What can you as a healthcare provider do to improve the customer journey within your organization? You do not always have influence on long waiting times or procedures. Still, there is a lot you can do. But how do you find out the customer experience of a target group consisting of people in need of care? And how do you get started with improvements? With those questions, the mental health care organization (GGZ in Dutch), Mediant from Twente approached us.
The mental healthcare provider wanted to provide insight into the customer journey of three target groups: clients, employees and referrers. The aim was to find out how they could make a positive contribution to this. How do you make the healthcare process that clients go through as bearable as possible? How do new employees experience the start of their work at Mediant? And how do referrers, such as general practitioners, experience the collaboration with the healthcare institution?
The Mediant team was looking for tools to get started independently and to implement improvements. This way, even after the project has ended, the team is ready to constantly expand customer journeys and translate the insights into concrete actions. We taught Mediant everything about customer journey mapping and implementation, while the organization immediately applied this in practice under our guidance.
The people from Mediant started working independently and were supported by our customer experience experts. In groups, healthcare providers, researchers, and HR and marketing staff took part in workshops on research design, data processing and the creation of a customer journey map.
In between, they were given homework and assignments, and we held regular check-ins. This was based on a basis of protocols and guidelines that we drew up together in a workshop, the participants also entered a discussion with the target group. A final presentation followed at the end of the process.
They learned everything about customer journeys, how to conduct research, what questions to ask and how to find out the right information in an interview. The combination of this knowledge about customer journeys and their own healthcare expertise and experience yielded valuable results for Mediant.
With a good dose of involvement from Mediant and the guidance of GriDD, a number of great results have been achieved:
Sharing our knowledge with a group of enthusiastic employees from all kinds of different departments in this unique way was very interesting. We have spent a lot of time with the people from Mediant and developed a pleasant and flexible collaboration. It was great to enable this group of employees to do this themselves and to see how involved they were.
"The collaboration with GriDD was very pleasant and familiar. By giving tips and especially by letting the group do a lot by themselves, we were immersed in customer journey mapping. Gradually we were able to sharpen our interview questions, so that we obtained the right insights. The outcome is not a ready-made customer journey or a flowchart, but much more important: insight into the process, and also how we, as Mediant, can move forward with this in order to always have a good picture of our customers and to continue to improve our services."
Mediant is a mental healthcare organization. They offer help, advice and guidance to people with psychological and psychiatric problems. Mediant has departments for children and young people, adults and the elderly and a few specialist centres. In addition, Mediant also provides support in general practice.
