Adopting customer-patient centricity across your digital platforms can take shape in various forms and it’s essential to achieve in today’s world, but yet many healthcare provider websites are still organization-centric.
Making the shift can be hard on knowing where to begin and the blue-sky approach of keeping the customer-patient individual at the forefront through a highly customized, personalized experience leveraging various technologies can seem very far off on a digital roadmap.
This transition however doesn’t have to be a one-time change. By adopting an iterative process, you can start by taking smaller steps and still see favorable results. Constantly evolving your approach and providing a stronger focus on the customer-patient each time will ensure success.
Implementing the basics through website design and content will ensure you’re starting the journey to mastering the customer-patient centric path. The first step is extensive user experience research to understand your target audience with a clear audience definition and understanding of user intent.
Secondly, with these insights you can now start to formulate how to support the prospect and customer-patient target audiences with the various flows they engage in across your healthcare provider site.
Consider the below in ensuring a positive digital experience.
- Customize your message. Show your audience you understand them with content that speaks to them. Focus on the customer-patient benefits and why prospects should chose you as a healthcare provider.
- Clear calls to action. Support prospects and customers-patients through the acquisition and retention funnels with clear, simple to follow calls to action steps that are prominently featured such as finding a physician, locating a facility, contact or make an appointment, patient portal log in etc.
- Easy to navigate. Structure your site and organize content in a hierarchy that helps the target audience easily find the information they need.
- Be device specific. Leverage your website analytics data in understanding what devices are being used to access your websites. If majority of your traffic is coming from mobile and tablet devices, make sure your website design is responsive to support various mobile devices.
- Be campaign specific. Most likely you’re driving traffic to your website via a number of methods such as marketing campaigns, emails, social media etc., so it’s important you assist these segments in engaging with your site. Ensure they land on highly relevant pages or determine whether you need dedicated, customized marketing landing page(s) before they go deeper into your website.
- Cater to the audience. Have tailored pathways for each of your customer personas so they quickly and easily find the information they need.
- Provide customer support. Make it easy for the target audience to reach you with a combination of live online chat, contact form, and telephone support.
Tackle various clinical sections of your website at a time in a phased approach to make the task more manageable. By reviewing each website section at a time and formulating a plan on the above considerations, this will help you outline the steps involved in making the transition to a customer-patient centric website and an overall delightful digital experience.
Don’t forget to maximize your success by ensuring you continue to measure the digital experience through website analytics. Regular review of website analytics will enable you to find areas for improvement in the digital experience and continue your path to a more customer-centric website.
