Setting Joy as Your Experiential North Star: It’s Time to Surprise and Delight Healthcare Consumers
Consumers are not accustomed to being surprised and delighted in their healthcare interactions. While they typically like and trust their personal physicians, outside of that relationship, they’ve often been let down and underwhelmed.
To successfully engage your members, you must overcome what we call the “engagement sins of the system”. Take an average doctor’s visit as an example. Consumers have to wait forever to get an appointment. In many cases that appointment is canceled by the doctor’s office and rescheduled at least once. When it’s time for the appointment, the individual has to wait, and wait…and wait. This experience is already untenable, and they haven’t even seen a healthcare professional yet. Basically everything about healthcare scenarios is unpleasant and inconvenient.
It’s Time for an Upgrade
Enhancing engagement requires changing this narrative by finding ways to upgrade the member experience. Even if you can’t transform everything immediately, think about specific programs or initiatives where you can surprise and delight members.
In Belle’s case, we’ve found such an opportunity with in-home foot care. You might be surprised to learn that in one study members ranked in-home foot care in the top 5 benefits they wanted their health plans to offer . Even more interestingly, members who had already experienced this benefit ranked it first on the same list.
The lesson here is that this service resonates positively by offering something members actually want and need. Our pedicures deliver consistent clinical outcomes, yet they feel like a luxury, i.e. something members would pay for out of their own pockets. Additionally, many people aren’t flexible enough to reach their own feet. If they’re managing chronic medical conditions, their feet can be in bad shape, and they need help to care for them.
The Experience Matters
However, just because members want and need a service or program doesn’t mean it will automatically be well-received. The experience matters. Just like in other consumer settings, an individual’s entire journey with your offering must be carefully crafted and consistently delivered at a high level.
Focus not only on what you’re delivering but also on how you’re making the member feel. This is important at every stage, from your first outreach to how you follow up once members have engaged. In short, approach member engagement as if you were in customer service for a luxury retail brand.
That’s why we advise making joy your North Star when it comes to engagement. Offer surprise and delight to members, and deliver on that promise. Remember, the experience is everything.
How to Create Joy
At Belle, we pay exceptionally close attention to the member journey. We carefully map it from head to toe to ensure we are methodical and consistently delivering a high quality encounter every time. Here are a few examples. Our fulfillment rates, meaning the rate at which we keep scheduled appointments, are north of 98%. Additionally, 97% of our visits begin within 5 minutes of the scheduled start time. We remove logistical barriers for our clinicians and technicians through processes and technology, and then we hold them accountable for delivering on our promises and exceeding consumer expectations.
As a result, our NPS has been documented at 98 by a third-party research group. Again, this is only possible because we are delivering high quality clinical care in a way that feels more like a luxury retail experience..
This post is an excerpt from our recent eBook, “Bringing Value Home: How Medicare Advantage Plans Can Engage High-Risk, Medically Complex Members”. For more insights on engaging MA members at home, click here and download the full eBook.