Tag Archives: CEx

4 simple ideas to improve patient experience

Written by: Kushal Dev | Co-founder, Customer Guru

Patient experience is fundamental to the healthcare industry. The profession is not just about clinical care anymore but requires care that addresses every aspect of a patient’s encounter with your hospital, including their physical and emotional needs.

People always remember how you made them feel and you should be sensitive about it. Let’s look at some simple initiatives you can take to provide a better patient experience.

  • Build compassion – Create an environment which makes your patients comfortable and at home. It’s important to have one on one friendly interaction to establish an emotional connect and build a feeling of compassion. This makes your patients feel welcomed and instils trust.
  • Listen – To understand your patient’s needs it’s important to listen to them carefully, acknowledge both the good and bad and most importantly engage. Tell them how important their opinion is to you and you are willing to go that extra mile to provide them a stellar experience.
  • Collaborate – The different departments in your hospital should work in unison towards a common goal of better customer experience. You should ensure a consistent delivery of patient-centred care across departments. Create a platform/medium where all the departments collaborate, deliver and evaluate change. Technology is great enabler here. Use it to your advantage.
  • Accept change with open arms- Always remember your policies and processes are in place to provide better and efficient service. It’s important to review them from time to time. If they are not fulfilling what they are supposed to or there is better way to accomplish something, try it. The idea is to make small incremental changes. Measure its impact and either retract and try something different or iterate and replicate.

Please leave in your comments, thoughts and ideas.

Reach kushal at kushal@customerguru.in

5 incredibly simple customer experience strategies that will make you a customer magnet

Simple customer experience strategies that improve customer retention and loyalty!

  1. Understand how your customers define “Customer Experience”
    1. What is important to your customers?
    2. What ticks them off? For example, is it the fact that you do not have a particular item in stock or that your sales person doesn’t know about it.
    3. Acknowledge that customer experience is driven by every customer touch-point – all elements of your media-mix and across all departments of your organization, customer facing or not.
    4. It is imperative to maintain a high quality experience throughout the relationship, not just when you are selling or renewing.
    5. Customers are sensitive about data privacy. How you handle personal data is an integral part of customer experience now.
  2. Customer satisfaction is a given, focus on improving customer engagement
    1. Customers are no longer passive recipients of ‘push’ marketing. They prefer doing business with companies that engage, listen to, and act on inputs from them.
    2. Be where your customers are – the device, the medium, and the communication. Match it to your customers’ preference to increase engagement.
    3. To come closer to your customers, actively listen to their preferences and personalize your marketing and services accordingly.
  3. Deliver a multichannel experience
    1. Today’s customers are present across channels – social media, email, offline billboards etc. Marketers need to engage and be available across every possible channel.
    2. Be relevant and consistent across channels to avoid confusing your customers.
    3. Customers are easily annoyed or they lose interest if multichannel communication is not as per their preference. Don’t become ‘multichannel annoyance’.
  4. Rethink how you engage with customers
    1. Don’t be fixated by tried and tested strategies. Leading brands constantly try creative ways to engage with their customers and more often than not, customers love it.
    2. Data privacy is becoming contextual. Customers are willing to share business/personal information if they trust you to deliver a personalized experience.
    3. Through meaningful exchange of value and information, companies are delivering better experience to customers; and customers appreciate that.
  5. Show your customers you care: when you promise something, deliver
    1. People never forget the way someone made them feel. Similarly customers never forget if you made them feel special by caring to send a birthday note, or by apologizing for a delayed delivery by sending a souvenir.
    2. When you ask for feedback, show that you read it and are going to act upon it. This simple gesture reinstates your customers’ trust in you.
    3. Customers and prospects view personalization as the next step in a company’s commitment to service excellence.

Are there any other customer experience strategies that are working for you? We’d love to hear them!