Customer Experience in the B2B Healthcare Sector: The Need for Personalized Journeys
Discussing Customer Experience (CX) in the B2B healthcare sector often feels like preaching in the desert. Not because it’s unimportant, but because the incentives to develop it are scarce. This industry is dominated by sales forces, where personal relationships have dictated the rules of the game for decades. If clients are doctors and purchasing directors who have long-standing relationships with their suppliers, why invest in enhancing their experience?
The truth is, despite appearances, there is room for improvement. Back in 2012, during a consulting project I undertook for a major healthcare corporation, we explored ways to optimize interactions with stakeholders beyond the traditional commercial model. In this process, we clearly identified multiple decision-makers, each with distinct needs and expectations. This led us to conclude that it was essential to design differentiated and tailored customer journeys for each profile.
The Trap of Personal Relationships
In a sector where trust outweighs any marketing strategy, CX hasn’t developed with the same intensity as in other industries. Doctors and purchasing managers are accustomed to dealing with trusted suppliers with whom they’ve built relationships over the years. At first glance, this reduces the need for formal customer experience processes. But what if that personal relationship could be reinforced with a structured design of the customer journey?
Here lies the opportunity: analyzing each interaction with stakeholders to understand whether the experience meets, exceeds, or falls below their expectations. It’s a delicate task, but one that can make a difference when loyalty isn’t guaranteed, and the differences between competitors are subtle.
Different Journeys for Different Stakeholders
During our consultancy, we identified the need to create specific journeys for each type of decision-maker:
- Doctors: Their focus was on the product, valuing aspects like functionality, ease of use, and efficacy in surgical interventions. Although they are reluctant to change suppliers if everything is going well, in an oligopolistic market where competitors’ solutions are of similar quality, differentiation is achieved by reinforcing all interactions with the brand. For example, developing an application that includes interactive tutorials, a user community, and real-time technical support can enrich their experience and loyalty.
- Purchasing Directors: While they share some concerns with doctors, their priorities center on warranties, competitive pricing, and logistical efficiency. For them, it’s crucial to design a journey that facilitates administrative processes, offers transparency in negotiations, and ensures a consistent supply. Digital tools that allow for order management, access to purchase histories, and alerts about contract renewals can be highly valued.
The Patient: The Passive Subject in the Shadows
In this B2B framework, the patient is usually a passive subject who, in most cases, is entirely unaware of the manufacturer of the materials used in their treatment. For instance, few people could name the brand of the prosthesis they have implanted. A quick internet search reveals abundant content, but it’s almost always geared toward healthcare professionals.
However, this dynamic changes drastically when problems with medical devices arise. For example, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued alerts about knee prostheses with defective packaging, potentially affecting the safety and efficacy of these implants. In such cases, brands are compelled to communicate directly with patients—a public they don’t usually interact with. This situation requires crafting specific messages and identifying appropriate channels to reach these users, who aren’t accustomed to receiving direct information from manufacturers.
How to Improve CX in B2B Healthcare?
Consider some concrete actions:
1. Optimize Technical Support and Training
It’s not enough to sell high-tech surgical equipment. Doctors expect continuous support, with immediate access to training and assistance. iPad applications with interactive tutorials or real-time support can make a significant difference.
2. Digital Experience in Purchases and Orders
Many suppliers still operate with slow, bureaucratic administrative processes. A self-management portal that allows for orders, availability checks, or invoice reviews without the need for a call can significantly improve the experience for purchasing managers.
3. Active Listening and Personalization
Post-sale surveys, usage data analysis, and interviews with key clients can help understand which service aspects need improvement. It’s not just about measuring satisfaction but detecting friction points and resolving them before they become problems.
4. Experiential Events and Training
Beyond the classic medical conference, companies can organize practical sessions where users test the latest innovations in a realistic setting. A surgeon values the opportunity to test new instruments in a specialized workshop much more than receiving a simple technical dossier.
The Key: Designing a Journey That Truly Matters
The great challenge of CX in B2B healthcare is that it cannot be a mere addition to the commercial strategy but a central part of the relationship with clients. Designing an effective customer journey involves mapping each interaction, understanding its impact, and adjusting the proposal at each touchpoint. It’s not a theoretical exercise but a pragmatic discipline that, when well-executed, can solidify client loyalty in a sector where changing suppliers isn’t the norm but isn’t impossible either.
The pie is large, and the players are few. Precisely because of this, those who take customer experience seriously can gain a real competitive advantage in a market where trust is everything... and the urgency of sales will always be present.
The Speed of Implementation: An Additional Challenge
Although there are incentives to develop tailored journeys in the B2B healthcare sector, the pace of the entire process differs notably from other sectors. Defining objectives, data collection, customer journey mapping, and identifying and analyzing critical points tend to progress at a more deliberate pace.
“While other industries operate with urgency in implementation and constant monitoring, the healthcare sector’s processes are often more measured and meticulous. This difference in execution speed can be attributed to the sector’s inherent complexity, strict regulations, and the need to ensure safety and efficacy at every step.”
However, it’s essential to recognize that, even at a slower pace, effectively implementing Customer Experience strategies can lead to significant improvements in stakeholder satisfaction and loyalty. Nevertheless, it is precisely this lack of immediate benefits and the difficulty in identifying clear causal relationships (“the revenue increase in division X is directly attributable to the development and optimization of customer experience for stakeholder Y”) that ultimately discourages greater speed, often naturally due to the dynamics of a sector deeply rooted in its—albeit highly profitable—inertia.
