Regional Medical Facility

This organization is a nationally accredited back and neck care center specializing in non-surgical treatments and minimally invasive spine surgery.  They have an incredibly unique approach to spine care:  every Wednesday, the entire team of surgeons get together to discuss all cases and provide a team-approach to patient care.  Their website is modern and aesthetically pleasing, but as it turned out, was not effective to the customers.

Primary goals:

• Fully document and understand the customer journey so that this organization can better serve and respond to the struggles and situations that their (very diverse) customers encounter.
• Convert more website visits into referrals and new and returning customer appointments
• Make forms and records, videos, and other resources easy to find, so that customer can self-serve and actively participate in their prevention and treatment plan

Process:

• Stakeholder interviews: to fully understand the start-to-finish process in which both the internal staff and the external customers engage
• Customer interviews to understand frustrations and roadblocks
• “Day in the Life” (ethnographic) Research where we observed patients both in the facility and online, 1] trying to onboard, 2] trying to find tools and videos, 3] struggling to schedule or reschedule appointments, 4] dealing with insurance
• Verification (with the target audience) of the Customer Journey (ie: what the customer was thinking, feeling, and doing at each step they interacted with Spine Team, and the resulting opportunities Spine Team could take to wow them)

Results:

1. Clear understanding of (and ability to solve) non-website related issues that were ultimately uncommunicated roadblocks: parking issues, childcare issues, insurance issues, ‘my portal’ access filled with targeted tools, videos, and information they would use for self-care
2. Full documentation of process so that each staff member at this organization could see the entire customer journey (not just their piece of the pie) so there was an understanding of the repeated steps and potential frustrations customers were feeling along the way
3. Because of #2, prioritized a project to streamline the onboarding process so that patients were asked only once for common (interdepartmental) information
4. Partnering with marketing, deliverables:
   • Built retention program to drive sales
   • Created a consistent branded look and feel throughout the journey
   • Created campaigns that engage patients in a variety of ways
   • Exceeded patient expectations along the way (increased Consumer Effort Score from 2.6 to 5.3 over 1 year)

Impact: 

1. Increased number of sales / conversions: self-help and ability to easily find answers to questions increase engagement and appointment bookings
2. Reduced churn: customers less likely to leave in frustration if roadblocks removed
3. Evangelism: Customer will recommend to others because of personalized service
4. Increased profits:  internal streamlining of business process