Customer Effort Scores for Healthcare?

Max Ball    |    September 13, 2012

Having had two weeks of political conventions wash over me and listening to so much about the fate of Medicare, the economy, our debt and our healthcare, it was interesting to read Richard Alonzo-Zaldiver’s online article, “US Health Care System Wastes $750B a Year.”

I have worked in the contact center space most of my adult life and have spent much of my time at parties apologizing for the shoddy way so many companies treat their customers. But after reading Alonzo-Zaldiver’s article, I now feel much better about our industry.

Just this morning my wife told me about her recent doctor’s visit that generated two separate co-pay bills—one for a procedure done in the doctor’s office and the other for the “consultation” that she apparently had with the doctor prior to the procedure which seemed more like a quick chat at the time. Three phone calls in and she is no closer to a solution.

So much of what we are learning about customer experience and good customer service is being missed in spades in the healthcare world. For example, we know that customers get angry when they have to repeat information to an agent that they have already entered into an IVR. And the company is paying the agent for wasted time.

The Customer Executive Board has done a good job of documenting the costs of making things hard for customers through their creation and publication of the concept of a “Customer Effort Score.” There are a handful of leading companies such as Apple or Zappos who have embraced the customer experience as a way to differentiate. While many companies may still greet you with, “Listen carefully as our menu may have changed,” most of the companies we talk to at Genesys aspire to efficient service for their customers. The next great frontier in customer experience is a complete “customer conversation” where the company understands what has happened on the web or in a mobile application and can change the customer’s experience based on knowledge from earlier interactions. Simple examples including knowing that a caller had just tried to fill out a loan application online, or has started booking a flight on a mobile application. Helping customers solve these basic tasks is of great value to enterprises – increasing sales, improving cross-sell and upsell and making life easier for customers.

Now let’s apply these concepts to the $750 Billion in annual waste in the healthcare system. How about easy access to a patient’s history and making it so doctors can quickly and easily consult with one another? Imagine your healthcare provider and doctor knowing you are pregnant when you call and tailoring your interaction around that fact. Imagine if they proactively reached out to you to suggest pre-natal care or to schedule the next check up.

I know the issues in healthcare are deeply structural, and many of the frustrations we see are endemic to the structure of an entire industry. But if insurance companies and providers simply looked at the world through a lens of the “Customer Effort Score” and started viewing interactions with patients as a cross channel conversation, they could quickly find a few small changes that could make things easier for patients AND save them money. We might be able to put a small but practical dent in this significant problem. To learn more about cross channel conversations follow this link for a Genesys whitepaper.

http://www.genesyslab.com/blogs/authors/max-ball/2012/customer-effort-scores-for-healthcare.aspx