With the growth of technology, the healthcare sector has adopted highly sophisticated technologies like Big data, electronic health/medical record (EHR/EMR) in their software products. These software’s are used for a myriad of purposes like secure management of clinical data, payment procedures and claims that ensure smooth functioning of health-care business. With so many tech-companies supplying healthcare-related software products, customer success in healthcare has become an indispensable part.

Healthcare industry is growing at a rapid rate with a CAGR of 13% and is expected to reach the market cap of $76 bn by the year 2025. Where around 56% of the market is covered by services, the remaining market size consists of healthcare software products.

Customer success is as applicable in the service industry as it is in products. Yet, because of the use of technology to gain valuable information to conduct customer success operations, it is more prevalent in product-based firms.

Healthcare industry poses a unique challenge for the vendors to help their customers succeed because of the immense complexity of medical standards they need to follow. The time has come when patients are viewed as needy and docile by health-related companies. With increasing competition, they have to focus on becoming customer-centric to sustain in their niche.

Hence, a few trends and best practices are worth following for such companies.

Customer success best practices in healthcare

With top tech players like IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and CompuGroup joining the bandwagon of healthcare products, there is a lot of disruption taking place in the way customers are served. Few of the best practices that will keep you ahead of the curve are as below.

#1 Build user-friendly products

The biggest change in the collective perception of users of healthcare SaaS products is that it is shifting from fear and sickness-based utility to proactive healthcare experiences. Diseases can be managed if the products provide right information at the right time to its users. Hence, the core focus while building such products should be on becoming user-friendly.

The way information is revealed to the patients can be transformed into something more meaningful rather than giving hard-numbers which only medical practitioners understand. Also, there should be a process for the users to connect with the brand wherein they can leave their feedback. And these feedbacks should become an integral part of developing feature roadmap for the product.

#2 Proactive medical treatment

With Big Data, predicting the course of a disease using the genetic makeup of a patient has become realistic. Patients can be diagnosed well in advance and prescribed with the preventative measures for heart diseases or diabetes based on their genetic research. This feature is essentially helpful for the patients who regularly perform a full-body checkup on a yearly or semi-annual basis.

This is also relevant in the SaaS companies providing predictive analytics services in the pharma sector. Companies can use this service to transform new drugs into precision medicine therapies. Using this service would allow you to stay ahead of the competition in supplying medical products to a wider market.

#3 Simplify customer communication

For B2B healthcare SaaS companies, it is essential to follow the government standards regarding data privacy of their customer’s patients. One such law is HIPAA compliance. But customers often don’t have time to get into the details of such compliance. Hence, it is your responsibility to keep the customer informed in a most simplistic language that they can understand.

As long as you are able to win customer’s trust through genuinely following these guidelines, they should be fine with it. Keep them informed of all such measures that you took care of without involving too much attention from them. It is best to keep them focused more on the business outcomes for which they have purchased your medical SaaS product.

#4 Need of a 360-degree patient view

With increasing complexity of patients’ health, there are often various specialists involved to diagnose and treat a patient. Each of them has a limited view of the patient’s health based on which they prescribe their treatments. It is a loss to the patient and hence a need for a 360-degree patient view arises.

If you are into developing a healthcare app, you must consider developing a feature that resolves this common issue. There are companies who are already doing it e.g. Philips has partnered with Salesforce to deliver a cloud-based healthcare digital platform.

#5 Enable cross-pollination of customer success

Customer success is an evolving field. There are new developments happening in different parts of the world in this field. Hence, keeping an open ear for the latest customer success insights would be quite valuable. You know your field best and by listening to the customer-centricity gurus, you can tailor those solutions best to your own niche.

Follow the inspiring leaders in the field of customer success like Lincoln Murphy, Nick Mehta, Dan Steinman, etc. in platforms like LinkedIn or Twitter. Keep yourself abreast of the latest knowledge they share in the CS community and decide which ones suit best to your needs.

Customer Success trends in Healthcare

Few trends worth noticing in 2021 are:

1. Platform as a Service (PaaS) is becoming a more enticing option for the cloud-based healthcare providers. As companies are focusing more on patient retention and acquisition, PaaS is being used more widely by them because it allows them to create custom apps and includes a software development kit (SDK).

2. Pay-per-use is becoming a new pricing model offering customers more flexibility. Instead of charging patients on a monthly or annual basis, offering them an option to pay only when they need your service is becoming more successful in the healthcare industry.

3. Transparency is becoming a key differentiating factor. With the advanced technology of storing customer’s health records over the cloud, doctors can easily access a patient’s medical history through SaaS and EMRs. It has been surveyed that over 64% of physicians have access to patient’s records through EHRs.

4. Telemedicine has totally changed the way patients used to see the doctor. Now they can get medical treatment right from the comfort of their home. This is especially useful for bed-ridden patients or those who are in remote locations.

Final Take

Healthcare sector is among the last ones where customers are getting empowered. The core values of providing service to the customers is pervading slowly in this sector as more and more cross-industrial collaboration is happening. With the advent of technology in the healthcare sector, the medical entrepreneurs are focusing more on bringing customer-centric values into their businesses.

No doubt, customer success grows revenues for a business but at its core it is much more than that. Similar to the core value of healthcare, which is to serve humanity, customer success is also changing the world for the better. It is much wider than generating more business from a customer for it is altogether changing the face of the service industry by enhancing the quality of experience in each transaction. And since these transactions are the very fabric of our modern social dynamic, it is transforming the world towards a more caring and interdependent society.

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