The Human Side Of Healthcare Analytics

By Abhishek Danturti Sharma, Assistant General Manager – Lead Data Scientist, Business Transformation at HGS

Capturing a consumer’s emotional response to a service or sales experience is increasingly vital to their interaction with a brand. The pandemic has made this fact increasingly clear, with both healthcare payer and provider operations accelerating digital delivery of member/patient experience. Emotional analytics and innovation to enhance CX, using digital emotional signaling, are a means for brands to acquire and retain consumers. That is because CX support that merges digital solutions with empathetic analytics can play an essential role to measure the moods, attitudes, and emotions that garner brand preference and loyalty.

A recent study by Tempkin Group showed when individuals have a positive emotional association with a specific brand, they are 8.4 times more likely to trust the company, 7.1 times more likely to purchase more and 6.6 times more likely to forgive a company’s mistake. Although sales figures, surveys, social media posts, and ratings may help inform brands about customer views, they do not provide the finer, granular insights regarding what goes unsaid. And existing conventional measures cannot intercept brand bias since they focus on measuring the probability of specific customer reactions while the customer is already having a biased outlook towards the brand.

As healthcare organizations continue to focus on improved operations and real-time insights that drive customer satisfaction, frontline resources are becoming increasingly dependent on data to improve the customer experience. But driving real time insights is less and less achievable, as current systems are disparate—across technology, locations, and resources—and they do not achieve a unified or real-time interaction insight. Additionally, real-time feedback is increasingly difficult —with the proliferation of channels adding to the siloing of reporting data. As this shift continues, operations are searching for more ways to provide instant impacts to the programs that they manage. Healthcare organizations need real-time tools that provide immediate insights into the condition of their interactions and the program overall.

Today’s analytics solutions solve for three key customer experience truths for healthcare consumers:

• Today’s digital-led customer care must meet the needs of Generation “C”, the “connected” customer demographic that spans generations. These consumers make purchasing decisions based on brand reputation and a more personalized experience. A strong digital toolkit of home-grown assets containing Interaction Analytics; AI-Powered Data Capture; and Intelligent Automation will elevate and customize engagement to earn and retain these buyers.
• Even in the face of all the digital, people still make decisions based on emotion. Consumers form an opinion about a brand even before they have shared any real-life experience with them. Any conversation or dialogue with that brand either counters or reinforces those subconscious thoughts regarding the brand. This bias is based on how the customer feels as he or she is experiencing issue resolution or any other service support.
• Healthcare organizations, now more than ever, require extreme efficiency and speed, reduced costs, improved CSAT, quality and Star ratings.

How do you solve for these truths? Healthcare organizations are understanding the need to step up yesterday’s analytics products with a next-gen approach that builds on what is available today. Analytics partners set themselves apart with domain expertise, custom-fit solutions, tech agnostic solutions that are customizable to client needs, innovation and value maximization to leverage proven methodologies and best practices. With a combination of tools and strategy, experts can bring these experience solutions to meet demand with next-level ROI to engage and retain members while also delivering both essential insights and operational savings.