Today I’m extending the conversation begun in this post two weeks ago.  There among the frogs and logs, we learned that among organizations with a broad understanding of customer experience, just 35 percent ACT on customer experience by using it as the primary driver in daily decision making.  Said differently, while over half – or around 400 of the leaders in our study – said their organizations understand customer experience very well, just a third of them actually put their understanding to work in an active way.

For this week’s stat, let’s go one layer deeper.  This week, we pay tribute to the industry which comprises the largest portion of this experience-driven group:

Health care leads all other industries in the active use of customer experience as a factor in all daily decisions.  A whopping 42 percent of the organizations who use customer experience as the primary driver in daily decision making are in health care.

The prevalence of experience-driven daily action in health care edged out even retail. I found this notable, maybe even surprising, since retail is the industry where examples of customer experience actions show up most frequently in the media, social and otherwise.

The emergence of consumer driven health care could be at play here.  Cost, quality, trust and service data is becoming available to consumers who in turn are being asked to take more active role in care decisions.  The sheer effort is to be admired here.  I’d like to imagine that leaders across health care are like the ones I know, who get that we are VERY early in truly understanding the patient experience from the patient’s point of view.

The health care respondents in our study could be early leaders in the use of customer experience.  I’m thinking this is a trend worth watching. You?

You may also be interested in:

Can we measure the patient experience? Not yet. (My recent post on the topic)

Redesigning the Health Care System (Sohrab Vossoughi, Bloomberg BusinessWeek)