Optimizing the Healthcare Customer Experience with John Nash, RedPoint Global
The following was transcribed from a recent interview on The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström podcast.
Today we’re going to talk about the healthcare customer experience and how customers are shifting their preferences to want better digital experiences. This means that healthcare providers need to keep up with these demands while providing better and more personalized experiences across channels that include both online and offline ones. To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome John Nash, Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer at Redpoint, a CX software provider.
Read Redpoint’s latest research on patient experience as referenced in the show.
(Greg Kihlström): Redpoint recently revealed the results of research conducted in November 2021, including a survey of more than 1000 U.S. consumers that shows that about 80% prefer to use digital channels to communicate with healthcare providers and brands at least some of the time and 44% prefer digital communications the majority of the time. From your perspective are healthcare providers and brands set up to deliver on this at the current time, and for those that aren't, what should they be doing in order to better meet these demands?
I think most were caught off guard in 2020, and there was about a 10-year acceleration of digital transformation and healthcare in particular 2021 that just continued so the market was moving way faster than people were prepared for.
There are some that were more ready than others if they had digitized their content or if they were focused on more holistic value-based care and the whole value chain of healthcare or if they had telehealth in place. But we’ve worked with a number of companies to really accelerate their development of digital transformation and it really starts with rethinking the customer experience in terms of Triple Aim in Healthcare. Triple Aim is three things: better healthcare outcomes, lower costs, and better consumer satisfaction. Those are sometimes at odds, but there are ways to get all 3 of them. We worked with one of the largest payers to look at their new member acquisition programs for both Medicare and individual markets and they were able to grow their member base 25% while also decreasing their operating expenses by 25%. A lot of that decrease in operating expenses was shifting things to digital channels and creating this holistic experience. The other thing to to get ready is to really look at your experience holistically across the ecosystem, and across customer journey stages.
The research also showed that 66% of consumers would choose a provider based on the ability to communicate in a timely and consistent manner and over one third, or about 34% were frustrated by limited doctor availability and slow response Times. So Omni Channel personalization is talked about a lot but even for larger and more sophisticated organizations that can often be challenging with true Omniann personalization as let's call it the North Star. How can an organization position itself to get there and even incrementally by choosing the right data and other technology platforms.
You hit the nail on the head by saying “incrementally doing it” because it really speaks to the whole focus on agility. I recommend incrementally building out data, analytics, and orchestration and then within each of those you can increment your way. So with data, say you really want to get to all that's knowable about customers across all identifiers. You can't hope to personalize the experience with consumers without that deep understanding of who each individual consumer is and that means getting all their data from traditional data like clinical and claims data as well as demographic data, behavioral data, and medical device data.
You can increment your way in terms of adding more and more data to get to their use cases and the value you're trying to create and then on the advanced learning advanced analytics and machine learning. That's really key to personalize the next best action at an individual basis at scale. So if you're dealing with millions of consumers, there's various ways to increment your way here. You can apply machine learning to do your segmentation or you can create dynamic simple next best actions based on events, and you can do simple predictive models. You can do next best actions that are more complex across the customer life cycle and journey stages.
So no matter where the customer shows up, whether in real time, physical, or digital, you need to to be able to personalize it. It's easy to personalize deeply in one channel but it's not so easy to personalize consistently across all channels in real time, but consumers now expect it. The turnarounds of 24 hours between data being updated just doesn't work anymore and so you can increment your way on the orchestration by picking off the high volume channels first. I think too many brands have overinvested in siloed channels at the expense of a really great orchestrated experience. So all 3 of those layers data analytics and orchestration need to be done to get some value.
What is the mindset of the organizationthat they need to have in order to provide great omnichannel CX?
The mindset of being consumer-centric is the number one priority and in healthcare I think Mayo Clinic is a great exemplar of making that consumer centric a reality, and they've done it with their mindset over 100 years. It's possible to be entrepreneurial, competitive, idealistic, and serve patients individually all at the same time and that's a great mindset for today's times if you think about the entrepreneurial dimension. It's being agile, being fast, and identifying those high value use cases where you can use a data-driven approach to drive results being competitive.
There's fierce competition for the share of consumer and healthcare care. We're competing with retailers with Amazon a lot of nontraditional healthcare players. And consumers are picking winners based on a level of personalization. You know Triple Aim, or this 3-part set of driving outcomes up, cost down, and providing better patient satisfaction doesn’t have to be conflicting objectives. The technology exists today to do that at scale both digitally and physically it's arrived, so embrace it. If you're consumer-centric and you focus on that kind of mindset around it, you will be successful.
Pointing back to the the research that was mentioned earlier, 60% of consumers say it's critical for providers to show how well they understand the individual beyond basic patient data. This doesn't just mean that consumers want the convenience of being able to access their healthcare providers on their device or medium of choice but they also want better and more personalized experiences. How should healthcare providers think in terms of bridging this gap because it's not just enough to be on channels—they have to rethink their experiences across channels.
