The customer experience (CX) has evolved drastically over the past few years, with many businesses embracing digital solutions in their engagement strategies. Think of it as a CX revolution – companies had to transform their strategies to meet their customers online, on apps and through various instant messaging solutions.

The healthcare industry also joined in on this revolution, but many decision makers are yet to implement forward-thinking solutions to maximise effective engagement and ROI.

A recent study by Deloitte found that customer experience has risen to the top priority among healthcare executives. Participants in the study highlighted numerous opportunities to improve their customer experience strategies, including:

Tailoring digital solutions to improve customer engagement;
Determining communication preferences to customise customer engagement;
Securing loyalty, as patients have more choices on where to get their care;
Matching digital offerings with the right customers; and
Understanding how to communicate in an in-person and virtual world.

There is a common thread throughout these opportunities: a need to deliver personalised, consistent communications throughout the customer journey – especially in our “anytime, anywhere, any channel” world. Businesses still have difficulty managing data and communications across disparate platforms, providers and systems.

Delight healthcare clients throughout the engagement lifecycle

Exceptional engagement that wins lasting loyalty doesn’t come from a single interaction. Businesses need to attract attention with ongoing personalised, relevant interactions at all the critical stages of the customer journey, including:

Sales and marketing
Deliveries
Support
Authentication and security confirmation

These touch points throughout the engagement lifecycle offer opportunities to remove barriers, improve experiences and create meaningful connections.

Getting to know your customer starts with marketing when you’re introducing leads and prospects to your business for the first time. Here, teams equipped with tools that help them track and manage interactions as they happen can react fast to evolving consumer needs. They can use rich customer profiles to create customised engagements for each lead and move them along the funnel to sales on whichever channel prospects prefer.

Delivery is a critical chance to fulfil customer needs and an increasingly challenging, competitive space. SMS and MMS alerts are an ideal way to be responsive, for example, by delivering live tracking information to customers’ mobile devices.

The longer-term engagement journey continues with support. Here, automation helps answer questions and resolve issues, using centralised data and analytics to route queries to the right agents on the right channels.

And, of course, consumers want to feel safe and know that their data is protected throughout the journey. Businesses can eliminate friction during onboarding and account login moments by offering secure, fast authentication that improves experience and engagement.

The right omnichannel cloud contact center solution will make it easy to communicate more effectively in all the ways consumers want to be in contact at each of these touch points – and the many other interactions throughout the entire customer lifecycle.

Taking healthcare CX to the cloud

Enterprises are moving their communications strategies to the cloud – shifting from disjointed and reactive customer service to informed, proactive and intuitive engagement. They’re using data to deliver seamless experiences wherever customers are.

It can feel daunting to transition to cloud tech. There’s all that information to transfer, various setup processes to get through, and teams to onboard. But it’s much easier than one might think to automate the entire healthcare customer journey when you have the right tools and support. A single, customisable cloud platform empowers you to design, program and deliver engagements that create value for customers, agents and businesses.

Better experiences for healthcare customers and agents

A unified platform gives agents a single view of the customer across channels and touch points, equipping them to build solid and lasting relationships at every opportunity.

A customisable cloud platform can create a simple workspace for customer support teams. Access to an easy-to-use, intuitive interface means agents can view customer histories at a click and set up workflows to automate repetitive daily tasks – freeing them up to do value-add work. Moving from “problem” to “resolution” faster, and switching the dial from problem solving to nurturing valuable relationships, is enormous for customer lifetime value (CLV).

Providing omnichannel communication from one platform doesn’t just make conversations easier to manage – they also become easier to measure and adjust. Businesses gain a clear overview of each agent and channel’s performance metrics.

Lasting loyalty translates to long-term benefits

A positive CLV is ultimately about keeping your customers satisfied, happy and loyal. Moving your communications strategy to the cloud and combining all customer interactions via one platform is the most effective way to do this. A single platform approach becomes the launchpad to building CLV – helping you make relationships more robust, longer and more profitable over time.

To learn more, visit the Infobip website at www.infobip.com, or connect with Infobip on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook or Instagram.