As a healthcare consumer, have you ever felt like just a number working to be acknowledged, recognized, and validated? Have you ever felt like you’re in “run around†mode trying to navigate a complex healthcare system on your own – only to face closed doors or rabbit holes constantly? You are not alone.
The healthcare industry generates approximately 30% of the world’s data volumeOpens a new window . An important segment of that data is based on recorded customer interactions. These interactions contain key unfiltered truths about what it’s like to be a healthcare consumer. But where does this conversational data come from, and what makes it valuable?
There are numerous points of contact between healthcare companies and consumers. Think customer service, billing, scheduling, prior authorizations, nurse triage, and patient support helplines. Organizations are already storing these calls, texts, chats, and emails, but over 80%Opens a new window of conversational data remains unused because of limited resources and time required for a more comprehensive sampling. This data is siloed, and organizations aren’t stitching it together to tell the true story of customer journey mishaps. This is where speech analytics comes in.
Speech analytics, which uses artificial intelligence to gather data, provides a transformative opportunity for organizations to hear all customer voices and gain a macro understanding of the customer experience. With this bird’s eye view, organizations are empowered to take the appropriate steps to improve the customer journey.
Listening to Customers at Scale
Today, surveys are the primary way organizations listen to the voice of the customer. More than 90%Opens a new window of customer experience (CX) professionals use survey-based metrics to measure CX performance. Yet only 15% of leaders feel satisfied with this metric.
Surveys fail to reach expectations because they don’t represent the customer population. Low response rates, reactive feedback, and minimal context lead to a skewed view of the customer experience. On the other hand, AI, machine learning, and other voice technologies offer new opportunities to develop a comprehensive view of the customer journey and measure CX performance.
By using speech analytics to listen at scale, companies can leverage conversational data they’ve been storing and ignoring. Speech analytics highlights words and phrases most used by customers during calls to identify themes and trends such as billing, benefits or digital accessibility.
Customer thoughts, feelings, and perceptions gathered through unsolicited conversations yield rich insights. This data reveals CX themes and trends that lead to strategic opportunities. These conversations are even more valuable than survey responses because they are:
- Authentic and in the moment.
- Inclusive and representative.
- Emotional and sometimes positive.
This unsolicited feedback helps organizations better uncover friction in the customer experience.
Understanding Friction in the Customer Journey
Over 90%Opens a new window of health systems listed “a better patient experience†as the top desired outcome of their digital transformation. But the reality is that a quarter of all healthcare customers struggle each day along their customer journey. The industry presumes customers are educated about the business of healthcare. They’re not. Top customer frustrations, which often lead customers to make multiple — often fruitless — phone calls, include understanding:
- How deductibles work.
- Tiers definitions.
- Policy language and wording.
- Benefits explanations.
- Billing and payment status.
- Eligibility for and availability of programs designed to provide additional support or financial aid.
Healthcare organizations must understand customers’ raw, unsolicited frustrations to guide meaningful change successfully. Speech analytics tools are critical for helping to identify customer pain points and ongoing confusion. Once the data is gathered and analyzed organizations can dig deeper to identify and fix the root causes of customers’ frustrations.
Customers who can not navigate their experience are more likely to quit trying — or switch providers. Organizations failing to provide smooth customer experiences see:
- Strong indicators of customer turnover.
- Low customer satisfaction.
- Gaps in patient care.
- Patient confusion on prescriptions, treatments, or status updates.
- Insufficient customer knowledge and understanding of medical and insurance teams.
Understanding customers’ raw, unsolicited frustrations in context is critical to prompt meaningful change and a frictionless experience.
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Facilitating Impactful Change
Delivering a genuinely patient-centered, goal-oriented approach requires more than data alone. Specific speech analytics tools like transcription or word clouds may show that a customer used the words “frustrated†or “confused†during a call — feedback that’s helpful but not actionable. Of more value? Uncovering the source of frustration or confusion.
Up to 90% of dataOpens a new window is unstructured, highlighting the need for a solution like speech analytics software. The technology surfaces the most prevalent themes and curates samples of interactions containing the most critical context. Transformational opportunities emerge when a company shifts attention from merely viewing keywords to listening to its literal customers’ voices.
For example, a company may seek listening insights after discovering an increase in calls lasting longer than 45 minutes. Speech analytics software can help identify topics and themes during long calls. This analysis can uncover opportunities to reduce call length and allow active monitoring to better access trends over time and agent performance.
Substantive changes are difficult to make all at once. When strategizing an effective approach to implementing voice technology, an organization must determine where listening insights will have the best impact. Then, prioritize the following steps:
- Visualize the patient journey from the patient’s perspective. Identify critical moments that typically cause confusion for the patient and map the ideal experience.
- Use speech analytics while listening to recorded patient conversations. Start small by listening to a handful of interactions. Identify the themes to pinpoint where customers struggle with comprehension.
- Re-evaluate processes and identify areas of change. Uncover pain points within current systems to adjust and improve customer experience. Process improvements might include new training for employees or educational resources for customers.
- Recognize CX teams for their positive impact. Highlight their accomplishments by playing an exemplary conversation with a customer.
Customers expect more personalized experiences in their interactions – especially with healthcare organizations. They expect those interactions to be fruitful and yield answers — not more frustration. Adopting and integrating a speech analytics software solution is instrumental in supporting data-driven decision-making in healthcare and provides a powerful tool for offering a best-in-class customer experience.
Organizations that actively listen can identify where disruptions occur and align their strategies to improve their customer experience. Gaining insights is one thing; turning them into actionable insights is another.
How do you think speech analytics can help identify disruptions in the customer journey? Share with us on  LinkedInOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , or FacebookOpens a new window . We’d love to know!
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