What Patient Services Can Learn from Leaders in CX
Think of some of the most successful companies of the last decade — Amazon, Apple, Warby Parker, Sephora, Target — and you’ll quickly realize they all have one thing in common: an exceptional customer experience (CX). But the emphasis on CX hasn’t been limited to retail. In fact, the heightened focus on CX can be felt across multiple industries, including health and wellness, where GoodRx, Tend, and CityMD are excellent examples. Not surprisingly, given an increasingly crowded drug market, pharma has followed suit.
So why, you may be asking yourself, should patient services be any different? Or for that matter, can it afford to be?
As patients become increasingly involved in the decisions that impact their care, the need for patient services programs to up their game is critical. Good CX in healthcare is what wins now. It’s no longer enough to simply get patients on treatment. To help people be successful on treatment, you need to build a great experience around it.
While HCPs are key to prescribing, patients are the ones who ultimately decide to start and stay on therapy. The problem is, as many as 50% of prescriptions written are never filled, and an equal percentage of patients stop taking their medication within the first year.1 The good news is that patient services can be a big part of the solution. In fact, 67% of adult US patients indicate that medication support impacts their treatment decisions.
So, what lessons can patient services draw from the leaders in CX and apply to their own offerings? Here are three that our Patient Services Experience (PSX) team has helped our clients put into practice:
1) Provide a consistent, personalized experience across all touchpoints
Everyone wants to be patient-centric. But the most successful patient services programs recognize that every patient is truly unique. It’s not enough to take a macro view. You need to take a micro approach.
That means meeting patients where they are with timely, relevant, personalized engagement. One way this is accomplished is with customized, data-driven communications delivered at specific touchpoints, which create a 1:1 relationship with the program.
Across a breadth of preferred channels, patients are met with an engaging, intuitive, integrated experience. From peer stories to lifestyle education to adherence triggers, content can be tailored to each patient’s unique journey and delivered accordingly.
2) Define your brand vision. And stick to it.
Creating an insight-driven, differentiating identity for a brand should be a given. Being consistent with how you express that identity, though, is what will differentiate you. By crystallizing what the program embodies with a core idea and pulling that through, you can create an ownable, relevant, cohesive brand. And in that way, the brand becomes synonymous with the experience.
A brand that defines itself as inclusive and inviting, for example, can express that in multiple ways — from the program name to the use of brand colors to the representation of patients across materials. When the brand identity reflects different aspects of patient identity, it makes patients feel seen and heard. And it invites them to engage more deeply, helping them become better advocates for their health.
3) Find a void and fill it.
By knowing what exists in the community and recognizing where there are unmet patient needs, patient services can build upon a foundation of core offerings with added-value and condition-specific resources.
For specific patient populations living with rare conditions, for example, we created an evergreen collection of stories and tips from patients and caregivers designed to support them through different life transitions — information that hadn’t been readily available. The fact that it’s delivered in a peer-to-peer format makes it even more resonant.
Key to the success of all these efforts is an understanding of the importance of listening to your audience. Every interaction is important, because it elicits some sort of emotion, which in turn connects to the brand. Seeking feedback from patients and caregivers, in both real time and in follow-ups, should be the focal point of everything brands do.
Clearly, there is a lot at stake. At Patients & Purpose, we’ve seen firsthand how elevating a patient services program through CX can drive purposeful change and result in tangible benefits for all. From addressing access issues to anticipating lapses in adherence to providing personalized engagement, patient services is well positioned to have a significant impact on treatment success and health outcomes.
To find out how our PSX team can help your brand elevate your patient services program, please reach out to our President, Eliot Tyler.
You can also see some of the work our PSX team has done for our clients here:
