Empathy is crucial for delivering great customer experience (CX) in any industry, but especially healthcare, where, after all, consumers are unlikely to be in a chipper and cheerful frame of mind, when they contact an organization – it’s typically the opposite.
What’s more, while inadequate CX might cost any business income, reputation points, and customers, health systems also risk increased staffing issues and decreased reimbursement rates, which will further negatively impact their ability to help patients.
Many of us see empathy as something primarily reserved for face-to-face—or at least human-to-human—interactions. But in an age where digital and omnichannel connection options are quickly becoming default expectations, that can be a mistake.
At its core, empathy is understanding how people feel, and—through CX—that can begin even before a patient ever contacts a healthcare provider. Let’s explore a few ways empathy can and should be applied, for extraordinary healthcare CX:
- Empathizing through the customer journey. Understanding how consumers interact with our organization lets us make the process as simple and seamless as possible for them. For example, if we know—and, via customer surveys, we do—that:
- 88% of healthcare appointments are still made via phone,
- those phone calls take an average of eight minutes, and
- 50% of those calls are for routine services,
then it becomes obvious that a phone system is vital for letting patients connect with healthcare providers, and that an automated phone system is ideal for helping more people get what they need, more quickly, efficiently, and painlessly.
- Empathizing with patients’ challenges. Having just named automation as a great solution, it must be said that clunky, antiquated phone systems—where you have to decipher multiple options across multiple menus, before you can hope to get what you want, or at least speak to a human—are a common source of consumer frustration.
It’s likewise worth noting that many healthcare customers tend to be older, and possibly not very tech-savvy, while disadvantaged patients may have less education and/or access to digital channels. So, when implementing an IVR (Interactive Voice Response) or IVA (Intelligent Virtual Assistant), it must be designed with empathy – for instance, making sure that instructions are free of jargon, easy for anyone to understand and implement.
- Empathizing beyond problem-solving. For complex issues, of course, nothing beats genuine human empathy, from a human CX agent who’s skilled at listening actively, expressing compassion, and validating the customer’s emotions. In fact, although most people make customer calls, looking for a solution to their current difficulty, some genuinely just want to be heard and understood, and it takes a human to recognize that.
In a great CX setup, agents and automation work in synergy, with automation handling routine tasks, so that humans can focus on more intricate, sensitive issues. Another way both sides work in tandem is in gathering and interpreting feedback, so that customer preferences and concerns can be incorporated in continuous improvement – yet again, leaning on empathy to guide better operations and, of course, customer experience.
