Every brand relationship with a customer is rooted in trust. That trust is earned through consistent delivery on customer expectations. Leading brands have understood this for years and created long standing relationships with their customers. However, the past two decades there has been a seismic shift in brand to consumer relationship. While historically the relationship was driven by the brand communicating things it believed and customers adopting and participating with those programs, goods, and services, the digital transformation of society has given way to consumerism and the roles are reversed.
Continuously Optimizing for Intent
There has been a fundamental shift in consumer behavior over the past decade. Initially enabled by search engines and now augmented with the rise of voice assistants, chatbots, and the introduction of conversational search, each customer journey is a unique collection of specific questions posed to specific services that address a desire or a need at a specific moment.
Each of these questions is an intent—a specific need a customer has with a predetermined expectation for the result. In each question, consumers are articulating what they expect in order to select and ultimately become loyal. In turn, brands are actively listening to ensure they can respond with the most relevant, useful and value creating answer.
In the context of healthcare, these intents are most often tied to understanding what they need to know about a specific care or coverage need, where they should go to get the care they need, and how much it will cost within the context of their healthcare relationship. Typically, the need for information occurs when a member/patient has a health event. That event is not something a business controls, it just happens—and when it does, the customer engages with a specific set of questions to quickly get comfortable with and get access to the care they need.
Intent is not a new concept in search. As algorithms continue become more intelligent and sophisticated and technology has moved beyond keywords to respond based on the intention searcher. The objective is getting ever closer to the specific intent of a specific person at a specific moment to predictively provide the most efficient, appropriate, and useful response that enables the outcome that user seeks.
This is the root of our customer experience strategy.
The Fundamental Importance of Measurement in Building Trust
Sapphire Digital is building and evolving a measurable experience improvement model for member experience based in ‘trust’ to enable our clients to build trust with their customers, patients, and members throughout their health service experience.
As a human centered product organization, we place the measurement at the heart of the experience optimization cycle to ensure an alignment between the customer expectation and success of a particular experience. By putting measurement at the center we can establish client/partner-wide customer experience metrics that create a common thread to prioritize the backlog of improvements with a clear alignment to the value they bring.
Building a Comprehensive Trust Score
A trust score is a multi-dimensional summary of customer loyalty.
In something as complex as customer experience, single measures unto itself are limiting—especially within healthcare where there are a number of business factors that govern the customer relationship and a network of services that work together to deliver value and share the journey. By aggregating set of scored inputs into one larger score, we can start to understand the customer satisfaction by considering a broader range of inputs that may offset potentially biased in-the-moment reactions that may tell a different story.
There are four main components of a trust score:
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Net Promoter Score (NPS): The measure of a consumers willingness to recommend. Leveraging transactional NPS technology to discretely measure more parts of the experience can help understand more specific points of friction.
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Voice of Customer (VOC): The in-depth process of capturing customer’s expectations, preferences and aversions. Integrating VOC data into customer analytics can bring the voice channel closer to digital. By developing a scoring model for sentiment and VOC factors this measure converts a qualitative measure to a quantified one as one dimension of the customer experience.
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Lifetime Value (LTV): A prediction of the net profit attributed to the entire future relationship with a customer. By integrating P&L measures like LTV, we can understand whether specific experiences affect likelihood to renew.
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Consumer Experience Analytics (CEA): An end-to-end data-driven view of the customer experience through their interaction. By leveraging embedded experience analytics, we can continuously optimize user experiences to improve the quality of interactions.
Creating a comprehensive trust score starts by defining and aligning the use and value of each supporting measurement system to ensure consistent use and get clear alignment on the elements and situations of bias that may exclude each score within the customer journey. With that defined, the set of scores can be implemented to begin to generate data and outcomes building up a more sophisticated usage model for the score. With experience and confidence in the individual scores, the scores can be combined into a unified view that better guides customer loyalty.
To learn more about how Sapphire’s Digital Shopping backbone can help your organization build trust and loyalty, reach out to schedule a meeting.