The entire healthcare industry has become much more focused on improving the patient experience. That’s crucial for a number of reasons, including good old customer satisfaction. It’s easier than ever for patients to explore provider options, and they’re doing so in significant numbers.
How significant? According to a recent Accenture study, 7 percent of patients have switched healthcare providers due to a subpar experience. The potential cost to a single hospital: upwards of $100 million.
Provider organizations that seek to reverse this trend and improve patient loyalty have a proven means at their disposal. It involves adopting automated tools that other business-to-consumer (B2C) industries have broadly deployed to improve their own customers’ experience, with great success.
Improving customer contact at every point elevates consumer satisfaction
The Patient Experience as a Service (PEaaS) concept combines two popular B2C technologies – Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) and Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS):
- CCaaS unifies all channels for customer contact (voice, email, and text messages), enabling enterprises to communicate through each customer’s preferred medium, while also tracking all contact with each customer across all channels.
- UCaaS unites people within the enterprise with seamless communications, tools, and workflows, enabling consistent and fully informed exchanges with the customer, regardless of the individual serving as the point of contact.
- The aaS (as a Service) designator in CCaaS and UCaaS reflects service deployment in the cloud, which enables higher levels of security and availability at a lower cost than locally hosted solutions.
- A network infrastructure optimized for the cloud is required to provide the necessary foundation to deliver these technologies.
PEaaS wraps these principles of patient engagement, clinical collaboration and security into a single view of the patient as a customer whose loyalty must be secured at every point of contact in their journey.
Exceptional customer experience drives customer loyalty – including patient loyalty
B2C industry leaders have benefited for years from CCaaS/UCaaS-driven improvements to the customer experience and customer retention. With studies repeatedly showing that acquiring a new customer is many times more costly than retaining an existing customer, CCaaS/UCaaS represents a sound technology investment, removing contributors to poor consumer experience that can drive customers elsewhere.
PEaaS translates those principles to healthcare, treating the patient as a valued customer with every pre- and post-care interaction.
That matters because for patients, searching for a new provider online, including reading patient reviews, takes just minutes. By improving the patient’s ability to communicate with a healthcare provider, and to have information throughout the organization readily available when they do, PEaaS can go a long way in keeping patients from searching elsewhere in the first place.
