The Times They Are A Changin', and with them the traditional roles of healthcare points of contact
"For the world is changing, we feel it in customer preferences, we feel it in customer satisfaction levels and we see it in the way people plan their day"; This paraphrase of Treebeard's farewell in The Lord of the Rings (the book, not the movies…) illustrates that people are changing the way they feel about having to visit and spend time at stores, public service offices, clinics etc.
Across different verticals we see a sea change in the role of the physical point of contact, and of the customer visit in it. This is true for retail, for governmental & municipal services and also for healthcare provision.
While healthcare seems all in for going digital, the actual patient visit is still required for diagnosing and treating even minor ailments, as discussed in another Q-nomy blog post.
The outcome is Retail Healthcare, described by Frost and Sullivan as "…primary care services for minor illnesses provided through clinics located in retail environments, such as a pharmacies, grocery chains, supermarkets, or departmental stores."
Retail chains like Walmart and CVS change the healthcare experience, according to Forbes, while engaging consumers in a trend that is according to Frost and Sullivan "spreading similarly in regions across the globe from Asia to Europe to South Africa".
This trend makes everyone happier – retailers get more customer engagement, consumers enjoy more convenient opening hours, more access to simple procedures at less the cost while already being present at the retailer's venue, and the traditional healthcare providers are less crowded.
PWC takes this further by envisioning the pharmacy of the future as a hub of personalized health: a trend driving pharmacies to offer primary care, to the chagrin of many small-practice physicians.
Why is this important for omni channel customer experience leaders? Because they now face a reality in which practices from different vertical industries need to be scheduled and managed in a single visit!
Customer experience managers should have the ability to schedule complex appointments, route people to different paths in different departments and divisions of the same venue and manage everything from a single console, no matter what CRM or business process management solution is employed by the retailer and its healthcare delivery subcontractor.
Sounds chaotic? Not with Q-nomy's omni channel customer journey optimization solutions, the perfect answer for "multiple industries in a single visit" scenario: self-service composite appointment scheduling, smart visitor check in and routing applications; all optimized from a single, technology-agnostic platform.