How to Create a Listening Strategy to Improve Patient Experience

Once upon a time, the world was a magical place in which people knew each other intimately. They knew their families, where they vacationed, and what they ate on Tuesday nights. Most importantly (at least in our story), people knew how others felt about them because business was done in intimate settings, whether it was a restaurant or a repair shop, a grocery store or a gym. Most commerce was done in the same town or neighborhood so business owners saw their customers walking down the road everyday. Based on those daily interactions, the owners immediately knew how they were doing. In that world, consumer experience was prioritized because there was an extra layer of social pressure and accountability.

For the vast majority of America, that idyllic fairy tale no longer exists. Without seeing their customers walking down Main Street everyday, that social accountability no longer existed and business owners needed a way to gather feedback them. Enter the survey!

A Brief History of Surveys

To be sure, surveys are not a new instrument: in the early 1900's, companies like Kellogg's and Colgate would send long-form surveys and comment sheets in the mail. In the mid 1900's, companies started using phone surveys which had a surprisingly high response rate due to most households having a stay-at-home mom. Comment cards on almost all restaurant tables were commonplace when I was a kid.

The problem with long-form surveys and comment cards is that even though they provided great insights, they simply weren't been scalable. If you received 100,000 responses, those had to be read, categorized, and acted upon. This could take hundreds of people, so much of that feedback went unread.

To simplify that process Fred Reichheld from Bain & Company created NPS (Net Promoter Score) in 2003. One question of "On a scale from 0 to 10, how likely would you be to recommend our company to a friend?" While it has limitations, NPS is fast, scalable, and quantitative. Using NPS can easily provide a high-level comparative view of a business or department.

Modern Listening Strategies

There's no lack of feedback tools in today's world: mail, phone, text, email, QR codes, video, social media, online reviews, and focus groups. Because these tools are so readily available, how they are used has become even more important. Enter the listening strategy.

A listening strategy requires your organization to understand the following:

1. Who: Identify the people to solicit feedback from.
2. What: Define the questions we asking them?
3. When: How long after the interaction should we ask for feedback?
4. Where: Detail the methodologies used to meet the consumer where they want.
5. Why: What's the overarching reason you're asking for feedback?
6. How: Should this be qualitative or quantitative? What methodologies should be used? What metrics do we track? Do we respond to every person?

While this may seem simple, the reality is developing and implementing a listening strategy is complex and difficult. Numerous organizations, many of them health systems, garner feedback from patients and do absolutely nothing with it. They track metrics, report on those metrics, maybe even publish those metrics. But they don't use the feedback as an opportunity to create sustainable change.

Process improvement and behavioral change are the ideal outcomes for any listening strategy. After all, if you don't do anything with all that consumer feedback you've gathered, why even bother collecting it? This follow-through is especially important in healthcare as it is a highly personal interaction between patients and providers.

In healthcare, where the stakes are higher than ever, listening can no longer be just about data points and scores. It's about truly understanding the voices behind those numbers and using that understanding to create environments where patients feel heard, valued, and cared for. By moving beyond passive collection to active engagement and change, we can build a new kind of accountability—one that’s rooted not in the visibility of customers on Main Street, but in the transparency of our commitment to continuous improvement and human connection.