To build valuable, lasting loyalty, show customers and patients you’re on their side, not just in their inbox
Customer loyalty doesn’t begin and end with a loyalty programme. When engagement with loyalty schemes has declined across all sectors, gaining people’s trust could be a better way to win their loyalty. In healthcare and medical especially, patients and customers need to trust you.
Being purely transactional does of course still work in some contexts. Tesco Clubcard is the prime example. But rewarding people for data on their grocery shopping is very different to the personal nature of healthcare.
In 2024, a US survey of 8,000 adults[1] who had received some form of healthcare in the past year found that trust is one of the main factors in patient engagement and loyalty. People who trust their healthcare provider are six times more likely to stay with them than in other categories.
Start with customer experience
Building trust starts with people’s experience of you. Patients are four times more likely to trust providers if they’re satisfied with the services they’ve received and more than three times more likely to trust if they’re satisfied with diagnostic testing and treatment decisions. A smooth and satisfying experience is more important than price, especially among younger people.
More than half of consumers who have switched health insurance companies did so because of their experience[2]. Top of the list of reasons was inconsistent or inaccurate information, poor customer service, poor digital experience or not getting their questions answered.
The service has to be easy to use, and customer retention drops hugely when it’s not: 75% are likely to stay when they rate a service as ‘very easy’ to use, but this drops to only 13% when they rate it as ‘very difficult’.
What people want the most is clarity, with clear, consistent and accurate information.
Value and ease of use lead to loyalty for Bupa
Ease of use was a problem Bupa wanted to solve. Customers already trusted Bupa as a healthcare expert. It has a big range of products and services that offer huge value. But it wasn’t communicating them clearly. Products weren’t easily discoverable and people didn’t know what they could and couldn’t use.
How might we increase loyalty among policyholders who trusted Bupa but didn’t see the value in their cover?
We had to expose and elevate other points of value. We identified customer needs and the hidden value across Bupa’s ecosystem, and then paired products and services with relevant customer segments, to increase their relevance and perceived usefulness.
This informed our design of a new loyalty-boosting digital presence and campaign that shifted Bupa’s positioning from ‘insurance provider’ to a premium healthcare service that’s more than just insurance. Focusing on particular customer segments’ real-life needs led to greater product and service use and improved retention.
Vitality: a warning story
Vitality was well-known for its generous rewards scheme, with perks for healthy lifestyle habits such as completing a park run or going to the gym. It was a two-way win: members got healthier and healthier members claimed less.
But in April, Vitality gamified the scheme, with members now having to search for a cartoon dog to get rewards. They were not happy. They got straight on to social media to deride it as complex, inconsistent, devaluing the rewards and basing perks on a childish game of chance, not healthy behaviours.
Cutting comments included: “How is this rewarding? I’m not 12,” “Blatantly obvious cost cuts dressed up as an improvement” and “That’s me cancelled. Set up a new policy with LV last night”.
By June, Vitality had rolled back some of the changes including removing the ‘play’ element from some rewards. It’s a warning for all brands to not over-complicate things.
Loyalty is hard to build and easy to break
Loyalty can be lost if people don’t feel valued or you get things wrong, especially in healthcare. Misjudged personalisation, a broken promise, a lack of transparency or a breach of confidentiality can do lasting damage.
Building loyalty takes time and effort, and considerations include:
- Trust. This is the foundation of lasting loyalty. Do no harm, keep your promises, be honest, be reliable, act with integrity and treat people with empathy. Prove you have the expertise and authority to guide them on health and wellbeing. Consistently show you deserve people’s trust through how you behave and treat them, not just in what you say.
- Human. People notice (consciously or not) when they’re treated as transactions. Caring is central in healthcare and you can’t fake empathy through scripted responses or chatbots in place of a conversation and a listening ear. People build emotional connections with brands that offer something useful, personal and human.
- Transparency about products, ingredients, efficacy, suppliers, pricing, appointments, customer data and so on all help to show you’re trustworthy, along with not giving people unexpected surprises such as additional hidden costs, breaching confidentiality or obscure T&Cs.
- Communication, which starts with active listening, especially when people tell you what they need and where you’re letting them down. Take them seriously and respond with empathy, honesty and understanding.
- Value. Surprise and delight by being better than people expected. Pay attention to the details. Small moments of unexpected value can make a big difference.
- Consistency helps people feel confident about you and builds trust: consistency in your service, customer interactions, products, online experience, emails from you. Every touch point.
- Ethics are inseparable from loyalty in the context of healthcare. Show customers not just what you offer but what you stand for, and act in line with it. This might include your clinical standards, data handling or making a wider contribution to society.
- Community can move people from being customers (transactional) to members (connected, supported, belonging) e.g. Strava, Zoe, Oura, National Trust. Some brands even manage to create this feeling without an actual community, because people believe in it and feel part of a movement e.g. Octopus Energy, Ecotricity, Riverford, Nationwide, Co-op.
Design for people’s real lives
People need to recognise themselves (their situation, needs and goals) in what you offer. When you involve customers in your innovation process, you can design services and rewards that reflect their lives and meet their unmet health and wellness needs.
Through customer research and testing, you discover and validate ways to help people feel better, healthier and more in control of their own and their family’s health. Their interactions with you feel more personal, trusted and reliable, helping to build loyalty.
Customers are falling out of love with loyalty cards. Help them trust you and fall in love with your brand instead by supporting them to improve their quality of life, not just access to products.
If you’re not doing this well enough, please get in touch to find out how we can help you unpick the challenges and design customer/patient-focused solutions with measurable business impact.
Email Jason DaPonte, Managing Director, on This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
