Just like in any other business, customer experience is a crucial factor for the success of a Healthcare organization. Since the customers are patients in the healthcare industry, delivering timely and accurate services is much more important in healthcare to save lives or make them better. Great customer service delivery enhances customer/patient satisfaction and experience, thereby improving patient loyalty and contributing to business growth.
However, healthcare providers often face challenges in streamlining their workflows and services due to factors like lack of adequate resources, absence of modern technologies and IT infrastructure, and more, due to which patient experience suffers.
To build a patient-centric healthcare business model and deliver exceptional patient experience, it is essential for healthcare organizations to invest in modern tools and technology platforms.
This blog post throws light on some of the factors that impact patient experience, and how a CSM platform like ServiceNow Customer Service Management (CSM) enables healthcare organizations to overcome challenges and deliver value to patients through customer service transformation.
4 Factors Detrimental to Seamless Customer Service Experience
1. Inefficient Appointment Scheduling Processes
Very often in a healthcare practice, there are more patients and only a handful of doctors available to see the patients, which can make scheduling appointments a major challenge. Long waiting times for appointments can get very stressful for patients. Also, when there is no self-help portal, patients have to spend a lot of time trying to connect to the healthcare practice to modify or cancel their appointments. There are numerous such challenges revolving around scheduling medical appointments that impact the patient experience.
2. Altercations Due to Operational Inefficiencies
There are times when patients have disagreements or arguments with medical receptionists, nurses, physicians, or other staff members and often the cause for such altercations is operational inefficiencies that impact the quality of care delivery. Work overload can stress out the healthcare staff and have an influence on their behavior toward the patients. Such scenarios stand in the way of a positive patient experience, with patients developing strong opinions about the entire institution.
3. Lack of Attention to Patients’ Needs
Patients may sometimes feel that the doctors or nurses aren’t understanding the severity of their symptoms and that they are not being offered the best care. Healthcare providers struggle to provide prompt and most appropriate healthcare services due to the absence of modern healthcare solutions. This lack of attention and personalized service impacts a patient’s trust in the healthcare organization in the long run.
4. Inadequate Consultation Time
When patients do not get enough time with the physician to fully explain their condition and receive the care and attention they deserve, the patient experience suffers. This happens when providers do not have the necessary infrastructure to manage patient appointments properly, predict patient no-shows, or cater to patients through a virtual telehealth platform.
Why is CSM Transformation Inevitable?
Patients expect personalized and focused attention that makes them feel that their health matters the most. For patient satisfaction, healthcare providers must be more mindful, compassionate, and understanding toward their patients – at scale!
This is where modern solutions like ServiceNow CSM play a significant role, streamlining the customer service management processes and enabling providers to be more attentive to patient needs.
ServiceNow CSM for Customer Service Transformation
ServiceNow CSM is an enterprise software application that enables healthcare organizations to deliver exceptional customer service experiences. The workflow-based CSM platform helps in efficient healthcare service management to radically elevate the way patients are attended to. Here is how ServiceNow CSM helps healthcare organizations:
- Delivers a single view of patient data through the ServiceNow platform to ensure better and proactive care delivery
- Enables patients to schedule appointments efficiently with the platform and reduces unnecessary back-and-forth communications.
- Reduces operational costs by replacing disconnected healthcare systems with a single centralized platform.
- Increases patient engagement and satisfaction with self-service portals that can provide automated responses to common queries.
- Eliminates manual efforts involved in repetitive tasks such as validating personal information and so on.
- Assigns complicated patient queries automatically to relevant healthcare professionals and reduces resolution time.
- Enables patients to access their healthcare information and understand their health status better.
Key Takeaway
The customer service transformation strategy of every healthcare business should be designed to focus on improving patient experience, increasing access to care, and providing personalized service. ServiceNow CSM helps organizations modernize processes, simplify customer service workflows, and gain visibility into customer satisfaction. The solution streamlines and automates customer service workflows and processes, tracks customer service performance, and also provides customer service analytics.
KANINI is a ServiceNow Premier Partner, helping healthcare businesses in their customer service transformation journeys with ServiceNow CSM. Click here to know more about improving patient experience with ServiceNow CSM.
Author
Joshua Smith
Joshua is a process improvement thought leader and digital transformation expert at KANINI. Over the past 15 years, his focus has always been on achieving organizational maturity and enhancing business processes through implementing tools and workflows to drive transformation initiatives. With experience in multiple verticals from – manufacturing to healthcare, Joshua brings a practitioner’s perspective when working on business solutions and goals to allow him to advise and guide on industry and process best practices.
