Customer Journey Mapping helps businesses understand what are the interactions that their customers have with their business processes. For the healthcare industry, using these methods to visualize the patient experience allows them to improve patient satisfaction, and drive business growth.

Introduction

Everyone remotely connected to the internet today has heard of the slang ‘Karen’. The slang essentially started out as a term for an over-entitled customer, who had taken to shouting at workers in a retail or sales setting. The number of recorded instances of ‘Karens’ has grown over the recent years. But how is this related to healthcare or businesses in general?

The rise of ‘Karens’ is the downside to the new revolution that we are witnessing in service-focused industries. Today’s customers are not content with just receiving our services, no matter what segment of the economy we are talking about, but expect to have a good experience while doing so.

The experience during the purchase of any service or product is just as important as the quality of service or product itself for most customers. 8 out of 10 customers stated that they considered their experience with a company just as important as the product itself.

The healthcare industry is witnessing a similar issue. While healthcare businesses had once considered themselves to work with only patients, today’s patients want to be treated as paying customers. They want to be treated in a manner similar to what they would expect in a different service where they had been paying money. And with healthcare costs continuing to rapidly increase, who can blame them for asking to be treated like customers do?

But how does a business go about improving the customer experience?

Customer Journey Mapping

Customer journey mapping is the process of mapping the customer’s journey. The journey itself details the various touchpoints and interactions that a customer has during the course of their engagement with a business. This journey starts when the customer starts to identify that it has a need and only ends far after the customer’s sale has materialized. For many companies that offer post-sale services like customer support, warranties, and more, the customer journey continues to extend till the end of that process.

Mapping this journey allows businesses to understand the complexities that their prospective and existing customers experience. It shows them in a visual and easy-to-understand format. Through this companies identify which touchpoints have a negative impact on the customer experience.

Without knowing what the problem is or where the problem lies, there can be very little scope for improvement or mitigation. As a result, today customer journey mapping has been used by nearly all major companies to optimize the customer onboarding process and improve the customer experience.

Customer journey mapping also allows businesses to adapt their processes differently based on the different customer personas there are. Not all customers are the same, but most of them can be broadly divided into a few categories. These ‘categories’ are the customer personas.

$35.3 billion is lost every year in the US alone due to customer experience reasons. We believe customer journey mapping can play a significant role in helping solve this problem

But what does this all mean for the healthcare industry?

CJM in Healthcare

The use of customer journey mapping in the healthcare industry has been a relatively new development. The change only came about as a result of the growing understanding of healthcare businesses that their business is not just serving patients, but patients who wish to be treated like customers. However, as the healthcare industry’s needs remain different from what many other businesses have, the industry instead uses the term patient journeys.

Through patient journey mapping, healthcare businesses are able to measure and understand the perspective of the patient in their healthcare setting and interactions. For healthcare businesses, it’s important to realize and understand that patient experience is influenced by multiple touchpoints and each touchpoint must deliver the right value and experience.

With different healthcare departments, these numerous touchpoints can become siloed leading to fragmentation of services and therefore delivering a poor experience for the patient.

With multiple stakeholders playing a part in the overall journey of the patient, it gets incredibly difficult to hold anyone accountable for the outcomes.

By using patient journey mapping, healthcare businesses are able to overcome these obstacles and provide better experiences to their patients and customers. While customer experience is of high importance for most businesses, patient experience drives patient satisfaction in the healthcare industry. Patient satisfaction is one of the key metrics of success and improvement for healthcare organizations in the healthcare industry today.

Conclusion

Customer journey mapping allows healthcare businesses to understand the increasingly complex ways that today’s customers communicate with them. By understanding the myriad touchpoints, healthcare businesses are able to ensure that they fill up the cracks in their customer journey models and improve their customer experience.

Healthcare businesses today need to understand that they are not just serving patients but customers instead. With customer experience being almost as important as the healthcare service being delivered itself, it is no wonder that healthcare companies that are focusing on improving customer experiences are coming out on top.

BraveLabs is a medical digital transformation and marketing company helping healthcare organizations navigate this new revolution in the healthcare industry. With BraveLabs, healthcare organizations can integrate customer journey mapping into their business processes and start improving customer and patient experiences in real-time.

Contact BraveLabs to understand how CJM can be integrated into your healthcare model.