How to Improve Customer Experience in Healthcare

By Your Health Magazine Contributor

Your Health Magazine Contributor

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How to Improve Customer Experience in Healthcare

Healthcare is the ultimate test of customer experience because every interaction carries clinical, emotional, operational, and regulatory weight.

A missed call, delayed response, or poor handoff is not just a service issue. It can affect access to care, patient trust, staff workload, and compliance risk.

In healthcare, customer experience is patient experience. It’s how people feel when they try to schedule care, ask a question, follow up, or resolve a concern. It starts before the visit and continues long after.

Improving it takes more than faster service. It requires secure, connected, intelligent communication built for the realities of care delivery.

Below, we’ll look at what the research shows, which tactics make a measurable difference, and how to choose a compliant healthcare CX platform that helps healthcare organizations improve access, protect trust, and support patients at every step.

10 Ways to Improve Patient Experience

• Fix phone access first. Answer every call, minimize hold times, and route callers correctly the first time. Phone remains the dominant channel for patient contact, and it’s often where the greatest friction occurs.
• Offer self-service online scheduling. Let patients book, reschedule, and cancel appointments without calling in. Self-service scheduling that’s easy to use can help reduce inbound call volume and no-shows.
• Resolve requests in a single contact. When front-desk staff and approved automated systems have access to relevant patient records, they can update appointments, answer billing questions, or route refill requests without extra transfers or callbacks.
• Send proactive appointment reminders. Automated reminders by text or email cut no-show rates without requiring staff to make outbound calls.
• Simplify billing communication. Explain charges in plain language, offer text-based payment links, and give patients a way to ask billing questions without sitting on hold.
• Conduct structured post-visit and post-discharge outreach. Timely follow-ups can help identify potential complications, support recovery at home, and show patients that their care continues beyond the visit or hospital stay.
• Train staff on empathy, not just process. Patients who contact a provider may be anxious, unwell, or dealing with sensitive issues. Staff should acknowledge the concern, communicate clearly, and resolve the issue efficiently. That combination of empathy and execution has a direct impact on how patients experience the interaction.
• Measure every interaction, not a sample. Manual call review only covers a fraction of volume. AI-based interaction analytics can score sentiment and outcomes across all conversations, surfacing patterns a spot-check would miss.
• Use a patient engagement platform to unify the experience. Consolidating phone, text, chat, and portal messaging helps reduce handoff friction and preserve context across channels. Platforms such as RingCX with AIR Pro can support HIPAA-covered contact center operations. AIR Pro adds voice-first agentic AI that can handle multi-step requests like scheduling, refill routing, and status lookups. This frees staff to focus on more complex patient needs.
• Close the loop on patient concerns. In healthcare, complaint management should go beyond documentation. A defined service recovery process helps ensure issues are reviewed, addressed, and escalated when appropriate. It also gives leaders visibility into recurring access, communication, billing, or care coordination gaps that affect patient trust and satisfaction.

What Is Customer Experience in Healthcare?

Customer experience in healthcare is the patient’s experience across every nonclinical and care-adjacent interaction with a provider, including scheduling, intake, referrals, follow-up, billing, and ongoing communication.

Healthcare CX measures whether the patient could reach someone, whether the request got resolved without a repeat contact, and whether the interaction added friction or removed it.

Customer experience in healthcare spans:

• Access: whether a patient can reach a front-desk staff or use a reliable self-service system on the first attempt, through phone, online scheduling, or another supported channel.
• Resolution: whether a request such as a refill, a billing question, or a scheduling change is resolvedin one contact or requires a callback.
• Continuity: whether the person or system handling the interaction can access the patient’s record, so the patient does not have to repeat information already on file.
• Communication: whether billing, diagnosis, and next-step instructions are explained in plain language rather than clinical or administrative shorthand.
• Compliance: whether channels that create, receive, maintain, or transmit protected health information are used in compliance with HIPAA and, when a vendor is acting as a business associate, are covered by an appropriate Business Associate Agreement.

Customer experience in healthcare is related to, but not the same as, the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS). HCAHPS is a standardized survey used to measure patients’ experiences during a hospital stay, including communication with doctors and nurses, responsiveness, discharge information, and the hospital environment.

Healthcare CX looks at the broader journey around care. It includes the everyday interactions patients rely on before and after a visit, such as scheduling, intake, referrals, billing, follow-up, and ongoing communication. These touchpoints often shape how easy or difficult it feels to get care.

