In the 10th Annual State of Engagement Survey from Engagys, a healthcare consulting and advisory firm, health plan leaders identified multichannel orchestration (“right message, right channel, right time”), AI, and next-best action capabilities as their top three strategic priorities.
These findings demonstrate the importance of timely, relevant customer engagements in the design and execution of health plan member journeys. Multichannel orchestration, data-driven AI, and next-best actions all require that a healthcare payer has the capability to engage with a plan member in a timely fashion, up to and including real time. When a member logs into the website or portal, interacts with a chatbot, or schedules an appointment, a payer should be ready to engage with the member at that moment – if the time is right.
The “right time” distinction is key; just because a payer has the capability to deliver a real-time customer experience (CX), does not necessarily mean that it’s always the optimal way to guide the customer journey, or to achieve the desired outcome.
Engaging in real time vs. the right time is an important distinction not just for health plans, but for healthcare providers, financial services, retail – any brand that engages with members, patients, or customers. Right time vs. real time also plays a factor in how to best achieve the desired use case, be it driving retention, acquisition, churn avoidance, increasing lifetime value, or any other result that solidifies the customer-brand relationship.
Real Time vs. Right Time: The Core Distinction
Real time is an immediate response to a customer signal (or a collection of customer signals) the moment a signal occurs, delivered the moment a customer appears in a certain channel. Right time is about responding when that interaction will have the highest relevance and create the best outcome, even if that moment is not immediate.
In other words, real time prioritizes speed; right time prioritizes impact. The two can overlap, but they are not interchangeable.
But one common denominator for any type of engagement, right time or real time, is that a contextual understanding of a customer is a must. Context, in fact, is the most important component for determining whether an engagement should happen in real time or whether the right time might be minutes, hours, or days later.
Keep Context Top of Mind
Having a contextual customer understanding means that the brand understands the contours of a customer journey. It involves understanding customer intent signals and being able to predict with a high degree of certainty what a customer will do next. For a health plan marketing team, this might be an analysis of a member’s website behavior that predicts a member is going to schedule a flu shot, and the team then delivering the appropriate next-best action based on the member preferences and opt-ins (an SMS with scheduling options, an email reminder, etc.)
Building a contextual understanding entails both situational context as well as a data context, i.e., metadata. Situational context is derived from gathering signals about a customer and how the customer interacts with a brand, with other people, and with products, along with insights into how a customer changes over time. Data context complements this by providing structure and meaning to those interactions. Metadata reveals the status of a data feed, changes in accuracy or timeliness, and being able to observe – and trust – how a data quality score was achieved.
Context is critical because knowing the contour of a customer journey is essential for knowing the right time to engage with a customer. If metadata tells you a feed of website activity is late or incomplete, for instance, perhaps the appointment reminder email is pulled. Or if the health plan member’s activity indicates a high likelihood of churn, the marketing team offers targeted advice to help a member optimize their benefits.
Building an in-depth, contextual understanding of a customer is a key component of data readiness, which entails making data right (complete, accurate, timely) and fit-for-purpose for use across the enterprise (actionable, compliant, trusted).
Real Time, Right Time: Balancing CX and Outcomes
The determination between right time vs. real time depends on a combination of factors: a brand’s ultimate objective, the active customer journey, the customer’s preferences (channel, frequency, etc.), and the brand’s capabilities for executing real-time decisions all play a role.
Real time is about collapsing the time between data, decisions, and interactions while considering the intended outcome. Consider a patient with a newly diagnosed chronic condition. The provider’s goals are twofold; provide education and help the patient build a care plan. When the patient visits the provider’s website, a real-time experience might be to show educational content on the homepage. A personalized care plan, however, with a lot more moving parts, might instead start with an SMS to schedule an initial consultation. The contextual understanding of the patient is what allows a provider to optimize the patient journey with hyper-personalized, relevant experiences.
For any engagement, these are the types of questions to consider. How much data is needed? How accurate and timely does the data need to be? Will waiting for more data improve the experience enough to justify the wait? Marketers and data teams need to measure outcomes and bake those into future decisions from a time, cost, and resource perspective about what real time means, factoring in business goals as well as the impact on the overall customer experience.
Advance Your CX Goals with Timely Customer Engagement
A timely customer engagement can make or break CX. Relevance and timeliness are closely intertwined; marketing teams are well aware that being too early or too late can both introduce friction into a customer journey. But just because a brand may have the capability to deliver a real time next-best action doesn’t mean it always should. Having a deep situational awareness (context) is what separates a superior CX from the routine, where being timely – right time or real time – becomes a matter of course.
For more on how the Redpoint Data Readiness Hub helps enterprise companies leverage timeliness as a key advantage in delivering a superior CX that is always in sync with the customer, click here.
