Key components of a digital strategy for the health experience on the doorstep

Many health organizations today offer a multichannel engagement approach that provides online and mobile access to services and even care. Adopting digital channels is a great first step in meeting your consumer expectations, but it’s just the starting point.

Consumers today expect to be given choices in their healthcare engagements and care channels – via a mobile app, on their computer, over the phone, in person – and want those interactions to flow into a connected, seamless, omnichannel experience that simple, intuitive and tailored to your needs. Today’s digitally integrated economy requires an approach to healthcare that puts consumer needs first and involves them at all relevant touchpoints of their journey.

Many healthcare organizations are turning to a digital front door to enable this type of digitally optimized omnichannel experience. A digital front door forms the foundation for a stronger, more consistent omnichannel experience that improves every connection, increases loyalty, reduces friction and creates competitive advantage.

Our health experience experts have identified the five components required to build a digital front door strategy that meets consumer expectations and empowers the omnichannel health experience:

1. Alignment

At Avtex, we often talk about the need to define your “North Star” to ensure that every aspect of the consumer journey is aligned with your company’s overarching philosophy of the best possible experience. A digital front door ensures that that desired health experience is aligned from goals to governance.

As with any successful customer experience strategy, the digital front door must align with and enhance existing patient and member experience strategies in order to digitally transform your business. Activities like Journey Mapping and CX Process Mapping can help uncover weaknesses and clarify how a digital front door plan can support your entire North Star.

2. Understand
A 360 degree view of your consumers is necessary to create a powerful digital experience. Building a full, holistic understanding of your consumers’ experience will help you identify gaps and opportunities to enhance that experience and create a more rounded, consumer-centric environment. For example, you can consider developing a Voice of the Customer (VOC) program to gain new insights, or you can choose to do persona mapping exercises to better understand your target segments and their identified needs better to meet.

It’s also important to prioritize collecting employee feedback and data, as these insights provide invaluable information about needs, preferences, trends, and vulnerabilities – both at the individual and group level. We learned that improving the employee experience leads to a measurable improvement in the consumer experience.

Understanding your consumers better leads to better healthcare experiences and more opportunities for growth. Recently, AvMed, a Florida-based insurance provider, saw these benefits firsthand after working with Avtex to gain a deeper understanding of their current and member segments. As a result of this work, they created a competitive advantage in insurance marketplaces, including healthcare.gov, as well as plenty of member insights to optimize tariff offerings.

3. Design
“Design” is a broad term, but at Avtex, good design is the cornerstone of a well-integrated health experience. A strong design framework involves aligning each interaction, skill, and strategy with the functional and emotional needs of patients and members. It takes careful planning to ensure that you map and capture your current consumer experiences – and turn that information into actionable data.

To support the design, you also need to equip your team with the right tools and technology. It is important to collect feedback from both customers and employees to drive continuous improvement of the experience.

Good design is critical to the success of your digital front door strategy and ensures that these experiences exceed consumer expectations.

4. Orchestration
The orchestration is based on a solid customer understanding combined with a powerful design to carefully synchronize the best combination of people, processes and technology. The orchestration helps all three to work together in harmony to provide a well-integrated omnichannel experience. Just like a real symphony performance, the orchestration keeps all elements of the patient / member experience in sync, so that even the smallest interaction suits their needs and preferences.

Orchestration ensures that planning and activation work together to provide members and patients with a strong digital front door, including the right technology decisions to deliver the best experience. Orchestration helps ensure greater ease of use, convenience, and accessibility throughout healthcare at every single touch point from the first interaction.

5. Measurement
The HCAHPS survey, the STAR ranking and the Net Promoter Scores (NPS) remain important metrics for measuring the customer experience. However, these aren’t the only metrics you can use to assess the success of your healthcare strategies. To measure the success of your digital front door and ensure a smooth, integrated experience, you should consider newer tools like the Customer Effort Score (CES) for evaluating support and transaction interactions or the Customer Experience Index (CXI) for evaluating the overall experience draw time.

Setting up experience metrics like this one helps ensure the success of your digital doorstep and health experience strategy and provides continuous improvement opportunities.

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