Generating Maximum Impact by Taking a Behavioral CX approach to Patient Journeys 

The treatment and care decisions they make are often influenced by family, friends, co-workers, social media communities and of course HCPs. If we just put the journey lens on the Tx/HCP relationship we miss most of the story and the opportunities to positively impact their care experience.

An experience-focused approach produces a rich and a more accurate picture of how and where consumers can be meaningfully influenced. Focusing on experiences gives companies and brands the opportunity to walk in their customer’s shoes to deeply understand your brand, product, or service through their eyes.

Journeys are powerful tools for empathy because they allow the human scientist to immerse themselves in a group of people as cultural detectives, understanding their particular social reality, norms, practices, and experiences and ultimately making sense of this for outsiders. But how can they be powerful tools for behavior change? How can we use them to shift behaviors and shape decisions? This is what the integration of Behavioral Science provides.

Behavioral science is an exploration of the human decision-making process. It helps uncover key decision points and their underlying psychological motivations. Using a Behavioral Science approach, we can build on the deep experiential insights from Cultural Anthropology to identify how emotional and cultural factors trigger psychological biases and heuristics at key decision points. With a better understanding of the common mental shortcuts and quick-thinking processes that guide consumer behavior, we are better equipped to design communications, products, and environments that are able to change behavior.

When developing a patient journey for a therapy in development for a rare yet devastating respiratory disease, we used methods and theories grounded in behavioral science to get at what we call the ‘deeper why’.  Specifically, we were able to identify the core human needs that the disease was violating, namely the needs for autonomy and predictability. Once we identified these foundational needs, we were able to break down the steps required for patients to regain what they needed most and with that their sense of self and independence. These anchor concepts – predictability and autonomy – became the lens through which we identified intervention points in the journey as we ideated solutions and intervention activations for our clients to pursue.

A Behavioral CX Journey approach allows marketers and researchers to access, understand, and map the complexity of human experiences. Ultimately, this elevated consumer journey facilitates the development of behavioral solutions tailored generate maximum impact in moments of influence.