As more healthcare organizations prioritize and embrace a customer-centered care model, they’ve recognized the critical need to listen to — and really hear — their healthcare customers. Improving the quality of care requires accurate measurement and analysis of patient experiences. But while most organizations rely on Net Promoter Scores (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction Scores (CSAT), these patient surveys miss valuable customer information and insights.
Healthcare providers have turned to conversational intelligence (CI) to gain a more comprehensive understanding of customer experience (CX). These tools make it easier to collect and analyze vast sums of data. In an industry where delivering positive CX is vital, the best insights on meeting customer expectations come from the customers themselves in the form of conversations, not patient surveys. And the best way to obtain, analyze and gain insights from conversations? Conversational intelligence.
Benefits — and Drawbacks — of Patient Surveys
Patient surveys are widely utilized to give organizations feedback about their services and the challenges customers face in obtaining care. This feedback helps healthcare leaders measure the quality of care by comparing performance against benchmarks and implementing changes to provide better CX.
Traditionally, survey metrics helped organizations to attract and retain new patients and maintain or enhance their reputation. Understanding CX and improving the quality of care leads to better health outcomes — the ultimate goal of healthcare organizations.
For many years, healthcare organizations have relied on patient surveys to measure CX, identify perceptions about CX and monitor evolving changes in customer sentiment. These tools offer feedback to guide leadership’s strategic decision-making. But times are changing — and while using NPS and CSAT surveys once was a best practice for collecting input and insights, relying only on survey data is no longer enough.
Survey scores weren’t designed to provide detailed insights — just overall, short-term satisfaction insight.
Because they offer snapshots of a moment in time — a particular experience or aspect of care, for example — the scores can’t capture a customer’s entire experience. And they’re unable to provide context or explain the reasons behind a customer’s ratings, which limits an organization’s ability to uncover and address underlying issues. In fact, Gartner predicts over three-quarters of organizations will abandon NPS programs by 2025.
If these survey programs are on their way out, what’s next?
Conversational intelligence: More context, deeper insights
Conversational intelligence leverages machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze customer feedback, conversations and similar unstructured data to gather meaningful insights about CX. Compared to NPS and CSAT, conversational intelligence can capture unsolicited, bi-directional data and surface common themes patients identify as issues, including long wait times, the Eddy Effect, communication challenges and billing concerns.
By analyzing qualitative and quantitative data, this technology gives healthcare organizations a granular, holistic understanding of CX, which:
- Provides deeper contextual insights. Instead of relying on a limited set of questions, CI technology analyzes actual customer conversations to provide insights into specific customer pain points, needs, preferences and drivers of customer behavior.
- Offers timely feedback by enabling organizations to quickly identify and address customer issues as they arise and uncover opportunities to improve agent training.
- Captures the voice of the customer to tell the customer’s story — via testimonials and unsolicited, freely shared feedback. Uncovering actionable insights beyond a single metric or score enables healthcare leaders to understand the nuanced emotions behind patient feedback and make data-driven decisions.
- Leverages AI and ML to access 100% of customer conversations — often generated in the thousands daily — to capture a complete picture of the entire CX continuum.
Previously, healthcare organizations lacked the best technology to effectively gather, process and analyze this data’s voluminous magnitude or unstructured nature. But AI-driven CI has made it possible for today’s providers to strategize and take action to understand and resolve customer concerns and identify training areas for call center agents.
The market isn’t slowing, either. Deloitte found nearly 90% of healthcare providers plan to invest in AI-powered solutions to improve patient engagement and experience. And by 2025, the conversational AI market will be worth nearly $14 billion. The driving force behind this meteoric growth? Increased demand for AI-powered customer support services like conversational intelligence, omnichannel deployment opportunities and decreasing chatbot development costs.
Will NPS and CSAT surveys stay relevant? For now. But their limitations prevent them from keeping pace with other technologies like CI, which are better equipped to capture subtle details healthcare providers seek to improve patient-centered care. With its ability to provide in-depth insights into patient experiences, CI is already transforming how healthcare organizations measure and analyze CX, empowering data-driven decisions that improve customer satisfaction.
About Leslie Pagel
Leslie Pagel is the Chief Evangelist of Authenticx – a conversation analytics company dedicated to improving the way healthcare companies engage with patients. In this role, she creates awareness, across the healthcare industry, of more efficient and effective ways for healthcare organizations to deliver on their customer objectives. With over two decades of working with customer experience (CX) teams, Leslie helps clients actualize the voice of the patient to show how these voices prompt meaningful action.
