Customer Experience in Healthcare: Lessons from the Optics Patient Journey
Table of Contents:
- What customer experience in healthcare actually means
- The stage most providers cannot see
- What good looks like across the private patient journey
- How one clinic group turned enquiry insight into measurable improvement
- Five steps to improve customer experience in healthcare
- Questions people ask about customer experience in healthcare
- Where to start
What customer experience in healthcare actually means
The strongest healthcare customer experience is shaped across the whole journey, including the moments before someone becomes a patient.
Customer experience in healthcare covers every interaction across the care journey, not just the clinical episode. This includes the part of the journey most providers have little visibility of – the stretch before someone becomes a patient at all.
For private providers, that means looking beyond treatment and considering what happens when someone first searches for a service, sends an enquiry, picks up the phone or speaks to a practice about their options.
Definition: Customer experience in healthcare
Customer experience in healthcare is the sum of every interaction someone has with a provider across their whole journey: finding you, enquiring, booking, attending, being treated and being followed up. It includes the clinical care and everything around it. Patient satisfaction measures how one episode landed. Customer experience covers the whole relationship, including the part that happens before a patient has committed to anything.
In practice, customer experience in healthcare means:
- The experience starts before treatment. Every interaction, from the first enquiry to the booking conversation, contributes to how someone experiences a provider.
- The enquiry stage is often the blind spot. Phone calls, emails and booking conversations can have a major influence on whether someone feels confident enough to take the next step.
- Post-treatment feedback can appear strong. However, it only captures the experience of people who went ahead, rather than those who chose not to.
- Independent measurement can reveal the gap. Our work with OCL Vision measured its enquiry experience separately, using the insight to improve its score from 77% to the mid-90s
The stage most providers cannot see
Why post-treatment feedback flatters you
Post-treatment feedback can often be positively skewed. This is because it leaves a crucial part of the patient journey completely unmeasured.
The survivorship problem in healthcare feedback is that post-treatment surveys only reach the people who booked and went ahead. Anyone who made an enquiry, felt uncertain, struggled to get an answer or quietly chose another provider is largely omitted from the data.
That means strong Trustpilot scores and healthy referral rates can sit alongside a leaky enquiry line without contradiction. They’re measuring completely different parts of the experience.
Our work with OCL Vision provides a useful example. The organisation consistently received exceptional patient feedback following surgery, backed by industry-leading Trustpilot scores and strong referral performance. However, the organisation recognised that the journey begins long before clinical treatment takes place.
While post-treatment satisfaction was exceptionally strong, there was limited independent visibility of how prospective patients experienced the business before consultation and surgery.
What happens in those early conversations
The quality of an early enquiry can determine whether someone feels confident enough to take the next step.
Early-stage interactions, including telephone enquiries, online contact, out-of-hours messages and appointment booking conversations, play a crucial role in building trust and guiding patients through complex and often emotional healthcare decisions.
A prospective patient may be comparing providers, worrying about cost, feeling anxious about treatment or simply unsure what to ask. Good patient enquiry involves understanding what the person actually needs, explaining their options clearly and appropriately, offering reassurance where it’s needed, and making sure someone follows up when they say they will.
The challenge is that when these interactions don’t go well, the provider often gets no opportunity to put them right. Research from insight6 suggests only 1 in 26 unhappy customers complain. The rest just leave. By the time you hear about it, you’re seeing a fraction of the picture, and missing what your loyal customers actually value.
Measuring these early interactions gives providers a much clearer view of what prospective patients actually experience.
What good looks like across the private patient journey
A strong private patient experience is consistent across every touchpoint, from the very first enquiry through to aftercare and follow-up.
| Touchpoint | What the person is really judging | How to measure it |
| First phone enquiry | Whether you listened before you quoted, and whether you sounded like you had time for them | Telephone mystery shopping across different days and times, scored on quality of engagement rather than script compliance |
| Web form or email enquiry | Whether anyone replied, how fast, and whether the reply was personal or templated | Web and email mystery shopping, tracking response time and whether the reply answered the actual question asked |
| Out-of-hours contact | Whether the provider seems organised enough to be trusted with their care | Out-of-hours enquiry testing, which OCL Vision included in its programme |
| Booking and pre appointment | Whether they know what happens next, what it costs and what to bring | Journey mapping plus mystery shopping the booking conversation itself |
| Arrival and reception | Whether the welcome matched the phone call, and whether they felt expected | In-person or video mystery shopping of the reception experience |
| Aftercare and follow-up | Whether the interest in them continued after payment | Post-treatment feedback, which most providers already have, plus follow-up call auditing |
What’s important is consistency across all patient touchpoints. The experience someone gets on the phone has to survive contact with reception, clinical support and aftercare, or the trust built in that first conversation gets spent. That’s why patient satisfaction shouldn’t be viewed as the result of one interaction, but as the cumulative effect of the whole journey. For providers asking how to improve patient experience, measuring each stage independently is a practical place to start.
How one clinic group turned enquiry insight into measurable improvement
OCL Vision turned independent insight into practical changes that strengthened consistency and lifted enquiry experience scores from 77% to the mid-90s.
