Author: Ruth D’Alessandro
Subject Matter Expert: Matt Lauer
What is customer experience in healthcare?
Customer experience in healthcare encompasses the whole experience that patients – and their families – have with their healthcare provider, from the moment they schedule their first appointment with healthcare professionals, to their discharge at the end of treatment, and into their continued wellness journey.
It takes in the whole series of medical touchpoints along a patient’s journey: clinical and administrative reception, initial appointments, patient wait times, follow-ups, referrals, examinations, diagnostics, treatments and follow-up care.
By analysing patient experience, healthcare providers will discover:
- The ease (or difficulty) of obtaining care
- The emotional experience of the care
- How successful the care was
Free eBook: 2025 Healthcare Experience Trends Report
Why customer experience in healthcare is so important
Healthcare professionals are amazing, and they’ve been through a lot in the last five years, many to the point of burnout. They’re constantly under pressure to deliver a world-class, safe customer service to patients, at increasingly lower cost and with fewer resources. Is it a surprise then that sometimes the healthcare process appears less than joined up? Delays in getting appointments, coordinating with different departments, and repeating medical history to multiple practitioners is frustrating to both patient and professional. There must be a better way.
There is. By taking into account the experience of patients, you can ensure healthcare is:
Emotionally sensitive
Health and our emotions are inextricably entwined. Patients worry about symptoms, they feel brave (or not so brave) during invasive tests, procedures and operations, and may hear things that they have never wanted to hear. At an emotionally vulnerable time, healthcare providers who can anticipate reactions and respond to their patients empathetically will deliver a better medical experience, which in turn creates trust.
Trusted
In the first half of the 2020s, trust in healthcare providers plummeted. Research found that in January 2024, just 40.1% of Americans said they trusted physicians and hospitals, down from 71.5% in 2020.
Our own research found that a positive emotional experience of healthcare, that is, how medical staff cared about patients and their families as people, had the greatest impact on trust.
Shared between patients and healthcare providers
Because of the emotional nature of healthcare, both patients and practitioners thrive when the healthcare experience is the best it can be. No caregiver wants to see their patients having a miserable time when something can be done to alleviate it, and patients don’t want to see caring staff struggling and burning out. The experiences of both staff and patients are intertwined.
Collaborative
When teams and team members communicate and work in harmony, informed by the people they are treating, they contribute to the emotional experience of patient care, and hence, to creating trust.
Safe and inclusive
There’s no place in healthcare for health and safety breaches, trauma, violence, abuse or bias. When patients and caregivers are able to flag up their experiences of safety issues in real time, immediate action can be taken to deescalate dangerous situations and eliminate bias.
Beyond the patient and clinician experience
It’s no longer enough simply to rate experience with doctors and nurses. You need to consider the entire healthcare ‘ecosystem’ – the network of organizations that work together to provide healthcare services.
These can be divided into:
- Clinical services that range from screening to identify health issues, to specialist hospitals that deliver care to the most complex medical cases
- Support services such as call centers handling appointments and test results, accessing medical records, schedulers, registration staff and patient access points
As you can imagine, the healthcare ecosystem is incredibly complex, in a constant state of evolution and change as new practices, diagnostics, drugs and treatments become available.
Making the experience consistent across healthcare organizations
At the heart of the healthcare ecosystem are people. As well as the doctors and nurses, there are also patients’ families and caregivers, administration staff, reception staff, nutrition staff and cleaners, and even volunteers. The experiences of all these people determine how good the overall healthcare system is, which is why it’s important to take a holistic overview by listening to everybody, and acting on what you hear, to make the healthcare customer experience the best it can be.
Closed loop systems in the healthcare industry
A closed loop system is a dynamic and responsive feedback system that continuously collects, analyses, and acts upon real-time information to improve patient care and clinical outcomes.
It can be used to:
- Listen to and analyze patient feedback across multiple channels, to improve customer experience
- Assist clinical decision-making, such as monitoring real-time patient data to make adjustments to treatment plans
Streamline processes and improve efficiency on every healthcare service, both clinical and support, to enhance overall experience.
Healthcare experience trends with strategies you can use to deliver high quality consumer experience
We’ve just released our 2025 Healthcare Trends Report to help you use new tools and technology to deeply understand and capture the complexity of emotions, expectations, and health outcomes in healthcare.
Here’s what we discovered, along with some strategies you can use to create a healthcare system that’s not just more efficient, but more compassionate, resilient, human and effective.
