This article was written by Toni Klein, Co-Founder and Digital Practice Lead at Klein & Partners, which provides research and consulting services solely to the healthcare industry. Klein & Partners have developed, in partnership with Greystone.Net, a suite of tools to measure the Voice of the Digital Customer. 

Do you ever think about your website’s impact on how visitors feel about your brand? Or how that “brand feeling” impacts their interactions with your facilities, physicians and services? Do you monitor the voice of your customers? Many times, your website is a consumer’s first brand impression of your organization and that experience can help or hinder the relationship. 

A website creates one of five impressions for the visitor:

1. Reaffirms existing positive feelings about the brand. “Preaching to the choir”
   
   
2. Creates new positive feelings about the brand. “Expanding the choir”
   
   
3. Reaffirms existing negative feelings about the brand. “Losing an opportunity to turn bad feelings around”
   
   
4. Creates new negative feelings about the brand. “Most damaging because a visitor who previously liked your brand no longer does”
   
   
5. Makes no impact on feelings one way or the other. “A lost opportunity”

Data from the gSight^sm national survey database shows that while approximately 9% of visitors to a hospital website develop new positive feelings about the hospital/health system after a website visit, fully 8% of visitors develop new negative feelings about the hospital/health system after a website visit. 

Source:  gSight^sm National Database, August 2019

What does it mean if 8% of your visitors experienced new negative feelings about your organization? If your hospital gets 100,000 unique visitors annually to your website, that means 8,000 visitors left with a new negative feeling. If you get 1,000,000 unique visitors a year, the negative number rises to 80,000. Do those numbers scare you?

But more positively, just think if 9% (or more) of your visitors left with a new positive feeling about your organization. That’s 90,000 happier customers. For the first group, you need to understand their pain points and execute plans to improve. For the latter group, you want to replicate that success over and over.

According to Neal Linkon, Director of Marketing Operations for the Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin, “Hospitals must measure the website visitor experience, which in turn can unlock the level of satisfaction patients have.” Linkon went on to say, “In doing so, hospitals will be granted more repeat visits, higher levels recommendations and a stronger relationship between patients and the hospital itself.”

And, the feelings about the brand created by that website experience also impacts advocacy and your brand’s Net Promoter Score (NPS). The NPS is a measure of intent to recommend your brand. Negative website experiences create more detractors than promoters of your brand (i.e., negative word-of-mouth).

Other insights from the gSight database found that different web tasks elicited different feelings:

• New positive feelings are created by learning more about the hospital/system or looking up a specific medical condition.
  
  
• Positive feelings are often felt by job seekers.
  
  
• Re-affirmed or newly created negative feelings often come from paying/reviewing a bill or trying to schedule/change an appointment (i.e., transact business).
  
  
• Most newly created negative feelings come from frustrated visitors searching for information.

Going to SHSMD this month? Learn more about how the Voice of the Digital Customer solutions are becoming a vital cog in the emerging MarTech stack for many health systems at a pre-conference workshop on Sunday afternoon, September 8^th featuring Neal Linkon, Kelly Faley from Sharp HealthCare and Kathy Divis and Mike Schneider from Greystone.Net. You can also learn more about gSight’s voice of the digital customer solutions at https://greystone.net/gSight.