Every healthcare organization has a team of leaders responsible for their respective process and the execution of their business strategy. These leaders also understand the importance of patient engagement and how each touch point is essential to the relationship with their patient’s overall experience.
Equally important is brand authenticity as part of the measurable execution of your business strategy, as perceived by your patient audience. Applied specifically to healthcare, brand authenticity is defined as:
“the extent to which patients perceive a healthcare brand to be motivated by compassion and caring, and its ability to be consistent, honest and faithful to itself in its messaging.”
Branding can be very specific, or intentionally broad, based on the spectrum of care and services available. But healthcare branding should consistently inspire hope, change (for the better), compassion and caring that can be distilled down to every individual patient experience. As an example, can you identify the healthcare brand by its slogan listed here?
1. Health Care Made Easier
2. Custom Care & Coverage Just for You
3. Making Healthy Personal
4. Hello Humankindness
5. Seamless Care that Revolves Around You
6. Every Life Deserves World Class Care
As objective consumers, how would we be able to effectively measure the patient perception of these brands and that the delivery of services is faithful to its messaging? Or more specifically… do you believe them?
What about Customer Service?
Care is a broad word with many definitions, but at its essence it is a state of mind or concern that solicits serious attention. Apply this definition to health care to describe the broader industry or methodology, and healthcare as the delivery of those services.
The essence of care is how we treat people. Human connections with staff and providers are both inevitable and invaluable as they can either build loyal relationships with your brand, or break them. Technology and automation should provide tools that can deliver value to the patient at their convenience, and also save time and costs to the provider. All together, these connections, tactics and tools should be a direct reflection of how we treat people –– and how we treat people can be defined as customer service.
If this is true, then it is equally remarkable that most healthcare brands don’t focus enough on customer service and the little things that make each patient engagement worthwhile, and the overall patient experience memorable.
Sometimes, something so obvious can be easily overlooked. And maybe healthcare should focus more on customer service, and as a result, their brand authenticity would be consistent with their messaging and the delivery of world class care would take care of itself.
Introspective
Is there one inspirational healthcare brand that stands out as the leader in customer service?
When was the last time you had a great customer service experience with a healthcare provider, and you didn’t appreciate all the little things they did well to make that experience happen?
Brand Key: 1. Banner Health, 2. Kaiser Permanente, 3. HonorHealth, 4. Dignity Health, 5. Mayo Clinic, 6. Cleveland Clinic