Trend 1: Empathy unlocks trust across demographics and settings
Emotion, as we’ve touched on above, is an important part of any experience, yet it isn’t generally captured in regulated healthcare measurement – until now. We discovered that patient trust is shaped by three key factors:
- Emotion
- Ease
- Success
The greatest impact on trust is emotion – patients’ perception of how healthcare staff care about them as people. The most empathetic health caregivers are able to anticipate how their patients will feel, and how deeply, and respond to them through talk and actions.
Strategy
It is possible to develop emotional intelligence, cultural competence and communication skills with tailored training programs. Listening programs are essential, initially targeting areas of high emotional intensity, such as the Emergency Department.
Trend 2: Care team collaboration drives patient experience
When patients can see their care teams working together effectively, they have a positive emotional experience of their care. And great teamwork makes obtaining care easier, and contributes to how successful the patient feels their care has been.
Inpatients, outpatients and patients admitted to the ED all particularly value seeing their nurses and healthcare staff working together, even more than their individual care preferences and receiving courtesy and respect (inpatients); careful listening and concern for patient comfort (outpatients); and individual care preferences and concern for patient comfort (ED).
Strategy
It’s the patients’ perception of teamwork that drives a positive healthcare customer experience. Teamwork may well be happening, but if the patient cannot see it, it doesn’t form part of their experience of the patient provider relationship. So:
- Make sure the patient and their loved ones feel part of the team
- Introduce team members and their roles, and flag up any changes within the team
- Stress that members of the care team are all working together for the patient’s good – both visibly and behind the scenes
- Manage up team members to the patient and stress their competencies
Trend 3: The paradox of improved provider engagement and a decline in intent to stay
The pandemic took a heavy toll on the healthcare sector, and it is still recovering. Burnout affected many clinicians and nurses. As an example, it took until 2024 for the doctor/physician burnout rate to drop below 50%.
Now, doctors and nurses are feeling more engaged:
72% of both doctors and nurses felt engaged in 2024 compared to 65% and 66% respectively in 2023
More optimistic about their healthcare organizations:
Most doctors and nurses answered positively to employee engagement questions
BUT 30% of doctors and 42% of nurses are considering leaving their organizations in the next five years.
70% of doctors and 58% of nurses plan to stay at their organization for at least five more years
There is clearly a disconnect here – clinicians are feeling personal accomplishment and engagement, yet they are still considering leaving. Why? It seems that some of these caring, altruistic professionals are not being cared for in return and are instead being overwhelmed with demands and administrative burdens that prevent them from delivering care in the way they signed up to do.
Strategy
Firstly, ensure that your valuable people have a good work life balance and are paid fairly. Make sure that they have clear professional growth paths, are valued and treated with gratitude. Listen, through all channels, and regularly for feedback on what is and isn’t working, and take steps to rectify issues.
Trend 4: Comfort with AI starts with making care delivery easier
Artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing everything, and its potential for improving healthcare is huge. However, the people using it daily need to trust it. Currently, 53% of doctors and nurses are comfortable using AI to handle admin tasks, but when it comes to listening empathetically to patients, comfort drops to 33%, and to only 28% for listening in patient rooms.
We’re back to emotion again, which is central to patient experience. Currently, most clinicians believe that AI cannot replace human connection, and are protective of their clinician/patient interactions.
Strategy
When rolling out an AI system, start with administrative tasks, to demonstrate AI’s reliability in alleviating friction and pain points. When developing AI in other areas, such as online patient portals which are vital for communication, include clinicians from the start, listen to them, incorporate their feedback into improvements, but respect their right to decline participation. Clinicians’ protectiveness of their patients is a gift – it will ensure AI is developed to enhance the whole healthcare experience meaningfully.
How Qualtrics can help improve customer experience in healthcare
From patients to families to providers and products, at Qualtrics we’re all for crafting the best healthcare experiences.
Qualtrics® XM® offers one centralized customer experience management platform to take your patient and provider experience to the next level and beyond, and enhance every healthcare interaction in your organization.
When you listen at scale, across every channel, and act quickly on what your people say, you have a unique opportunity to shape the future of healthcare and improve healthcare customer experience.
Patients’ and providers’ emotions and experiences don’t just matter – they define the system’s success. Prioritizing people is key to reliability, while complex, closed loop systems deliver exceptional performance and increased patient satisfaction.
Discover what patients need, understand how they feel, and predict what they’ll do next – with Qualtrics XM.
Free eBook: 2025 Healthcare Experience Trends Report