25 August 2025

8 practical steps to improve healthcare customer experience

Quick summary

Healthcare experiences shape trust, treatment outcomes, and patient retention. In this guide, we highlight eight practical steps to improve healthcare customer experience, from setting clear goals to tracking progress. You’ll learn how to reduce friction and deliver more consistent connected care at every touchpoint.

Why is healthcare customer experience still broken?

Patients may get great medical care but still feel let down. Why? Because the journey in between —booking, waiting, billing, and follow-ups — is often confusing, inconsistent, and disconnected.

These gaps don’t just frustrate patients; they overwhelm staff and slow down care. For a system built to save lives, the experience itself is rarely designed with the patient in mind.

In this TheyDo article, we’ll show you how to improve healthcare customer experience by focusing on what really matters to patients. You’ll learn how to map the full journey, spot what’s not working, and help your teams fix it.

Why listen to us?

At TheyDo, we help healthcare teams turn patient journeys into measurable action. Our platform connects insights, pain points, and priorities across departments so providers can improve what matters most. Leading organizations trust us to make patient experiences smoother, faster, and more coordinated from first contact to follow-up.

What is customer experience?

Customer experience in healthcare refers to how patients perceive every interaction they have with a provider, from booking appointments and receiving care to follow-up communication and billing. It is not just about medical treatment; it includes:

How simple it is to schedule or reschedule an appointment
How clearly diagnoses, treatment plans, and costs are explained
How supported a patient feels during care transitions
How responsive and coordinated follow-up care is

Great care alone is not enough. Patients judge providers based on how smoothly everything fits together. A strong experience increases the chance that a patient will return or recommend your service to others.

Why good customer experience matters in healthcare

Reduce missed appointments and delays: Identify where communication or access breaks down so you can close gaps and keep patients on track with care.
Boost trust and long-term engagement: Deliver clear, consistent experiences that make patients feel heard so they return, refer others, and follow treatment plans.
Break down internal silos: Help care, admin, and billing teams see the full patient journey so they can respond faster and more effectively.
Improve care outcomes: Focus on the points where patients feel most confused, anxious, or unsupported to improve clarity, confidence, and follow-through.
Turn feedback into action: Map complaints, reviews, and survey insights to specific stages in the journey so staff know what to fix and where it matters most.

How to improve your customer experience

Step 1: Set experience goals that reflect patient priorities

Improving customer experience in healthcare starts by setting the right goals, but not just from an internal perspective. These goals should reflect what matters most to patients:

Feeling heard
Getting timely care
Understanding their treatment, etc.

When your CX goals are aligned with patient priorities, every improvement becomes easier to measure.

To align CX goals with patient priorities, use direct feedback to guide where you focus:

Post-visit surveys to learn what worked and what didn’t
Focus groups to surface emotional pain points and unmet expectations
Call transcripts or support logs to reveal recurring issues or delays

From there, define a few experience goals that are simple, specific, and measurable. For example:

Shorten average wait time for appointment scheduling
Improve clarity of discharge instructions
Reduce transfers during phone support

Keep these goals visible across your team’s workflow. When staff know what matters most to patients, they’re more likely to take action that supports it.

This focus also builds alignment across departments. Clinical, administrative, and support teams can rally around one outcome: improving the experience for every patient, not just solving operational issues.

On TheyDo, you can set your CX goals so that every team is aligned on what the focus is and track the impact of your activities on the business.

Step 2: Map the complete patient journey from start to finish

You cannot improve what you cannot see. Mapping the full patient journey helps you uncover what happens before, during, and after care.

Start by identifying the key phases of the journey. In healthcare, these typically include:

Symptom recognition and online research
Appointment scheduling and wait time
Intake, diagnosis, and treatment
Follow-up care, prescriptions, billing, and support

For each phase, ask:

What channels are involved? (Phone, portal, in-person, email)
Where do delays, confusion, or handoffs happen?
What is the emotional state of the patient at this step?

Use collaborative tools like TheyDo’s patient journey mapping to create shared visibility across teams. It ensures everyone sees the same journey and understands where the experience breaks down.

Step 3: Gather feedback and connect it to the journey

Once you’ve mapped out the patient journey, the next step is to fill it with real voices. Feedback brings the journey to life and helps you see what’s working and where trust breaks down.

But to be useful, feedback must be tied to specific stages, not just collected in a vacuum.

Start by pulling data from multiple sources:

Post-visit surveys that ask clear, stage-specific questions
Call logs and emails that reflect common frustrations
Online reviews or complaints that highlight emotional pain points
Operational data like delays, no-shows, or rescheduled appointments

As you collect this input, connect each piece of feedback to the corresponding step in the journey. For example, if patients complain about unclear instructions after discharge, tag that to the follow-up stage.

Platforms like TheyDo have a comprehensive customer journey mapping tool, which helps you tag insights directly to moments. This ensures teams see issues in context, making it easier to act on what matters and track improvements over time.