I think there's 2 fundamental gaps within that gap. One is a strategy to execution gap which requires rethinking your customer experience holistically and then putting the right capabilities in place to the right data analytics and orchestration. Brands have this great customer strategy in their head and brands certainly know what they want to do, but they just can't execute it. They don't have the right capabilities in place. So one thing to bridge that gap certainly is to get the right capabilities.
A second thing is that there's a customer understanding gap where you really want to know and need to know your customers. But you don't always know them as well as you should know as a provider..
How does an organization measure and understand how well it's understanding its customers? How does an organization ensure it's staying one step ahead?
There's some HBR research that said that 95% of people think they're self-aware but only 10 to 15% are truly self-aware, and I think similarly healthcare organizations don't know what they don't know. So it's really hard to figure out if you're at that level of measuring and understanding that you need to be, but there are some practical questions you can ask. One of those questions is, do you have all the data? Are you bringing together clinical claims, consumer demographics, behavioral data, et cetera. A second question is, do you have the data that moves the needle. You want to influence consumers to do things like closed care gaps, but do you have the data that actually helps with that part of the journey or that particular outcome? Do you have data that keeps up with the customer in the customer's cadence which could be real time or it could be a 5 minute window or a day window?
Another good question to ask yourself is do you have data accessible across all channels? You know if your behavioral data is stuck in your web channel, it's not very helpful to an omni channel customer experience which is true for most businesses out there. Then, are you able to resolve identities across channels. Consumers use email identities, social handles, phone numbersm patient numbers, member numbers, pkuls any number of ookies. There could be lots of different ways to identify your customer and if you're not able to identify them accurately as they move across channels you really end up with a customer experience full of friction.
The Healthcare industry certainly has a lot of room to improve. According to the research study referenced earlier 57% of Healthcare consumers think retailers or financial services do a better job at providing personalized omnichannel experiences than healthcare. What effect has the global pandemic had on healthcare delivery and patient experience?
I think where healthcare is accelerating is in the data area. Healthcare has more data than retailer banking. They're just not using it effectively so they are accelerating where they have that strength and they're starting to use all their data. You can look at it in another way: 80 to 90% of Health care outcomes are determined by environment and patient self care patient behaviors. So you know the care itself is about 10 to 20% of the outcomes. So the clinical and claims data which is typically around the care itself is only a fraction of the outcomes. There's a lot of that behavioral data that's left on the cutting room floor, but we are seeing healthcare accelerate their use of that. It really is their best opportunity to accelerate past retail and banking because they have a huge advantage in terms of the holistic view of the consumer over their lifecycle if they can get it all pulled together and we are also seeing this acceleration across the ecosystem certainly with value-based care being an incentive.
What are what are the leaders in the healthcare industry doing to create better and more personalized experiences that could be an example to?
The leaders are putting the right foundation in place and focusing on high value use cases. So they're looking at their care paths their journeys, and prioritizing the ones that are high impact. What are the use cases that are going to drive outcomes higher and cost down and then what are the data and channels you need to to drive that, and what cadence do you need. When you pull all that together, you can definitely deliver outsize results, and we have seen leaders do that and across the ecosystem.
What are some first or maybe initial steps that you'd recommend to an organization that is not as far along in customer experience maturity to get started?
I'd recommend to put the right foundation in place that lets your point solutions stay in place. So everybody has point solutions around data and engagement channels. The channels stay in place and you overlay it with this level of data analytics and orchestration. I recommend starting there and and when you start looking at the data try to bring all your to data together. You really should be striving for a version 3.0 of your single customer view, not a version 1.0 Start picking off those high value use cases with pilot projects and take it from there..
Listen to the Episode
About the Guest
John Nash has spent his career helping businesses grow revenue through the application of advanced technologies, analytics, and business model innovations. As Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer at Redpoint Global, John is responsible for developing new markets, launching new solutions, building brand awareness, generating pipeline growth, and advancing thought leadership.
About the Host, Greg Kihlström
Greg Kihlstrom is a best selling author, speaker, and entrepreneur and host ofThe Agile Brand podcast. He has worked with some of the world’s leading organizations oncustomer experience, employee experience, and digital transformation initiatives, both before and after selling his award-winning digital experience agency, Carousel30, in 2017. Currently, he is Principal and Chief Strategist atGK5A. He has worked with some of the world’s top brands, including AOL, Choice Hotels, Coca-Cola, Dell, FedEx, GEICO, Marriott, MTV, Starbucks, Toyota and VMware. He currently serves on the University of Richmond’s Customer Experience Advisory Board, was the founding Chair of the American Advertising Federation’s National Innovation Committee, and served on the Virginia Tech Pamplin College of Business Marketing Mentorship Advisory Board. Greg is Lean Six Sigma Black Belt certified, and holds a certification in Business Agility from ICP-BAF.