Why is customer experience harder in healthcare than in other industries?

Customer experience is harder in healthcare because the interactions are often high-stakes, intermittent, and highly regulated. Unlike routine customer transactions, healthcare interactions often begin when a patient needs care, clarity, or reassurance. They may be scheduling an appointment, following up on test results, asking about medication, or resolving a billing issue, often while navigating an unfamiliar process.

• The stakes are personal and financial at once. A delayed diagnosis, missed follow-up, denied claim, or billing error can create both medical and financial consequences for the patient. As a result, even small points of friction can damage trust more quickly than they would in industries like retail or hospitality.
• Regulation limits what channels can carry. When a platform creates, receives, maintains, or transmits protected health information on behalf of a HIPAA-covered entity, the vendor generally acts as a business associate and an appropriate Business Associate Agreement is required.
• Healthcare interactions are often need-based, so each touchpoint matters. For many patients, contact occurs around a visit, test result, referral, medication question, or billing issue. A poor interaction can disproportionately affect perceptions of access, trust, and continuity of care.
• Legacy systems make it harder to connect patient conversations to patient records. Calls, texts, and chats may happen in one platform, while patient information lives in the electronic health record. Without integration, staff may not have the information needed to resolve the request in real time or update the record once it’s handled.

What does the research say about customer experience in healthcare?

Published research consistently identifies access and responsiveness as core drivers of healthcare experience. It also shows that CX performance is not a soft measure. It is an operational and financial variable tied to patient retention, staff efficiency, care continuity, and revenue performance. Each figure below is attributed to its original source.

• 46% of healthcare providers believe patient access improved over the prior year, but only 18% of patients agree, according to Experian Health’s 2026 State of Patient Access survey of 200 providers and 1,000 patients, published March 24, 2026.
• 45% of medical practice leaders named eligibility and prior authorization the most time-consuming phone task, and 31% named scheduling, according to an MGMA Stat poll of 294 respondents published March 11, 2026.
• By 2029, agentic AI will autonomously resolve 80% of common customer service issues without human intervention, reducing operational costs by 30%, according to a Gartner press release dated March 5, 2025.

How do you improve customer experience in healthcare?

Improving customer experience in healthcare begins with removing friction from access, because scheduling and phone contact are where patients most often give up. The tactics below are ordered by how directly each one affects whether a patient can get care.

• Fix phone access before adding digital channels. MGMA’s 2026 polling shows phone work consuming the largest share of practice staff time, so adding a chatbot while calls go unanswered moves the problem rather than solving it.
• Deploy AI call handling for routine requests. AI can handle or route appropriate administrative tasks such as scheduling, directions, and refill requests, freeing staff to focus on work such as eligibility and prior authorization.
• Integrate the EHR into the conversation. An agent who can see the patient’s record during the call resolves the issue in one contact, while an agent who cannot creates a callback.
• Make outreach proactive rather than reactive. Appointment reminders, pre-visit intake, and post-discharge follow-up reduce no-shows and readmissions without requiring the patient to initiate contact.
• Measure every interaction, not a sample. Manual call review covers a small fraction of volume, while AI-based interaction analytics scores sentiment and outcomes across 100% of conversations.

Bottom line: Healthcare organizations that improve access first can see significant CX gains, since access barriers are a common reason patients consider switching providers. Avita Care Solutions reported keeping call abandonment under 5% across all of its locations after consolidating patient communications on RingCentral.

What should you look for in a CX platform for healthcare?

The first filter is compliance coverage because a platform that cannot lawfully carry protected health information is disqualified regardless of feature set. Evaluate in this order.

● Compliance coverage first: Confirm the vendor signs a Business Associate Agreement and holds current SOC 2 and HITRUST CSF certification.

● Voice as a native channel: Confirm inbound voice is built into the platform rather than dependent on a third-party add-on. Phone remains a primary access channel for patients, so voice quality, routing, reliability, and reporting should be core capabilities.

● System-of-record integration: Confirm the platform can read from and write back to the EHR, so staff can access relevant information during the interaction and keep records current afterward.

● AI that resolves rather than deflects: Evaluate whether the platform’s AI completes tasks such as scheduling or status lookup, or only routes the caller onward.

● Analytics across full volume: Confirm the platform analyzes every interaction rather than a manual sample, which is what makes CX measurement reliable enough to act on.

