Healthcare UX and CX: Getting Beyond The Jargon And Providing Engaging Experiences

Key Takeaways:

1. CX is strategic, and involves all actions that a person has with your healthcare product, and can be used to look at the entire customer journey. Examples of healthcare CX include continuation of care, transparency, personalized treatment plans, etc.
2. Healthcare UX deals with users interacting with your product or service and the experience they have from that interaction.
3. The key to success in implementing data to your healthcare UX design is to use as many data points and sources as you can. With this data, you will be well on the way to creating the perfect healthcare product.
4. Customer profiling helps to create a portrait of patients to put their experience at the forefront of decision making.
5. While UX decisions should be heavily data-driven and customer profiling should be a key factor in any of your organization’s CX strategy, it is clear that they are not mutually exclusive.

Have you ever wondered how you could take customer experience for your healthcare products to the next level? Do you know the difference between UX and CX? This article will explore how data analysis and customer profiling will make vast improvements to a healthcare organization.

Bridging the gap between healthcare UX and CX

The terms UX and CX are often used interchangeably (and incorrectly), even by experienced industry professionals. However, while there is a lot of overlap, they do mean quite different things.

Healthcare UX deals with users interacting with your product or service and the experience they have from that interaction. Your product or service could range from healthcare website, mHealth app, or EHR software. UX can be measured by metrics such as success rates, error rates, and patient feedback. Here’s what you can ask yourself while designing healthcare UX, “How to make the experience of interacting with a product as pleasant, smooth, and intuitive as possible?”

Customer experience or CX is more strategic, involving all actions that a person has with your healthcare product, and can be used to look at the entire customer journey. Some examples of healthcare CX include continuation of care, transparency, personalized treatment plans, etc. You can offer exceptional CX solutions such as chatbots, automation, and AI that can help providers to deliver top-class customer experience.

Essentially, UX is part of the CX whole, while CX contains some aspects outside your product or service. It is often assumed that UX is all about data, whilst CX is mainly bettered by customer or patient profiling. This article will explore how, conversely, both data and profiling can be extremely useful to UX and CX.

Why data driven design really works for healthcare UX

There is no one-size-fits-all strategy for every healthcare development company, but here are a few great ways for you to use data to improve healthcare UX for your product:

1. Use multiple sources of data to inform and adapt your design choices: Analytics, A/B tests, social media engagement, customer service logs within your CRM, sales data, surveys, interviews, usability tests, and contextual research. The more sources of data you use and analyze, the more likely you will be to create a seamless healthcare UX that will appease all of your users.
2. Keep track of numbers and wider context: You need both numbers and context to uncover the real story.
3. Make sure your research and reports are sensitive to the nature of human experience: You should use averages carefully and avoid making sweeping generalizations. Each user experience is unique.
4. Tracing data to analyze changes over time, exploring patterns, and investigating problems is the key: Do your surveys show you that your healthcare app performs better at some times rather than others? Perhaps this could be down to increased traffic. Keeping a record of your findings over a period of time can help you iron out any problems
5. Use categories to enable you to make sense of the data you are unearthing: This data should be easy to understand for anyone in your company, from your marketers to your front-end developers.
6. Communication is very important: You need to develop a way to share, discuss, and implement data findings to your development team. Consider involving your team in regular meetings to update and brief them.

The key to success in implementing data to your healthcare UX design is to use as many data points and sources as you can. With this data, you will be well on the way to creating the perfect healthcare mobile app, website or product. (Arkenea, a mobile app development company, can take the stress out of this process, and help you create a UX that works in the mobile ecosystem, with very clearly defined success metrics and parameters).

Simplicity is the key

credit: little sparrow tea

One question that you should definitely ask yourself before implementing any major changes into your healthcare UX design – “is it really necessary?” If you are considering adding something to your healthcare application’s design then you should really think about whether it would actually benefit the user’s experience. (And whether it will actually drive conversions). You don’t want to add too many features and make the app confusing and complicated for users.

For instance, Little Sparrow Tea is an attractive online store created by Shopify, specializing in loose leaf tea. However, their product plays victim to too many call-to-action. Their ‘add to cart’ button is competing with the social sharing buttons thanks to identical design choices – it is best to avoid any distracting secondary calls-to-action at such a crucial point of the buyer’s journey. It is best practice to include secondary call-to-action on a post-purchase thank you page.

How customer profiling will fine-tune CX in healthcare

From demographics to treatment and lifestyles, the crux of CX in healthcare is about understanding patients through all interactions they have with your application or website. Customer profiling helps to create a portrait of patients to put their experience at the forefront of decision making.

Here are the main elements of customer profiling:

1. Starting with your data, you should consolidate and add KPIs to measure patient retention, experience, and healthcare product monetization (like patient feedback, app downloads, website visits, click-through-rate, etc.).
2. Backup your data with third-party research of your competitors. This will ensure that your data is thorough.
3. Segmentation is very important. Split patients into groups to target and create different promotional strategies. Implement your cross-channel strategy for selected patient segments.
4. Create a rich picture of both online and offline customers, and your competitor’s customers, so that you can target them and ensure that your brand communications are on point and relevant.
5. Measure the effectiveness of your campaigns over time within each customer group. Keep a track of changes in industry trends to stay in the loop of where your best customers are and how they interact with you.
6. Listen to your customers. Chances are that by paying attention to their desires and medical needs, you will be inspired to find ways that your CX solutions can be tweaked to meet their demands.

How healthtech companies are redefining customer experience

credit: mint

1. Embracing new types of customer care: Technologies such as remote patient services and telemedicine is paving way for video and message-based consultations, along with chatbots that offer services 24/7. These technologies are likely to disrupt the age old ways of reaching out to patients in need.
2. Reducing operational costs: With new age technology like remote care services, providers can save cost on healthcare resources by preventing readmissions, thus increasing ROI. Automation in CX solutions can significantly reduce the need for admins to book appointments and manage payments. Thereby, reducing costs for healthcare organizations.
3. Streamlining efficiency with automation: Incorporation of chatbots and self-service tools in CX solutions can enhance efficiency for healthcare organizations. Chatbots are capable of answering small patient queries. Automation tools are good at booking appointments and sending reminders to curb missed check-ups. Bots can perform repetitive tasks, aid with the documentation process, and store healthcare data securely.

Data and customer profiling are not mutually exclusive

It is a common misconception that data should be limited to UX developments whilst customer profiling is a CX strategy. However, both data and profiling are extremely useful to both UX and CX.

Data feeds into all customer profiling. If your data is showing negativity, then your profiling is targeting the wrong audience and you need to go back to the drawing board.

Similarly, profiling can be extremely useful for UX. Using personas is great for your healthcare UX design strategy – it is important to design your healthcare website or app with a particular user in mind. The entirety of your design strategy should be tailored to deliver a positive user experience for that user.

While UX decisions should be heavily data-driven and customer profiling should be a key factor in any of your organization’s CX strategy, it is clear that they are not mutually exclusive. Data (compilation and analysis) and profiling are two methods that can be interchangeably used to the benefit of any brand wishing to improve their customers’ experiences as a whole.

Data and profiling are also integral to making important decisions with your content marketing strategy.

If you’re looking for healthcare CX and UX development then connect with Arkenea, a leading healthcare software development company in the USA. Hop on to a consultation call with us to know more.