Building Customer Loyalty in Healthcare Through "Digital Empathy"

Everyone is talking about digital transformation. As digital technology accelerates, every industry is undergoing disruptive change. Manufacturing, commerce, financial services and healthcare all face challenges from new kinds of innovation within the next 24 to 36 months. As the well-known author William Gibson said, “The future is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed.” The quote captures the discontinuous nature of innovation in the technology era.

With emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, augmented reality (AR) and machine learning now widely used, the conditions for disruptive transformation in healthcare are in place. So how can the healthcare industry seize the new opportunities this change brings?
Strengthening “digital empathy” is the only way to effectively increase customer loyalty in healthcare.

Increasing customer loyalty

Customer loyalty has always been hard to build in healthcare, where the ways you can market are relatively restricted. But research across industries shows that customers are willing to pay up to 23% more for a better experience. To deliver a better experience, you have to understand your customers’ behavior and needs. For example, one of the newest hospitals in Dubai is building a mobile app that gives patients timely, useful information as they move around the hospital, and spares them from repeatedly showing ID and medical records as they move between examination rooms. Meanwhile, health systems in the US are experimenting with Alexa to remind elderly patients, through spoken conversation, when to take their medication. And a children’s hospital using telemedicine lets families take a real part in treatment and enrichment activities, so that both families and young patients receive more timely, better care. These are all technology applications built from a starting point of empathy for patients.

Digital empathy
In healthcare, patients are the customers. The future of healthcare lies in earning customer loyalty. By understanding behavior, relevance and needs, we can use digital empathy to make a brand “sticky” and foster lifelong partnerships between patients and caregivers, and that interaction should begin at the first digital touchpoint. With a website built on the Sitecore platform, you can start getting to know your customers online: observe their habits, identify their needs and see what information they search for. At the same time, you can establish a way to assess and understand whether your interactions with patients are effective. That way, you can keep optimizing and evolving from the very first contact.

That is when true “digital empathy” begins.