Consumer experience is key, and it decides how people will perceive your business.
Healthcare is one sector where consumer experience is of utmost importance. Healthcare staff develop a close relationship with the patient and provide much-needed care.
Providing them with special care is what every patient looks after, which results in ‘BETTER PATIENT EXPERIENCE’.
And hospitals with better patient experience sustain in the long run, and it makes it easier to make key decisions to improve the overall process.
Are you in the healthcare business and struggle to know the strengths and weaknesses of your hospital? The right way to do this is by using a net promoter score in your survey.
In this article, we will cover:
- What is NPS?
- Why Is Measuring Patient Loyalty Important In Health Care, And How Can NPS Help?
- What Is A Good NPS Score?
- Ways To Use NPS Effectively In Health Care
What Is NPS?
NPS is a metric for organizations to measure the customer experience and loyalty of the users.
The score ranges between -100 to +100. In the healthcare business, you can ask the patient a simple question in your survey: ‘How likely are you to recommend our hospital to others?’ The patient can rank the hospital on a scale of 0 to 10.
0: being extremely unlikely and 10: being extremely likely.
NPS is popular in the healthcare sector and resulted in developing a sense of sharing the reviews by the patients and influencing their friends/family.
Why Is Measuring Patient Loyalty Necessary in The HealthCare Industry, And How Can NPS Help?
Healthcare is the combination of health and care. But it is how much you emphasize the ‘care’ aspect. You can be reliable in the healthcare sector only when you create a positive brand image.
Reason being: it helps to measure patient loyalty via customer satisfaction metrics like
NPS. NPS helps categorize the patients into promoters, passives, and detractors via obtaining feedback.
It will provide you with the data by which you can make positive changes to your process. NPS calculation allows you to convert detractors to promoters.
What Is A Good NPS Score?
NPS score gives you an insight into your customers. But do you know the ideal NPS score?
Here is a quick overview of NPS scores:
- NPS score below 0 is considered poor.
- NPS score above 0-50 is good.
- An NPS score above 50 is great.
- An NPS score above 70 is excellent.
If your NPS score is equal to or more than the healthcare industry average, it shows that you have loyal customers and they are willing to refer too.
And a negative NPS score means customers will not refer to new customers, which can harm the brand image.
So, having a tab on your NPS score is necessary to stay ahead of the competition and better yourself from the competition. Do constant monitoring of the NPS score to know whether it is good or not.
Ways To Use NPS Effectively In Healthcare Industry
- Grow your sample sizes.
The underlying benefit of NPS is you can share the questionnaires with patients to gather feedback.
Sharing the survey with the sample size is ideal to know the ‘real’ feedback. In the healthcare industry, you need to target all your patients and collect scores at scale.
Including an NPS question in your survey allows a better understanding of your customer base. Another benefit of using NPS is that it is quick to share feedback.
- The questionnaire must be simple.
The questionnaire plays a role in calculating NPS. Keeping it simple is necessary.
Otherwise, the patients can feel distracted and might not answer, leaving you with no feedback at all.
Try keeping the questions like:
- “How likely are you to recommend our hospital to your friends/family?”
- “On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend our hospital to a friend or colleague?”
The above questions serve the purpose and are easy to respond to.
- Align your organization towards improving patient experience.
It is vital in the healthcare industry to keep every employee on the same page for NPS scoring.
And for running a seamless patient experience, all the staff needs to understand the benefit of the NPS metric. When it gets implemented, it will automatically improve the whole process.
If your purpose is to improve the patient’s care and value their feedback. You can go ahead with the survey.
And if you aim to improve the NPS score of your hospital, then you need to rethink the plan.
When every employee knows the importance of NPS surveys, they can surely let the patients understand how important/vital NPS is for improving the hospital’s services.
- Improve results by integrating the patient data.
The data fetched from patients is what matters. You can deliver a better net promoter score and provide the care and treatment.
The purpose of this data gets diminished if not integrated well. It means fragmented data is of no use and is of little help to provide any insights for the healthcare providers.
They won’t judge and make any improvements based on incomplete data. Therefore, deploying a data integration solution to gather this data for further analysis.
- Close the loop with the feedback.
When the survey gets completed, the NPS question gets answered.
Now, it’s time to work upon both the good and bad feedback. Take a corrective action that is in a match with the information gathered.
Closing the feedback loop plays a role in the healthcare industry. It’s one of the industries where word of mouth plays a role. When the patient has experienced any negative experience during the treatment.
It gets measured via the NPS metric, and the hospital works on it to improve the patient experience.
The patient with negative feedback will convert his experience into a positive one.
The patient has converted from a detractor into a passive.
- Promote the survey.
Having a survey is one thing, but reaching out to the customer base is different.
For this, the hospital needs to work on its distribution channels. They need to share the survey with patients as quickly as possible after the treatment is done.
The process of giving feedback to the patient needs to be easy and accessible because that’s the whole point. Here are some of the channels to share the survey:
- Via email.
- Kiosk mode.
- SMSes.
- Social media.
Summing It Up
Implementing a net promoter score is more than necessary in the healthcare industry. And in the long run, it improves patient loyalty and your brand image. Try the above tips & did they leave an impact on your NPS journey!!
Author: Kaumudi Tiwari
Bio: Experienced Digital Marketer and Strategist, been in the IT Industry for the last 5+ Years. Associated with the Zonka Feedback. Passionate about writing customer experience, customer satisfaction, customer feedback, and net promoter score.
Follow Techrado for more!
