Issue link: https://beckershealthcare.uberflip.com/i/898852
86 Executive Briefing For 35 years, NRC Health has been committed to achieving human understanding. We enable healthcare organiza- tions to know the people they care for with greater clarity, immediacy, and depth. Our partners are able to illuminate and improve the key moments that define an experience and build trust. Guided by our uniquely empathic heritage, proprietary methods, skilled associates, and holistic approach, we help our partners design experiences that exceed expectations, inspire loyalty, and improve well-being among patients, residents, physicians, nurses, and staff. Patients will remember—and return to—providers who treat them well. Experience can't be discounted. It is a key aspect of loyalty in the consumer journey, and it's critical that organizations get the experience right. But healthcare's a unique industry—there can be long gaps between individual episodes of care. Therefore, if an organization is only building loyalty while the patient is in the building, it's missing many opportunities to engage and influence loyalty in the interim. Most healthcare leaders now agree that loyalty is more than the sum of a patient's positive experiences, and that further understanding is necessary to engender it. Loyalty is a construct, built from a wide variety of interactions that a consumer has with a health provider. To nurture loyal feelings, healthcare organizations need to understand what these interactions are, how they intersect, and the impact each individual interaction has on the next; they need to grasp the constituent components of loyalty. How loyalty is built Drawing from a national database of more than 300,000 healthcare consumers across the country, NRC Health's Market Insights research team has identified seven components of loyalty that healthcare organizations should consider: Brand score. This is loyalty's first, most fundamental factor. Consumers must be aware of and think favorably about your organization in order to choose you for care. If they're aware of your organization's brand, consumers will have a set of predispositions toward it. Brand score is a cumulative result of marketing efficacy, news events, local/environmental factors, and word of mouth. Engagement. Do consumers read and share your brand's social-media posts? Do they visit your local events? Interactions like these strengthen a sense of familiarity and trust with your consumers—whether they're actively pursuing care or not. Need. Every consumer has unique health issues and needs. Naturally, they will favor those organizations that are best equipped to provide care based on personal need. Access. As already mentioned, today's consumer has high expectations and a correspondingly low threshold for frustration. Barriers to care, confusing bureaucracies, or excessive wait times sour a patient's opinion about an organization. Access, also known as Customer Effort Score (CES), is a critical element to ensuring that those consumers who know, prefer, and need your services are actually able to access care on their own terms. Motivation. Most consumers can find multiple providers near where they live who offer a wide variety of similar, if not identical, services. If the choice is made to pursue care, consumers will likely choose only one such provider at a time. Consumer motivation measures their stated degree of preference for any one provider or brand. Experience. This factor comprehends considerations such as: How well does the provider care for the patient? Does the consumer feel delighted with the organization's service? Net Promoter Score (NPS). Premised on a single question— "Would you recommend this provider to your friends and family?"—the NPS is a time-tested means to measure and indicate future utilization of your brand. What gets measured gets improved Throughout their lives, consumers of every kind are on a continuous journey of discovery, needs assessment, engagement, and experience. Unique to the healthcare industry—and few others—is that almost everyone will most assuredly become a consumer of its services in their lifetime. Every step along these many consumers' individual journeys provides an opportunity to better understand and engage with those you hope to serve now and into the future. To help healthcare leaders understand what matters most to consumers and how this journey is managed, NRC Health has developed the Loyalty Index. The NRC Health Loyalty Index is the industry's first holistic measure for loyalty in healthcare. It captures how patients rate a health brand for each of the above-mentioned aspects of loyalty. These individual aspects of loyalty, trackable and comparable over time individually, are also combined to create a composite score for each brand. This gives healthcare marketers and administrators the first-ever unified metric capable of assessing strengths, weaknesses, and gaps relating to the creation of loyalty among consumers. The Loyalty Index provides a scientific means to address one of healthcare's most enduring challenges. In doing so, this data- driven innovation promises to help demystify consumer loyalty. Complementing the comprehensiveness of the Loyalty Index is its utility in simplifying analysis for healthcare marketing teams. It functions as an intuitive and complete tool, bringing clear focus to high-impact areas deserving of energy and resources to increase the rate of organizational growth. The Loyalty Index enables healthcare marketers to prove marketing ROI, demonstrate the value of new programs, and gain buy-in from leadership using simple, concrete figures. Ultimately, the Loyalty Index takes the guesswork out of generating consumer loyalty. Start the loyalty conversation In order to achieve the level of loyalty that consumers desire and healthcare organizations require, a new way of thinking is needed. Loyalty is a broad issue, and healthcare leaders need local answers on all—not just some—of the ways to best engage their consumers. NRC Health's Loyalty Index is designed to illuminate each step of the healthcare consumer's journey in each of the largest 300 markets in the country, representing more than 3,000 hospital and health system brands. Illuminate the path of your consumer, and discover the impact of improved consumer loyalty within your health system. To learn more about the Loyalty Index, please visit nrchealth.com/ loyalty. n