Too many options are a turnoff, help me help myself with a smart recommendation. Always-on acknowledgement breeds loyalty better than hustling for rewards. Physicians are the brand and need to know why that matters.

Elevated insights build brands. It communicates needs that are intuitive and actionable. 

It is the thing management needs to hear – the starting-points, endgames and level-sets that make companies great, all wrapped into one. But, insights are elusive and the result of thousands of points of feedback, so where do you start and how do you get there? The answer is different every time. In my experience, teams that listen to their customers consistently, in multiple ways, are those that develop strong consumer-centric cultures, anchored in elusive yet essential, elevated insights.

At Big Village we’re lucky to be working with ConvenientMD who is developing a body of work centered on listening to their customers (patients). The New England based urgent care provider initially set off with Big Village to obtain perceptions and priorities relative to an innovative care concept the team was working to assess. We connected with target consumers, listened intently to their opinions, ideas and preferences, and together developed a patient point of view. This work was done with Big Village Digital Hives, an online market research community where consumers are recruited to connect and participate in research activities in an environment similar to a social media platform. With the findings meant to shape strategy at the executive level, the always-on Digital Hive delivered the rich, colorful qualitative feedback necessary to build a narrative that was true to the patient experience – confirming some executive team hypotheses and serving to inform and develop others.  

With key findings in hand related to a critical strategic concept and existing post-visit customer satisfaction measurements, John Aldrich, ConvenientMD’s Chief Marketing Officer, wanted to build out ways to listen more broadly to the marketplace – more specifically to existing patients about their experiences with ConvenientMD and competitors, aiming to identify and consistently invest in areas critical to customer experience and brand perception to grow the business.

“In healthcare, patient experience is everything. While many providers say they put ‘patients first’, most rarely take an honest look at their operation from the customer’s perspective, and even fewer take action. Big Village has been an important partner for us by providing the relevant customer insights we need to ensure we’re always improving and keeping pace with consumer expectations.”

– John Aldrich, CMO, ConvenientMD

Working closely with John and his team, Big Village built out brand and customer experience tracking streams. Both programs work to consistently bring measurement data into the organization that supports decision making in areas consumers have identified as critical to their experiences and perceptions of ConvenientMD. Importantly, an initial baseline study of patients worked to identify key drivers of satisfaction in patient experience. This set of attributes are consistently measured via ongoing data collection with recent ConvenientMD patients and embedded in the broader marketplace read on brand awareness being drawn through a brand tracking study. Key drivers serve as critical (to the patient) performance indicators as management receives the data.

The experiences and attributes measured build on a foundation of internal knowledge and is interpreted in the context of health and economic conditions to bring meaningful, actionable findings to drive strategy and tactics (think urgent care needs at the height of COVID). Roll-ups serve to inform and set strategy while ongoing review of patient experiences at the point of service are set to begin this year to support, and further contextualize, the ConvenientMD teams on location who benefit from hearing and adapting to patient needs.

In all, John is building a strong foundation that supports brand, marketing/promotion, operations and ultimately the bottom line – and it’s not an instant fix. The coming year is likely to have ConvenientMD exploring more areas of opportunity with employee satisfaction tracking and behavioral audience insights layering in detail essential to everyday success in developing a growing arsenal of elevated insights.