In a world where technology and medical advancements have raised the bar for healthcare quality, today’s medical sector is however facing a significant challenge regarding patient satisfaction. Whether internally or externally, both patients and professionals are looking for a service that goes beyond excellence in clinical care. Could lessons from the hospitality industry provide the missing link? The role of Chief Experience Officer, inspired by hospitality competencies, might hold the key to redefining patient satisfaction in healthcare.
Hospitality Competencies – the Missing Link
Imagine a healthcare environment where patient care goes beyond clinical expertise to create a deeply human and personalized experience. Indeed, as Young and Chen (2020) show, while essential, the quality of medical care is not the only driver of patient satisfaction. For example, the quality of infrastructure and, more importantly, the quality of interactions with staff are important determinants of patient and family satisfaction.
As mentioned by Godovykh and Pizam (2023), there is a growing need for a better patient experience. Patients and their families are increasingly vocal about their dissatisfaction, and in response, hospitals are scrambling to find solutions. Various projects have been launched to improve the experience for patients and professionals alike.
However, more than goodwill is needed when these projects are implemented within large structures. Creating meaningful and effective experiences is a complex endeavor that requires a solid foundation of skills and knowledge. As a result, many projects get stuck in the development stage, while others fail to achieve the desired results.
What’s often missing is a conductor for this complex orchestra that is a hospital, i.e. a person capable of centralizing everyone’s actions and efforts to design and implement quality experiences.
What is a Chief Experience Officer?
In the hospitality industry, the client experience is central and is the responsibility of a person and a team dedicated to the experience. This person is the Chief Experience Officer (CXO), a strategic-level executive whose primary role is to oversee and improve both the customer experience (CX) and the employee experience (EX) within an organization.
This central figure represents the voice of the customer in strategic decision-making processes, ensuring that their needs and perspectives are always considered and placed at the center of organizational dynamics.
Transferring this concept to the medical sphere, the CXO role can enable hospital services to be tailored to each patient’s specific needs. Experience Officers also ensure that employees deliver on the brand promise and provide services that make for a better experience. This means significantly improving the employee experience, focusing on personal or professional development programs and nurturing employee fulfillment.
The CXO participates in the organization’s comprehensive strategy and takes concrete action to make the customer experience a central element of the hospital’s identity. The role is at the heart of the organizational structure; it consists in getting all stakeholders who directly or indirectly contribute to the customer and employee experience to work together seamlessly and effectively. As a result, CXOs help to strengthen patient loyalty, increase employee motivation, reduce turnover, and, in general, significantly improve the organization’s performance.
Mastering the Role of CXO
Even today, hospitals rarely have a dedicated CXO position in their ranks, even though the need for experience is just as critical as in other service sectors. This scarcity is partly explained by the dearth of training programs that specifically focus on aspects related to the experience—or customer service for that matter— in the healthcare domain.
While some institutions have taken the initiative to recruit professionals from the service sector to fill this role, others entrust the CXO position to motivated people who are unprepared for the challenges of managing experiences in an environment as complex as a hospital.
Yet ‘experience management’ requires mastering a wide range of knowledge and skills, made even more complicated by the cross-functional nature of the CXO role. Indeed, this unique position requires juggling strategic, operational and relational dimensions with the overall aim of aligning all of the goals of all departments – while maintaining a vision focused on the needs of patients and employees.
In light of the lack of training dedicated explicitly to the CXO role in healthcare, we have identified five categories of skills that can effectively drive the CXO role in healthcare organizations.
1. Understand How a Hospital Works
First and foremost, the CXO’s role in a hospital is based on a thorough understanding of the specifics and rules of this complex environment. Hospitals must meet standards and requirements driven by one need: provide the best possible clinical care to their patients. The CXO must, therefore, integrate the emotional dimensions of the patient experience while mastering the technical, regulatory and ethical aspects specific to the hospital environment. This requires in-depth knowledge of medical processes, quality and safety standards, and stakeholder expectations. Hospitals are extremely complex workplaces with multi-faceted business models that the CXO must understand inside and out. In addition, they must be able to navigate a highly regulated environment while maintaining a focus on improving the patient and employee experience.
2. High-Performance Leadership
The CXO should be an inspiring leader who is able to work across the organizational silos inherent in hospital operations. Specifically, this means engaging physicians, nurses, administrative staff, technicians and logistics managers around a shared, inclusive vision of the human experience. The CXO’s leadership is based on their ability to unite these often highly independent, disparate teams and coordinate their efforts. CXOs must also communicate with clarity and empathy, tailoring their message to the person they are speaking with – be it a department head, an administrative director, or a receptionist. This ‘catalyst’ role requires natural authority and the ability to influence without necessarily having direct hierarchical authority across all departments. To maximize these technical skills and knowledge, CXOs need to cultivate and promote a people-centric mindset within their organization.
3. Data Management
Experience-related decisions should be backed by solid data. The CXO collects, analyzes and interprets a variety of indicators, such as patient feedback (via satisfaction surveys, online reviews, or focus groups), operational data (wait times, readmission rates) or employee well-being indicators (absenteeism rates, job satisfaction, turnover, etc.). Based on this information, CXOs can map patient and employee pathways, identify friction points, design appropriate solutions and measure the impact of initiatives that have been implemented. Mastery of data analytics tools, combined with an understanding of emerging user experience trends, is obviously a key asset.
4. Knowing How to Design and Implement Experiences
Creating meaningful experiences requires specific expertise in designing and engineering human experiences. The CXO identifies key moments and pain points in the hospital experience. For example, this may involve streamlining the front desk, rethinking department transitions/transfers, or improving staff interactions. CXOs should include patients, their families and staff in the design process. Ideally, they should have previous experience in implementing similar initiatives. They will need to promote interdisciplinary teamwork whilst, more importantly, encourage collaboration between the hospital and its patients and their families. The overarching goal is to curate memorable and personalized human experiences.
5. Pursue Service Excellence
To deliver a world-class hospital experience, why not look to the hotel industry for inspiration? This means paying close attention to the details that influence patient comfort and perception: creating friendly and efficient reception areas, personalizing services, fulfilling individual needs and developing a warm and inviting environment. The goal for the CXO is to take the elements that make service excellence possible in a general hospital context and adapt them to their specific environment. Service excellence should not only be reserved for patients but should also be extended to employees to motivate them and provide them with a stimulating and rewarding work environment.
The Synergy Between Hospitality and Healthcare
Both hospitality and healthcare revolve around meeting human needs, but with very different approaches. While hospitality focuses on creating positive, memorable experiences for guests, healthcare emphasizes clinical outcomes and operational efficiency for patients. The intersection of these fields reveals a powerful synergy: the potential to bring hospitality’s focus on comfort, personalization and emotional connection into healthcare settings.
As patient satisfaction is increasingly based on hospitals providing better service, the role of the Chief Experience Officer should be seen as a strategic necessity. By centralizing and orchestrating patient and employee experience initiatives, the CXO can transform how healthcare organizations meet more human-centric needs. As a result, it is critical to train professionals with the specific skills needed to meet these challenges. In taking inspiration from roles within the hospitality industry, healthcare organizations can redefine their care delivery and set a new benchmark for holistic and patient-centered service excellence.
EHL Hospitality Business SchoolCommunications Department+41 21 785 1354EHL
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