OCL Vision is a specialist eye care provider with clinics in central London, Elstree and Kensington. While they consistently receive exceptional patient feedback following surgery, backed by industry-leading Trustpilot scores and strong referral performance, the organisation wanted to gain a clearer, independent view of these early customer experiences – recognising that the customer journey begins long before clinical treatment takes place.
As Head of Operations, Mark Dalgarno, puts it: “Patients only become patients once they’ve committed to treatment. Before that, they’re customers with choice, and those early conversations are critical.”
With an opportunity to strengthen consistency across the full patient journey, insight6 implemented a tailored mystery shopping healthcare programme covering telephone conversations, website enquiries and out-of-hours messaging.
Rather than measuring response times alone, it assessed the quality of engagement and clarity of communication: how well teams explored needs, explained treatment options and created reassurance and confidence.
The programme was positioned as development rather than individual assessment, with reports reviewed collaboratively. That collaborative approach was an important part of making the insight useful and turning measurement into lasting improvement.
The insight then translated into practical operational changes, including:
- Better conversation frameworks to support meaningful, patient-focused discussions.
- Reference guides aligned to treatments and consultants.
- More personalised communication across phone, email and reception.
- New internal CX leadership roles to support ongoing coaching, monitoring and accountability.
The results were compelling. Mystery shopping scores rose from an initial benchmark of 77% to consistently reaching the mid-90s, with some reporting periods achieving full compliance across enquiry channels. Meanwhile, Net Promoter Scores remain exceptionally high.
Five steps to improve customer experience in healthcare
Improving patient experience is less about a new system and more about measuring the part of the journey you cannot currently see. Here are five steps to improve customer experience in healthcare:
1. Measure the enquiry stage independently. Mystery shop your own phone line, web form and out-of-hours channel so you know how prospective patients are actually treated, not how you assume they are.
2. Score quality, not just speed. A four-minute call that explored someone’s worry beats a 40-second call that answered the question asked and nothing more.
3. Set one standard across every touchpoint. Phone, email, reception and aftercare should feel like the same organisation. Write it down.
4. Coach as a team, not as an audit. Share feedback collaboratively so people take ownership. This is the step OCL Vision credits for the shift in mindset.
5. Re-measure and put it in front of the board. Track enquiry scores over time and review them alongside your other performance measures.
Checklist: what to test in your own enquiry line this month
- Ring your main number at 8:50am, at lunchtime and ten minutes before closing.
- Submit a web enquiry as a prospective patient and time the reply.
- Send an out-of-hours message and see what comes back, and when.
- Ask whether anyone followed up after first contact, and how many times.
- Check that the price or process explanation given on the phone matches what reception says.
Questions people ask about customer experience in healthcare
Customer experience in healthcare is the sum of every interaction a person has with a provider across their whole journey, from first enquiry through booking, treatment and aftercare. It covers the care itself and everything around it. The parts most providers measure least are the ones that happen before someone becomes a patient.
Patient satisfaction measures how well a specific episode met expectations, usually after treatment. Patient experience covers the whole relationship over time, including the enquiry and booking stages. Satisfaction tells you whether one appointment went well. Experience tells you whether people trust you enough to choose you and come back.
Mystery shopping is the practical answer, because prospective patients who go elsewhere never appear in your feedback data. Trained researchers make real enquiries by phone, web form and email, then report on what happened. OCL Vision used exactly this approach across telephone, website and out-of-hours channels.
Post-treatment surveys only reach people who committed to treatment. Anyone who enquired, felt uncertain and quietly chose a competitor is absent from that dataset. That is why a provider can hold excellent review scores and still be losing prospective patients at the first phone call.
Yes. After introducing an insight6 mystery shopping programme, OCL Vision’s scores rose from an initial benchmark of 77% to consistently reaching the mid 90s, with some periods achieving full compliance across enquiry channels. Their Net Promoter Scores remain exceptionally high.
The principles apply anywhere, but this post is written for private and independent providers, where a prospective patient has genuine choice and the enquiry stage directly affects whether they book.
Where to start
The first step is visibility. Once you can see the experience clearly, you can identify where trust is being built, where it’s being lost and what your teams can do differently.
If you can’t see the experience before someone becomes a patient, you can’t improve the whole journey with confidence:
- Measure the whole journey, not just the clinical experience. Customer experience in healthcare covers every interaction, from the first enquiry through to treatment and aftercare. Yet the enquiry stage is often the least measured part of the journey, despite its influence on whether someone chooses to continue.
- Treat post-treatment feedback as one part of the picture. Patient experience surveys tell you what people who said yes thought of their care. They don’t tell you what happened to the people who enquired, hesitated and went elsewhere. Strong feedback after treatment can therefore sit alongside weaknesses earlier in the journey.
- Start measuring the enquiry experience independently. For most private providers, this is one of the highest-value changes they can make. Mystery shopping across phone, web and out-of-hours channels gives you an independent view of what prospective patients actually experience, rather than what internal processes suggest should happen.
- Measure, coach, then measure again. OCL Vision used this approach to move from an initial 77% benchmark to consistently reaching the mid-90s, supported by collaborative coaching and re-measurement.
Want to understand what prospective patients experience before they choose you? Book a free consultation with your local CX Specialist and get clarity on what’s really happening at the point of enquiry.
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