Customer experience has a cardinal role to play in business today. In healthcare, its impact is accentuated manifold. It would not be imprecise to say that no other industry witnesses an intimate bond between the provider and customer than the healthcare industry. After all, patient care is contingent on the quality of services offered. Further, since healthcare units associate with their customers in the most vulnerable times, it is important to provide an experience beyond medical care that addresses concerns of patients in entirety.
In terms of financial gains, the Deloitte’s report has confirmed that healthcare units with high patient-reported experience scores have higher profitability. This report also shows that hospitals with improved experience levels earn more profit than those with lower ratings. This reiterates that quality-driven patient experiences are essential for taking healthcare to new heights.
The Net Promoter Score is a well-known metric that enables organizations measure customer experience and loyalty. A lot of providers use this scale to evaluate and enhance patient experiences. However, because NPS isn’t as widely used in healthcare, using it without any prior knowledge can be counterproductive. For better understanding, we’ve listed some pointers that you can use to leverage NPS for delivering better patient outcomes.
1. Come Straight to the Point with Questionnaire
The questionnaire used to calculate NPS effectively must be simple and straightforward otherwise its relevance can easily get lost or deprioritized. In actuality, asking the question, “how likely are you to recommend the brand or service to others” and listing to the reasons behind the score are enough. The goldmine of information gathered from respondents can be analyzed to gain valuable patient insights. Additionally, a simple straightforward NPS question is easy to respond to. Ergo, the questionnaire used to garner the respondent’s feedback must not be cumbersome and lengthy.
2. Unlock the True Essence of NPS
NPS is an operational metric that measures customer delight and satisfaction. It helps units take quick action, and so it should be used in correlation with a robust process that warrants fast action on patient feedback.
In addition, NPS is the leading indicator of the financial performance of a business. If the score is high, better financial results are likely, and vice versa.
NPS metric, when it comes to healthcare, must be used as a measure of what’s useful and what’s not for the patient. And the feedback can be used to course correct and improve organizational performance.
3. Integrate Patient Data to Improve Results
Data fetched from patients is key to delivering a better Net Promoter Score and ultimately superior care and treatment. However, the utility of this data gets diminished if it isn’t integrated properly. Meaning that a fragmented set of data is of little use to healthcare providers as extracting actionable insights becomes difficult. Hence, healthcare units must deploy a powerful data integration solution to collate this data and make it useful for further analysis.
4. Close the Loop with Your Respondents
Once the questionnaire is answered, it must be analyzed otherwise it may turn futile. This means that once the feedback is collected, data analysts must close the loop on the patient feedback. This involves taking corrective action that resonates with the information gathered. Closing the feedback loop in healthcare is all the more important because this is one of those sectors where word-of-mouth plays an important role. Even if the patient has experienced hiccups during treatment and if the hospital reaches out on time to facilitate service as compensation, the patient would be less upset than before. Honestly, this gesture would convert a detractor into a passive, if not a promoter.
In short, ensuring a short and crisp questionnaire, understanding what NPS is all about, integrating patient data seamlessly, and closing the feedback loop can help healthcare organizations proffer delightful patient experiences and improve patient outcomes. Know how Adeptia’s self-service approach to data integration can help you leverage the Net Promoter Score in healthcare.