A Midwest Children’s Hospital, which has seen tremendous growth in the last few years, continues to strive to be the first choice for pediatric care in the state. Like other healthcare systems, it’s seeing an increase in visitors to its website via both desktops and mobile devices. Their website serves as a primary channel for new customers and a resource for returning visitors.
Key Takeaways
The Children’s Hospital found that by combining real time tracking of how visitors use the website with visitors’ insights and verbatim comments, they could prioritize the use of
resources to address specific web issues that harm the visitor experience. Examples of changes propagated by the gSight data and usability testing included:
- Re-organizing the patient/visitor section
- Making urgent care information easier to find
- Adding telephone numbers to the sub-specialist section
- Identifying an impediment to online donations.
Challenges
- Website visitors expressed concerns about their difficulty in finding information on the website
- Usability issues not directly managed by the marketing operations team weren’t recognized
- A high number of drop-offs on the online donation form
- Difficulty in bringing all the feedback together in one coherent view.
Their Story
To begin this journey, the hospital implemented the gSight pop-up survey on their site. The survey uses a standardized set of questions with phrase-based responses. The use of standard questions allows for comparative benchmarks and leaderboard scores. Verbatim responses were used to help add insight and color to the analysis. The survey invitation was presented to 50% of visitors who were on their site for at least 30 seconds and excluded internal IP addresses.
Through listening and acting on the customer feedback, the marketing operations team focused on the top priority to fix: “Making things easier to find.” Other areas to improve
included:
- Improving the usefulness of the search function
- Reducing the number of clicks needed to find information
- Making the site more visually appealing.
Over time and by making identified changes, the improvement scores moved from the “Key Improvement Priorities” quadrant to the “Monitor” and “Keep Up the Good Work” quadrants.
Two Uses of the gSight Feedback
First, the verbatim responses helped the team improve the urgent care experience. For example, visitors provided feedback that the “urgent care appointment link needs to be easier to find” and that “searching for children’s urgent care could be easier.” One visitor said: “I went to the main/normal website to find a phone number for neuro-psych and could not find it. I also couldn’t find simple information on which building it is in! Why don’t the web pages for locations list the departments at that building!” These content changes were quick and simple and improved the customer experience. After a monthly review of verbatim responses, these comments were no longer mentioned.
Second, the marketing operations team faced another challenge – Why were online donations form drop offs so high? The team used feedback from gSight to better understand visitor attitudes and data from the Hotjar tools to better understand visitor behaviors on their site. With Hotjar, a set of behavioral analytic tools, they were able to determine where in the donation form that visitors were dropping off and removed one of the questions that seemed to most disrupt donations. As a result of removing this one question, the hospital achieved a 25% increase in the donation form completion rate. Stakeholders were delighted!
gSight Impact
The hospital now routinely includes key metrics from its gSight dashboard as part of their shared MarCom metrics to measure the overall website effectiveness. For example, they share the Brand Impact Scores paying particular attention to the net new negative impact of the website. gSight data suggests that, on average, 8% of website visitors leave with a new negative impression of the hospital. This Children’s Hospital strives to stay below that level with an overall net new positive impact.