Customer Experience Platforms for Healthcare

Healthcare CX technology spans several categories, including CCaaS platforms, digital front door solutions, patient access and navigation tools, CRM systems, and payer/member engagement platforms. The right fit depends on the use case, care setting, and population served, whether the priority is improving access, reducing contact center burden, coordinating care, or supporting members across benefits and claims.

The platforms below illustrate several options available to healthcare organizations modernizing patient engagement.

• RingCentral (RingCX) is an AI-powered omnichannel contact center platform built for healthcare organizations managing high volumes of patient communication across voice and digital channels. It supports HIPAA-covered workflows with HITRUST CSF certification and a Business Associate Agreement for eligible Covered Entity customers. RingCX brings voice, SMS, chat, and contact center operations into one platform, with integrations to systems such as EHRs. Its AI capabilities include AI Receptionist (AIR) for routine requests, such as call routing, FAQs, and appointment booking, and AIR Pro for Healthcare for more complex patient interactions. AIR Pro for Healthcare is currently in early access.
• League operates a composable digital health platform that health plans and systems use to build member-facing applications, combining a personalization engine with FHIR-native data and pre-built modules for health engagement, benefits navigation, and program enrollment.
• Sharecare centers on AskMD, a health navigation tool that reads a patient’s records, history, and coverage to generate a personalized action plan, matching patients to in-network providers, comparing prescription prices, and translating lab results into plain language.
• mPulse focuses on omnichannel member outreach for Medicare, Medicaid, and commercial health plans, combining predictive analytics with AI-personalized messaging; the company reports a 22 percentage point increase in Medicaid recertification rates and an 8x year-over-year increase in new-member content engagement among its health plan customers.
• Pager Health provides AI-assisted care navigation and triage delivered behind a health plan’s own branding, connecting members to providers, closing care gaps, and escalating to a clinician around the clock; the company reports a 66% virtual or home care resolution rate.
• Loyal is an end-to-end patient engagement platform for health systems, combining provider search, omnichannel scheduling, conversational AI chatbots, and online reputation management in one product.
• b.well Connected Health is a FHIR-native digital health platform that unifies a patient’s clinical, insurance, and wellness data into one consumer-facing experience, with modular products for care navigation, personalized outreach, and quality-measure automation.
• Salesforce Health Cloud with Agentforce 360 for Healthcare is a CRM-anchored engagement platform strongest for organizations already standardized on Salesforce, with published pricing starting at $350 per user per month for Enterprise and $525 for Unlimited, on annual contracts.
• HealthEdge serves health plans rather than providers directly; its Wellframe product handles digital member engagement alongside HealthEdge’s core administrative and care management systems.
• Zelis focuses on the financial side of the patient relationship, with tools for member cost transparency, claim pricing, and provider payments rather than clinical engagement.

Evaluate each platform through the same healthcare-specific lens: compliance, interoperability, workflow fit, and channel coverage. The strongest option is the one that aligns with the part of the patient journey you need to improve, whether that is access, navigation, follow-up, billing, or ongoing engagement.

Frequently asked questions

What compliance requirements apply to CX platforms in healthcare?

Healthcare CX platforms that create, receive, maintain, or transmit protected health information on behalf of a HIPAA-covered entity generally must operate under an appropriate Business Associate Agreement. HITRUST CSF certification and SOC 2 reporting can provide useful third-party assurance, but HIPAA does not require either certification.

Can AI improve customer experience in healthcare?

Yes, provided the AI operates inside the same compliance perimeter as the rest of the platform. Gartner predicts that by 2029 agentic AI will autonomously resolve 80% of common customer service issues without human intervention, reducing operational costs by 30%. The near-term gains in healthcare come from AI handling scheduling, status lookups, and document requests so staff can focus on eligibility, authorization, and patient care.

Which CX platforms support healthcare compliance requirements?

RingCentral supports HIPAA-regulated healthcare communications through eligible covered services and an applicable Business Associate Agreement. RingCX, RingEX, and the RingCentral app are HITRUST CSF certified. RingCentral also undergoes SOC 2+ assessments that include HIPAA-related controls, and offers a Business Associate Agreement to eligible paying Covered Entity customers.. Genesys, NICE, and Salesforce also serve healthcare, and compliance scope should be confirmed per product and per plan tier in every case.