Healthcare organizations face an array of challenges regarding customer communication and retention. Customer intelligence can be a game-changer for small and large organizations due to its ability to understand customer needs and preferences.
When it comes to data, more is not necessarily better, and organizations must carefully craft their data analytics strategies to make the most of the available information. Data on patient backgrounds are just as important as information about their current health and experiences inside the hospital or clinic.
Most professionals agree that major decisions can be better made with a full array of customer intelligence information, but even minor, day-to-day judgments can be improved with the right data. Here are seven reasons why organizations should take steps to start using more customer intelligence and data analytics tools.
1. Understanding Customer Profiles
Not all healthcare industry organizations serve the same demographic. Although healthcare providers can reasonably procure an imprecise judgment on the demographics they serve based on the location and services of the practice, factors like family size, occupation, and education level are difficult to predict.
All of a patient’s demographic factors influence how, when, and why they seek out services. A patient who faces financial obstacles to getting care will generally seek preventive care less often than they should, and someone who dropped out of high school will usually know less about health and nutrition than someone who completed an advanced degree.
Understanding customer profiles is the first step in leveraging customer intelligence for broader proactive purposes. Creating better services for patients is impossible without first knowing their needs, attitudes, and obstacles to care, factors often not discussed honestly over the course of an appointment. Data can reveal trends that affect appointments for both healthy and ill patients.
2. Training Staff Better
Customer intelligence analytics can reveal a lot about patient needs and wants, both medically and holistically. Data collected from patient visits can be analyzed for general trends in patient engagement and experiences.
For example, patient data may reveal that physicians do not always prescribe the appropriate follow-up tests or that certain medical conditions are being diagnosed at an unusually high rate. Organizational leadership can look at any unusual trends and remedy common mistakes by providing updated training and reminders for all staff.
3. Creating Better Marketing Campaigns
Customer intelligence helps you understand patient preferences and satisfaction, which in turn can help you shape marketing campaigns. If you’ve found that your staff’s professionalism and high standard of care have struck a chord with senior citizens, it may be helpful to launch a targeted campaign highlighting your patient-centric services.
Knowing the details of your existing customer demographic can also help you discover where you might recruit new patients. Knowing where your patients live and don’t live can inform appropriate marketing strategies.
A detailed customer intelligence platform can give your marketing team access to the information it needs to craft more effective and relevant campaigns. With real-time updates to customer intelligence and marketing campaign results, you can make adjustments on the fly to maximize the return on investment for your campaign.
4. Growing Responsibly
Customer intelligence can reveal how and where to expand, creating more opportunities to serve your existing client base. A clinic that wants to add services or specialists would want to analyze their existing customer base for services that patients appreciate and avoid oversaturating the market or creating positions that are nearly impossible to fill.
This is especially important for organizations seeking to invest significant money in an additional building or wing. Without a clear picture of patient needs, concerns, and satisfaction, there’s no way of knowing whether you’ll make good on your investment.
Growing also requires consideration of potential customers that you haven’t yet accounted for. Subfields of future-oriented business intelligence, including predictive analytics and prescriptive analytics, play an even larger role in helping leaders decide the best investments for the future. Customer intelligence completes the picture by showing organizational leaders’ current strengths and weaknesses, allowing for smarter decision-making.
5. Increasing Communication with Customers
It’s hard to rely on patients to stay up on their follow-up and preventive care, even with highly-educated and wealthy patients. Customer intelligence can be used to craft and send personalized emails and text messages designed to remind the patient about necessary appointments.
Healthcare facilities can also send relevant general health information to entire families, even if the stated goal of the message isn’t to bring patients back in for another visit. Staying in contact with past clients helps improve patient intimacy and trust so your practice can reap the benefits of patient loyalty.
6. Fix Retention Problems
Client retention is an ongoing issue, especially for specialized clinics or family practice centers in areas with high market saturation. In order to address and fix client retention, organizations need an accurate picture of what factors are contributing to patient turnover.
For example, an effective customer intelligence system could collect information about patient check-in and appointment times, and discover that patients who have to wait more than 30 minutes to be seen have a much higher chance of not coming back for their follow-up or other future appointments. Knowing what your clients will tolerate can help you increase patient satisfaction.
Why is Digital Transformation Important for Healthcare?
As with the other major transformations, Healthcare organizations have been trailing from other industries so recently we sat down and discussed with Dr. Pillay, Chief Innovation Officer for UAB Health System, who has been at the forefront of Healthcare Innovation for the last 30 years to discover some of the insights as to why this is the case. Read More
7. Improve Patient Outcomes
Hospitals in particular must grapple with patient readmission rates, mortality rates, and other key metrics. When these rates are higher than average, customer intelligence can help you discern what factors are contributing to the problem.
In some cases, factors like income could be contributing to patients’ failure to adhere to follow-up plans, but sometimes there are factors that are within the hospital’s control. Customer intelligence analytics, part of the broader digital transformation in healthcare, can help hospitals connect the dots to improve their relationships with patients.
Harnessing the Best Technology and Data Science Methods
Achieving these goals isn’t possible with just a spreadsheet and some graphs. Unlocking the full power of your customer intelligence requires a comprehensive approach to how your data is collected, stored, and viewed.
Syntelli Solutions provides specialized data analytics and data science services for healthcare facilities employing data-driven approaches. We provide services ranging from data management to complex artificial intelligence, all with an eye toward data privacy and processing speed.
Our team works to understand your organization’s needs and craft the solutions you need to improve patient outcomes, recruitment, and retention. Contact us today to learn more about our multifaceted approaches to customer intelligence.
SIMILAR POSTS
Why Public Cloud Services Will Become Essential for Data and Analytics Innovation
Cloud computing services started as a niche area for tech companies and savvy young professionals. Storing files and data "in the cloud" was originally subject to file size restrictions and technical limitations that kept it from catching on with companies in most...
The Rise of Decision Intelligence: AI-Optimized Decision Making
The use of artificial intelligence in business continues to evolve as massive increases in computing capacity accommodate more complex programs than ever before. Decision intelligence, the intersection of technology and business needs, helps companies think on a...
Achieving Smarter AI with NLP
Experts predict that 30% of companies will base decisions on graph technologies by 2023. This change and a shift to operationalizing AI may cause an increase in streaming data and analytics infrastructures. Several AI techniques, including machine learning (ML),...
