Having worked within the private medical industry for some time now, I really feel it could benefit from better understanding how improving their customer / patient experience could help improve their bottom line.
Competition is tough in the private medical world. Services are much the same from hospital to hospital and prices are all being driven down year-on-year. Mark Grindeland, Teletech’s CEO highlights in a recent article how it’s becoming increasingly hard to gain competitive edge on product and price differentiation. Mark says: “If you can’t compete on product or price differentiation, what can you compete on? My belief is that differentiation really happens around customer experience and that depends on data. We have more data than we’ve ever had before, and those companies that really understand the power of data can use the data they have on individual customers that no other company has, adapt the experience with them, and learn from those experiences to determine the next interaction.”
In the medical world there is no shortage of data. Endless form filling in and endless questionnaires with monstrous tick box surveys. So what happens to all this data? Not much, in my experience. It’s time for the medical world to wake up to a new way of doing things, a new way of gathering and using data, a new way of using feedback (and by that I mean meaningful qualitative verbatim data, not the 10 page tick box survey data which has limited value), and a new way of putting the customer at the focus of everything it does.
It just takes a little bit of thinking outside the box and some conviction to do things a bit differently from how they’ve always been done in the past.
by Nicola Douglas, Marketing Manager at Feedback Ferret Ltd