Why Customer Communications Management is Essential for Modern Healthcare Organizations
Today’s patients expect more from their healthcare providers than ever before. Accustomed to the seamless and personal customer interactions they have with brands like Amazon and Uber, they now expect the same level of service when they access healthcare. Too often, these expectations are not met, resulting in a poor patient experience.
Great patient communications can go a long way to addressing this expectation gap. Patients prefer that important healthcare communications, like bills, arrive through their channel of choice, in a user friendly and accessible format. By meeting this need, healthcare organizations can maintain or improve their brand image, develop meaningful patient relationships, and even convert one-time patients into loyal, long-term supporters and advocates.
For all these reasons, it just makes sense for patient communications to be the cornerstone of any modern patient experience strategy. But to make this plan a working reality, healthcare organizations must identify current gaps in their communication strategy and understand how patients prefer to communicate with their organization. With that understanding in place, it becomes clear as to why customer communications management in healthcare is key.
Learn how Doxim’s Customer Communications Management platform will help you meet the expectations of today’s patients. SPEAK TO A DOXIM CUSTOMER COMMUNICATIONS MANAGEMENT EXPERT TODAY
Different Customers, Different Needs, Different Communications
There’s really no such thing as a typical patient. Patients belong to a variety of different demographics, and their communication needs and preferences vary dramatically as well.
For instance, younger and more tech savvy individuals may prefer receiving billing reminders or making payments through text message or other online communication channels. This massively online demographic of customers also values interactivity, like digital communications with personalized explainer videos built right in. They are also more likely to reach out to your patient service associates via social media if your communications are inaccurate, time consuming, or difficult to understand.
Older and more traditional patients may still prefer paper bills. These patients are likely to reach out to customer service by phone if they are confused by the content of their bills and other communications. They can benefit from statement design that leverages customer data effectively to make their financial obligations and other key information easy to understand. Additionally, some older healthcare patients may have age-related limited vision, and benefit from a statement that uses larger font and high contrast.
Other patients with disabilities may not be able to access paper bills and instead, require accessible digital bills that can be reviewed through a screen reader. Providing accessible communications to these patients is not only a moral imperative, but also a regulatory requirement in many regions.
In a nutshell – to maintain relationships in the long term, your healthcare organization must be able to provide all types of customer communication, across multiple channels and formats, to meet the varied needs of your patients. And the only way to do that, without a massive operational burden, is to leverage an omnichannel customer communications management solution.
5 Key Benefits of Customer Communications in Healthcare
A Customer Communication Management solution allows healthcare organizations like yours to centralize the creation and distribution of many forms of customer communication, across all the channels that make up the modern patient experience.
A modern solution integrates with your customer relationship management, or CRM, solution, as well as your other back-office solutions, so documents can be populated with relevant data for informative, personalized communication. It allows you to compose, personalize and deliver communications for different patients through channels both digital and physical, and track them through one central platform.
Decreasing time to pay for medical billings is a critical success factor of performance and growth, especially in an environment of increased costs and narrow margins. For this reason, modern customer communication solutions designed with healthcare in mind will also incorporate payment solutions, so your patients can meet their financial obligations at the push of a button.
Here are five key ways in which a customer communication management solution can benefit your healthcare organization:
1) Integrated omnichannel communications – across all industries, customers expect to receive their communications through their channel of choice. They expect healthcare organizations to respect these preferences as well. Given the sheer number of communications you must provide to patients, and the recent and ongoing proliferation of communication channels, a communication management system quickly becomes essential to keep customer communications synchronized.
2) Accessibility compliance – Persons with disabilities expect their critical healthcare communications to be available in a format they can access. But meeting accessibility requirements can be overwhelming, as your organization is already stretched to meet day-to-day business requirements. Working with an experienced partner can help you meet the needs of the large and growing population of patients with disabilities.
3) Enhanced patient experience – the healthcare industry is seeking innovative ways to enhance the patient experience and build stronger patient relationships. As the world moves online, providing patients with digital options to review their communications and pay their bills is a simple way to build engagement and trust. The post-pandemic digital shift also means that when patients are considering whether to move providers, digital capabilities will be one of the criteria that they use to assess their options. By adopting a customer communication management platform, your healthcare organization can stay ahead of the curve and retain patients.
4) Improved security and regulatory compliance – healthcare data is, by its very nature, ultra-sensitive. Customer Communication Management solutions built for this industry are created with privacy and confidentiality in mind, and communication-related data is housed in data centers with comprehensive security protocols in place. Home-grown communication solutions may not offer this level of safeguard.
5) Simplified payments – with the industry shift towards patient responsibility for payments comes a new challenge. Your patients need to clearly understand their financial obligations, and they require access to easy ways to pay their bills. A customer communication management solution with integrated, multi-channel communication and payment options can help reduce your revenue cycle time, while increasing patient convenience. That’s a win-win for your organization and your patients!
Customer Communication Management, for a Modern Patient Experience
Patients develop loyalty to healthcare organizations when they feel their needs are met. By providing them with a customer communication management platform that makes it faster and easier to consume important information, you show them that you value their time, and their channel preferences. Making sure that the communications they receive are synchronized across channels, timely, and personalized also helps to build engagement and trust. And by analyzing how patients interact with their communications, and using that data to inform communications development going forward, your team can get smarter about patient communication and improve the patient experience in ways you’ve never imagined.
With the right technology partner, you can make your patient communications available across channels securely and get started on building happier patient relationships as soon as possible.
Industry-Proven Customer Communication Management and Payment Solutions from Doxim
Doxim’s Customer Communications Management Platform is an integrated SaaS solution that empowers healthcare organizations to create and deliver patient-critical documents and omnichannel personalized communications, engaging patients throughout their healthcare journey.
With over 20 years of serving the healthcare industry, Doxim has developed and implemented innovative communication solutions that enable healthcare organizations to communicate across generation and improve patient experience – all while adhering to strict regulations and privacy and security requirements.
