategies

Acquiring new patients is an imperative of most hospital and health system marketing departments. Yet, we find that many lack critical insights into what consumers experience during their first touchpoint(s), how this experience compares with their competitors, and how these experiences might impact the efficacy of their strategies.

With so many clinics and sites of care in most health systems, it’s not surprising that many healthcare marketers lack a clear view of the experience at every touchpoint.

Even the smallest hospitals have multiple practice locations, many of which were acquired as private practices and are still operating with some level of independence. As practice locations or providers change, website information can quickly become outdated or inconsistent.

As McKinsey reports, healthcare consumers’ expectations have changed. Many seek out the same personalization, service, and experiences they receive when interacting with non-healthcare consumer brands. Understanding the importance of these initial touchpoints in the new patient journey and ensuring a positive experience will improve patient acquisition and loyalty.

Fortunately, Consumer Experience Research can help to illuminate these common gaps and offer a rich understanding of the consumer experience that marketers and service line leadership alike may benefit from.

Consumer Experience Research Promotes Understanding and Informs Strategy

Consumer Experience Research involves studying the consumer experience at various touchpoints. In most cases, this involves simulating a new patient call to a clinic, service line, or hospital using scripted scenarios of consumers calling a practice or the hospital to reveal performance on objective and subjective measures. This research can also include conducting similar calls to local competitive facilities to establish clear benchmarks and comparisons not captured in other patient experience surveys, as well as visiting specific landing pages on the providers’ website(s) to audit the content and user experience.

Live calling allows for a robust analysis of both objective measures and subjective experiences.

Consumer Experience Research deepens marketers’ understanding of real-life consumer interactions so that they can develop messaging and services that reduce friction, solve consumer problems, and emotionally support consumers. The insights gained from this research can provide healthcare marketers with a powerful tool to share with operational leaders and support cross-functional collaboration to align marketing campaigns with patient operations, maximizing the effectiveness of the marketing initiative through consumer-driven solutions.

Our studies have revealed valuable insights into how our clients provide a better experience than their competitors. These features could be used in a variety of strategic applications to differentiate their brands and generate more new patient volume.

What insights can Consumer Experience Research illuminate?

Studies conducted by LIFT Healthcare have illuminated multiple opportunities to refine marketing messages to differentiate the hospital from competitors. Examples include:

• The time-to-next-appointment was nearly 50% lower than competitors – a valuable differentiator as consumer expectations for convenience have increased.
• Lower out-of-pocket costs for specific consumers compared to competitors. Consumer cost and price transparency are increasingly important criteria for selecting a provider with the growth of high-deductible health plans.
• Clients have outperformed competitors on subjective factors, including “knowledge” and “helpfulness,” both words that can be incorporated into marketing messages and leveraged to celebrate internal teams.

Results of Consumer Experience Research enable marketers to leverage competitive advantages and target consumer needs.

Consumer Experience Research has also revealed opportunities to improve new patient experiences. Examples include:

• Standardize scripting for practice staff on issues important to consumers, such as wait times, availability, referrals, and insurance.
• Consistently deploying phone trees within organizations to reduce dropped calls and streamline access to services patients are seeking.
• Reducing reliance on voice mail and improving call answering and new patient conversion.
• Ensuring phone numbers listed on websites are active and connected to the proper practice. 

Understanding how patients navigate phone trees or online portals, how they are treated during initial interactions with healthcare providers, and how they feel when they first seek information all contribute to shaping the patient’s overall experience. Our team collaborates with healthcare marketers to develop recommendations based on these insights to ensure marketing strategies and campaigns are designed based on the research findings. 

Beyond marketing – a powerful tool for engaging internal stakeholders.

Consumer Experience Research is also an invaluable tool for engaging and supporting other internal stakeholders outside of the marketing department. Operational leaders may not have visibility into how the patient experience varies between practices, whether scripts or protocols are consistently being followed, or whether there are gaps in staff knowledge. This is an area where marketing leaders engaging in Consumer Experience Research can deliver additional value.

Engaging these operational leaders at the start of the study can help ensure that they are invested in the results and willing to consider and implement any recommendations derived from them. Using research to build and support collaboration can help healthcare marketers establish and strengthen their perceived value within their organizations.

Human understanding is key to exceptional experiences and marketing strategies.

Understanding how patients experience their healthcare journey is essential for marketers to create empathetic and impactful strategies. Deepening our understanding of the consumer experience is vital to marketing success now that healthcare consumers have raised their expectations around service, access, convenience, and price transparency to match those of non-healthcare brands.

Consumer Experience Research uncovers the key drivers of patient loyalty, satisfaction, and retention by focusing on the moments that matter most to patients.

Consumer Experience Research is one of several LIFT solutions marketers can use to gain insights and deepen their understanding of the human experience of interacting with their health system. By leveraging deep qualitative and quantitative insights, hospital marketers are equipped to create more personalized, effective, and compassionate experiences that result in increased patient acquisition and loyalty.

A human- and consumer-centric strategy is about more than improving how hospitals market their services — it’s about aligning healthcare organizations with the needs and expectations of the consumer population. Equipped with insights from solutions such as Consumer Experience Research, healthcare marketers can lead their organizations in this transformation.