Patient Experience + Brand + Culture = Growth
// By Sally Mildren //
For patient experience to be successful, it must be woven into the culture, expressed through your brand and marketing, and demonstrated first and foremost to your employees.
Truly exceptional patient experience programs thrive at the intersection of culture, engagement, and experience. This has played out in study after study by Monigle, PwC, McKinsey, Medallia, and many others. Good experience equals growth — in revenue, reputation, loyalty, satisfaction, and employee engagement.
Yet inconsistent consumer experiences, misaligned resources, and inability to access information continue to create a gap between employees of health care organizations and the patients they serve.
The problem is rarely a lack of knowing you need change, but instead frayed bandwidth, competing priorities, lack of dedicated resources, and a squishy commitment to truly address the organizational changes that are tightly tied to great patient experience.
But let’s be real. After these last two pandemic-dominated years, our focus has got to be on getting people vaccinated, addressing staff burnout, getting elective procedures back, and returning to our new state of normal. Can’t patient experience wait?
Data supports NOT waiting. According to Forrester, experience-led companies have 1.7x better retention of customers, 1.5x better employee engagement, 1.9x higher return on spend, and 1.6x better brand awareness. Not to mention that for every +1 percent increase in customer satisfaction, the resulting millions in revenue increases are trackable across all industries.
Let’s take a look at what it takes to build an extraordinary patient experience program.