Step 4: Identify friction points across channels and teams

Once feedback is tied to the right steps in the journey, the next move is to figure out where things break down.

Patients rarely experience care as a single interaction; it’s a series of touchpoints that span departments, systems, and channels.

But when these handoffs are clunky or inconsistent, they create confusion, delays, and stress. Identifying these friction points is what turns scattered feedback into focused improvement.

Start by reviewing feedback already linked to journey steps. Look for hotspots where issues consistently arise. For instance, if multiple patients mention long delays after check-in, that signals a breakdown between intake and triage, not just a scheduling problem.

Then:

Compare patient sentiment across different access points, like online scheduling vs. phone, or portal vs. in-person check-in
Map out handoffs between departments, such as front desk to nursing or radiology to billing. These are common places for dropped information or delays
Watch for channel-switching friction, such as patients starting online but being forced to call or repeat information in person
Talk to cross-functional staff to understand internal blockers that impact the patient’s external experience

To bring this into a central view, TheyDo’s Journey AI can help highlight where pain points accumulate across the full journey. It turns raw data into insights by mining, enriching, and summarizing feedback so you can spot opportunities to enhance CX.

Step 5: Segment patients to personalize touchpoints and communication

Once you’ve found the pain points, it’s time to adjust the experience to fit different types of patients.

Some want quick answers, while others need more guidance. If everyone gets the same experience, some feel confused or left out.

Identify key segments that reflect different goals, expectations, or barriers. For example:

First-time visitors often need more guidance and reassurance at intake
Chronic care patients value consistent follow-up and self-service options
Tech-savvy users may prefer mobile reminders and digital forms
Elderly patients might rely more on in-person support and phone-based updates

Group patients not just by age or condition, but by behavior and intent. Why did they come in? What channels do they prefer? How much help do they need?

Personalization starts with seeing patients as individuals. Tools like TheyDo enable you to create customer personas and link them directly to journeys, allowing you to see how each user progresses through the experience.

By aligning touchpoints with each group’s context, you can enhance their experience where it matters most and measure the impact on your institution.

Step 6: Prioritize fixes based on impact and feasibility

Once you’ve segmented patients and tailored communications to their needs, the next challenge is knowing what to act on first.

Not all issues have the same weight. Some problems affect only a few, while others impact many and have real consequences. Prioritization means investing in changes that will be the most beneficial for the most people.

To prioritize right, start by evaluating:

Patient value: Will solving this problem significantly improve outcomes, access, or satisfaction?
Operational effort: How much time, budget, or coordination does the fix require?
Risk of inaction: What happens if this issue remains unresolved?

Scoring each issue using these lenses gives teams a clearer sense of urgency. But aligning around what to tackle first can still be tough without a shared system.

Check out our guide on how to prioritize fixes for more detailed explanations. You can start by scoring each opportunity using TheyDo’s built-in framework.

Step 7: Assign clear ownership and track experience improvements

Prioritizing improvements only works if someone or a team follows through. Once an issue is identified, assign each opportunity to a named person or team. This ensures accountability and keeps progress from slipping through the cracks.

To assign ownership effectively:

Name one person or department (e.g., “Lisa in Patient Access” or “Front Desk”)
Clarify the goal they’re responsible for (e.g., reducing intake wait times)
Tie the task to a journey step, so it’s clear where it fits
Add a deadline or check-in date to maintain momentum

Tracking progress is just as important. Use shared dashboards or digital tools to:

Mark which improvements are “in progress” or “done.”
Flag blockers or dependencies early
Show impact by linking actions to patient outcomes

Tools like TheyDo let you track each solution within the journey, linking it to the people, systems, or services it touches. This builds transparency and momentum across teams.

Step 8: Test changes, measure progress, and refine continuously

Once each improvement has an owner, you need to know if it actually works. That means testing it in the real world, tracking how it performs, and tweaking it based on what you learn. This step keeps your CX work from stalling or drifting off course.

Start by defining what you expect to change. Be clear:

Faster intake times?
Fewer follow-up calls?
Better satisfaction after discharge?

Next, pick a small pilot area, like one clinic or care team, and test the fix. This helps you spot problems early without affecting everyone.

To measure progress, track metrics tied to the exact journey step:

For intake: wait times, check-in satisfaction
For support: resolution time, repeat calls
For discharge: understanding of aftercare, follow-through rates

Review those numbers weekly or monthly and compare them to your baseline. If things are improving, roll out the change more broadly. If not, talk to staff and patients, refine, and try again.

Improve healthcare customer experience with TheyDo

Improving healthcare customer experience is about building a system where feedback, behavior, and operations are connected, tracked, and improved continuously. That’s where TheyDo comes in.

With tools like Journey AI, structured taxonomy, and cross-functional collaboration features, you can map real experiences, uncover friction points, and align teams around what matters most to patients.