“If a customer likes you and continues to like you, they will do business with you. If they don’t, they won’t.”- Paul Greenberg, Managing Principal of The 56 Group, a customer strategy company, and Author of “CRM at the Speed of Light”.
Among thousands of definitions of “customer experience” (CX), I couldn’t find a simpler and better one. In today’s highly-competitive and turbulent business environment, customer experience controls whether a product, a service, a company or a whole industry is successful or not. Dental Industry is no exception. But before we talk about how Dentacoin could help global dental industry to implement a patient-driven strategy, let’s have a closer look to the ubiquitous importance of customer experience.
Why is customer experience so important?
According to the Huffington Post, 70 percent of companies that deliver outstanding customer experience rely on customer feedback . Smart companies have already realized the essential importance of bringing customer intelligence into all business processes. Thus, new-age organizations don’t just passively wait for a random customer to write a review on Facebook or to imperceptibly drop a face-to-face comment, so that they could get an idea about the perceived CX. Instead, they proactively invite customers to be a part of the development process by asking for feedback, recommendations, ideas.
Therefore, a co-creation process is formed, where companies and customers work together to create and optimize products, services, certain activities and processes. Customers are not only invited to the business stage; they get the leading role in the show.
This paradigm shift requires an infrastructure, which enables customers to freely and regularly give their feedback and thus helps companies to optimize the overall customer journey in accordance to customers’ needs. The old “Give-them-what-you-have-and-teach-them-to-like-it” approach doesn’t seem to work anymore.
Who has the control over customer experience?
Here comes the tricky part. Customers nowadays are more informed and more empowered than ever before, and on the top of that — overloaded with choices. Among these choices, there are products/services/companies/industries they trust and others — they don’t. Choice is often determined by trust, both closely related to customer experience (own CX and others’).
But is customer experience something that could be controlled or owned by companies? Most certainly not. Customer experience is only owned by the customer. What every company does need however, as mentioned above, is to deliver an infrastructure where customers have the freedom to raise their voice and companies have the possibility to easily implement customers’ wisdom into the workflow. This self-learning infrastructure should be designed for continuous improvement based on measured customer feedback.
Moving to a customer-driven strategy will then lead to a positive word-of-mouth effect — the most trusted source of information for customers worldwide.
Is this customer-driven approach ubiquitously applicable?
Some will argue that depending on the industry, business regulations, government rules, compliance, it might not always be possible to apply this level of customer-driven strategy. I would call this statement into doubt.
No matter how strong is the institutional control over a certain industry, nobody can control the customer experience and its tremendous impact on the industry. No regulatory authority, no central institution, no powerful organization or individual could control the industry better and stronger than the customer community. However pleasant the opposite idea might be, it seems more like an Utopian one.
Healthcare Industry e.g. is a highly regulated industry for understandable reasons. The role of regulatory bodies in ensuring that certain standards are maintained is undoubted and of the utmost importance. However, as a patient you wouldn’t trust a dental practice only because it is approved by the Government, would you? But you would consider trusting it because a friend of yours has been there. And you would consider trusting the thousands positive reviews about it. You would consider trusting the patient community.
People… It’s always about people trusting other people.
So, how does Dentacoin fit in this new-age business reality?
There is nothing more valuable to dentists than constant, trustworthy feedback from the patient community. But what if this community doesn’t exist yet? What if patients have no tribune to speak their minds and therefore — to contribute to the overall quality improvement of the industry? This is where Dentacoin steps in.
Through creating and implementing the first Blockchain-based platform for trusted dental treatment reviews, Dentacoin will allow patients to raise their voice. Simultaneously, dentists will have access to up-to-date, extremely valuable market research data and qualified patient feedback — the most powerful tool to improve service quality and to establish a loyal patient base. Through a self-executing Smart Contract, the Dentacoin review platform will assure optimal autonomy, trust, speed and safety.
Dentacoin’s one-of- a-kind feedback platform will be supported by various other value-creating solutions: a dental insurance model, a healthcare database, an aftercare mobile app, an educational website. All devoted to the same purpose — to improve dental care quality worldwide by giving the power to the hands of the people.
Through Dentacoin, patients will become the drivers, the influencers, the decision makers, when it comes to their own health. After all, it is the patient experience that matters. It is the patient experience that should set the direction.
Originally published at www.dentacoin.com on May 25, 2017.
