Deliver better patient experiences and outcomes in 2025 with voice of the customer

As the healthcare market becomes increasingly competitive in 2025, both regionally and across specialties, how you engage with patients and the interaction experiences you deliver will become increasingly vital to maintaining a successful practice.

A bad experience can leave a lasting scar: Patients can (and do) easily share ratings and feedback online, where those negative posts widely influence potential patients’ decisions about which doctors and facilities to use.

That’s why, heading into 2025, healthcare providers should take a proactive approach to patient feedback with a data-driven voice of the customer (VOC) program. Healthy VOC programs empower healthcare providers to address patient feedback promptly, improving the overall patient experience—and potentially leading to better health outcomes.

In this article, we’ll look at current VOC trends in the healthcare industry that our research has uncovered, and discuss how providers should adapt their programs heading into into 2025, in order to drive better patient experiences and outcomes.

Current state of patient feedback in healthcare

Let’s start with some good news: Customer experience (CX) research clearly shows that today’s healthcare providers understand the value of gathering patient feedback.

Nearly 72% of healthcare providers studied in Metrigy’s global AI for Business Success: 2024-25 research consider gathering patient feedback “vitally important” and nearly one-third of the healthcare providers studied in our global Customer Experience Optimization: 2024-25 research made patient feedback a transformation initiative for 2024.

How are they collecting patient feedback?

An overwhelming majority of healthcare providers—83.6%, according to Metrigy’s research—use survey tools, and 60% survey patients after an interaction. However, given the personal nature of healthcare, nearly 64% of providers also rely on one-on-one conversations. Slightly more than 40% also use focus groups as part of their patient feedback programs.

Turning insights into meaningful action

Collecting and analyzing patient feedback are the first steps, but taking meaningful action on those insights is where you can really start to improve experiences and outcomes.

More good news: for healthcare providers leading the way on VOC, the turnaround time between gathering feedback and acting on it is shrinking. Nearly two-thirds of healthcare providers are already using patient feedback capabilities in their contact centers. Why? Doing so enables them to use real-time feedback to improve interactions.

Healthcare providers have been doing a good job of clearing away the common obstacles standing in the way of optimizing on patient feedback—but, of course, there’s always more work to be done.

For example, 27.6% of healthcare providers say they don’t have a 360-degree view of their patients. Others say a lack of data integration is an issue; 12.1% of healthcare providers are storing customer data in multiple standalone databases.

Ultimately, your goal should be to integrate all patient feedback into a holistic VOC platform. With such a platform, you can consolidate feedback from various channels with embedded call recordings and interaction summaries—and view real-time reporting from a comprehensive dashboard. As a result, you’ll gain that much-desired holistic view of patient sentiment and empower your teams to deliver timelier and more effective responses to their needs. That holistic view can also help you identify areas of improvement that can impact patient outcomes.

Emerging trends shaping patient feedback technology

As patient experience technology and strategies evolve, so too do the ways healthcare companies capture and analyze data, with an eye on better understanding patients.

For example, your 2025 patient feedback program should include analysis of any new interaction channels, such as digital self-service. Knowing what keywords patients are searching for could help guide agent training for live interactions. Being able to assess completion and abandonment rates in your online portal or appointment system can provide more insight into patient satisfaction—and where improvements are needed.

Additionally, as healthcare providers expand their use of AI-driven virtual agents and chatbots in 2025 (more on AI below), they should not only be using them to help patients during an interaction, but also to collect feedback from them at its conclusion. Grabbing patient feedback in the moment can prove far more effective than trying to get a response later.

Healthcare companies that have adopted agent-assist technology can also benefit from having patient feedback at-hand. AI assistants can deliver precise patient information so that agents can tailor interactions to an individual’s preferences and needs.

The growing role and impact of AI for patient VOC

AI is taking patient feedback analysis to a new level, not only allowing for deeper insights and a better understanding of patient sentiment, but it’s also enabling healthcare companies to move from reactive to proactive management of the patient experience. We see these trends continuing in 2025.

For instance, a hospital might use sentiment analysis to detect frustration in a patient's recent feedback, apply text mining to understand that the issue relates to difficulty in understanding post-discharge instructions, and then use predictive analytics to determine how likely it is to affect the patient's recovery or lead to readmission. This comprehensive insight would enable the hospital to take targeted action to improve communication and support for the patient—and potentially improve their outcome

Metrigy’s research shows that healthcare providers see considerable promise for incorporating AI in their patient VOC programs. Most are already using or see the benefit of using AI in 2025 to:

• Spot trends and automatically adjust survey questions to determine root causes (70.3%)
• Track customer interaction patterns (62.2%)
• Listen to calls and provide analysis of customer satisfaction (59.5%)

As AI technologies continue to evolve and become more widespread in 2025, we can expect even more sophisticated analysis of patient feedback, leading to deeper insights, and more personalized experiences for patients.

The business impact of strong patient VOC programs

Effective patient VOC programs are already driving tangible results by enabling healthcare providers to identify meaningful insights from patient feedback and to take prompt, meaningful action on those insights.

For example, Metrigy’s Customer Experience MetriCast: 2024 global buy-side market research found that healthcare companies that measure the success of their VOC implementations saw a 35.1% improvement in customer ratings due to the use of AI in their patient feedback initiatives. Additionally, evaluating patient feedback and using it to guide agents led to a 28.4% improvement in agent performance.

Clearly, by investing in holistic feedback solutions, using AI to gain deeper insights, and acting on patient feedback to drive continuous improvement, healthcare companies can build stronger patient relationships, and improve their experiences to drive optimal patient outcomes.

To healthcare patient experience leaders: Prioritize your patient VOC program, embrace emerging technologies, and get ready to truly put your patients at the heart of your decision-making processes. The time to act is now.