B2C Patient Experience Healthcare Marketing

5 Bold Ideas from Qualtrics X4

On the first day of the annual Qualtrics user conference, X4, speakers from multiple industries shared bold ideas and statements about the future of customer experiences. Here are five of the most interesting.

Bind Customers to Your Brand With LOVE

Qualtrics CEO, Zig Serafin, kicked off X4 with a very interesting statement: “Being a brand that people like is good. Being a brand that people LOVE is much better. Bind customers to your brand by building connections and relationships founded in LOVE.”

Think of the brands you truly love. That relationship is likely not based solely on the features of their products or the level of service they provided. You have an emotional connection that is the result of how the brand make you feel. Organizations that can achieve that, will have loyal, repeat customers for life.

Using APIs Can (Indirectly) Improve Outcomes

Michael Pfeffer, MD is the Chief Information Officer and Associate Dean at Stanford Health Care shared this interesting nugget during a panel on patient experience: APIs allow us to better leverage our technology platforms. This in turn allows staff to do their work quicker and with less friction. That leads to better staff experiences which means we have happier staff. Happier staff improves patient experiences which leads to better outcomes.

Pfeffer was being a little tongue-and-cheek with his statement, but it was a very fun way to advocate for increased use of APIs.

If You Aren’t Ready to Love Your Patients, You Are Doomed

I moderated a panel on Patient Experience at X4 that featured three rockstar patient experience leaders:

During our discussion, the panelists all agreed that any healthcare organization that wasn’t ready to love their patients was doomed. All agreed that we are at a point in healthcare where patients expect more than just a positive outcome. They want healthcare organizations to care about them as people. That means showing kindness, compassion, and empathy while delivering care. The panelists believed that organizations that were not ready to do this, would soon be in dire straits.

Build an “Experience Moat” Around Your Offering

Ryan Smith, Qualtrics Founder and Executive Chairman, shared a key lesson learned as the owner of the Utah Jazz. As marketers, we cannot control the final product or the experience an individual has with our organization. However, we can control everything around it.

Smith said it was important to create a moat that surrounds your offering and organization that is filled with great experiences. This moat will help defend you when things do not go as planned. As an NBA team owner, Smith has no control over whether the team wins or loses, but he can ensure that fans have a good experience at the concessions, that the arena staff are courteous, and the facility is spotless. That is the moat that the Jazz have built around themselves.

The parallel with healthcare is obvious. Marketing and Patient Experience leaders cannot control patient outcomes, but they can control things like wayfinding, food options for families and visitors, escalation processes to address complaints, and the website experience. Those are the moats we can build in healthcare.

Viral Videos Need to Illicit a Visceral Response

Mark Rober is a YouTube Content Creator and founder of CrunchLabs. He is a former NASA engineer whose videos regularly generate over 50 million of views. In his keynote he shared a key learning from years of creating viral videos. To create a viral video, your audience must have a visceral reaction. This means you have to make the audience laugh, cry, get angry, be shocked, or be amazed.

As video becomes more and more popular in healthcare and health IT marketing, this is something to keep in mind.

About the author

Colin Hung

Colin Hung is an award-winning Marketing Executive with more than 15yrs of healthcare and HealthIT experience. He co-founded one of the most popular healthcare chats on Twitter, #hcldr and he has been recognized as one of the “Top 50 Healthcare IT Influencers”. Colin’s work has been published in the Journal of the American College of Radiology, American Society for Healthcare Risk Managers, and Infection Control Today. He writes regularly for Healthcare Scene and here at HITMC.com. Colin is a member of #pinksock #TheWalkingGallery and is proudly HITMC. His Twitter handle is: @Colin_Hung.

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