How To Identify The Right Content That Helps Your Patients Move From Touchpoint To Touchpoint Through Their Customer Journey
Why would a patient choose you over another practice? Why would he visit you over and over again and bring along his friends and family members? If you can understand your patient more than any other practitioner in your area and learn from your services how you can engage more effectively to bring more patients to your practice you have the opportunity to capitalize on a competitive advantage that ensures growth and profit for the long term. When your practice is patient-centric you can transform your organization and business to the next level with customer journey mapping. Customers have expectations, experiences, and reflections across a product or service lifecycle. Through customer journey mapping businesses can create an illustration of the several stages of the customer journey from the first touchpoint to sale and post-sale advocacy. Those stages include the presale stage of awareness, consideration stage, decision and purchase phase, retention phase, and advocacy. Understanding each of those stages for every product and service is key to building and sustaining a successful business. Moreover, most marketers agree that customer loyalty is not achieved by the satisfying initial experience with the product or service, instead a complete series of experiences that constitute a compelling journey that keeps him coming again for more and referring others to visit you too.
Over the years of studying how to improve customer experiences and the journey overall to keep them coming for more, researchers have come up with a framework they called customer journey matrix to help marketers and managers in designing those compelling journeys and includes four archetypes:
- A routine journey is effortless and predictable. With known outcomes, one can predict a journey of patient scheduling for an eye exam. It consists of getting a prescription and making glasses.
- A joyride journey is effortless and unpredictable. With unknown outcomes, what starts with a routine eye exam and continues in prescribing disposable contact lenses may end up losing sales to online contact lens sellers. To avoid unknown outcomes practitioners should dispatch contact lens orders covering all the period until the next appointment as well as offer delivery services to avoid ordering lenses from online sellers.
- A trek is effortful and predictable. Pushes practices to set reminders and schedules for the next eye exams and contact lens replacement.
- An odyssey is effortful and unpredictable leading practices to guide patients coming for an eye exam with the intention of choosing a new frame, to choose their frames before dilation and before starting their eye exam. This step leads to patients carrying their chosen eyeglasses to the exam room and having their eye doctor comment on their choice.
There won’t be one journey design that fits all situations. However, since we are in a highly competitive market we have to employ many archetypes that bring up the product that ensures a compelling customer journey that keeps the customer coming over and over again. While there are many ways to design the customer journey, using the customer journey matrix is one way to choose among four archetypes that are routines, joyrides, treks, and odyssey.