For healthcare brands, understanding patients and providers is the key to delivering better care and building trust.
Voice of Customer (VoC) research gives you structured, real-world feedback from the people you serve. That feedback can inform patient experience, customer satisfaction, service design, product launches, and relationship building across the continuum of care.
Ready to explore what VoC looks like in healthcare, why it matters, and how to build a program that works in practice? Let’s dig in.
Voice of Customer research captures and analyzes feedback from your target audiences, whether that is patients, physicians, caregivers, or internal stakeholders. The goal is simple and powerful. Understand needs, expectations, pain points, and moments of delight, then use that insight to guide decisions.
Common outcomes include stronger patient experience and CSAT, clearer priorities for quality improvement, and a more resilient brand reputation.
If you want a broader primer first, our ultimate guide to VoC is a great starting point.
A few angles teams sometimes overlook:
If you want a broader primer first, our ultimate guide to VoC is a great starting point.
From a market research perspective, VoC is one of the most direct ways to hear from patients and providers in their own words, then quantify what matters most. When used properly, it boosts trust, satisfaction, and operational performance.
Strategically, healthcare VoC helps you:
These are not abstract benefits either.
Two examples highlight why patient experience is so closely tied to healthcare outcomes and financial success:
Together, these real-world examples show that VoC is not just about customer service—it directly affects financial sustainability, clinical performance, and long-term trust in your brand.
Surveys are the backbone of most healthcare VoC programs because they’re versatile, scalable, and measurable. They allow you to reach patients, physicians, or caregivers at scale while still capturing detailed insights.
With the right survey design, you can measure CSAT, healthcare NPS, appointment scheduling, billing clarity, or portal usability—all in one instrument.
At Drive Research, we specialize in building patient satisfaction surveys that combine quantitative rigor with qualitative depth.
Instead of just running a checklist survey, we design smart open-ends and logic paths that reveal why patients and providers feel the way they do. This makes the data actionable rather than just another score on a dashboard.
We also layer in segmentation (by demographics, specialty, or region) so you can see exactly where satisfaction is strongest, where friction exists, and how to prioritize improvements.
While surveys give you the “what,” interviews and focus groups reveal the “why.”
These methods dive into patient expectations, emotional drivers, and provider frustrations that numbers alone can’t uncover. They’re especially powerful for mapping sensitive experiences, like navigating chronic conditions, understanding discharge instructions, or evaluating specialty referrals.
Our team has run VoC interviews and focus groups across every major healthcare segment, from health systems and payers to pharmaceutical and digital health brands.
We know how to probe in a way that gets patients and clinicians to open up—without biasing the data.
For many clients, qualitative sessions also help test new messaging or digital tools before they launch, saving time and avoiding costly missteps.
Reviews on Google, Yelp, RateMDs, and patient portals may seem surface-level, but they are often the first place prospective patients go to decide whether to trust a provider.
Analyzing these reviews systematically gives you real-time insight into what patients are saying about access, bedside manner, communication, and facility experience.
The real value comes when this data is paired with structured research.
We regularly run online review monitoring side-by-side with VoC surveys and focus groups. This lets you validate patterns, spot reputation risks early, and benchmark your standing against competitors.
In fact, many of our healthcare clients have uncovered service line–specific issues from review analysis that were later confirmed and prioritized in formal VoC studies.
Instead of treating reviews as noise, we turn them into a strategic input for brand perception and experience management.
Building an effective Voice of Customer (VoC) program in healthcare isn’t just about collecting feedback once. It’s about creating a structured, repeatable process that regularly turns patient and provider insights into customer satisfaction improvements.
Here’s how to set up a program that actually works.
Decide what success looks like. Common goals include improving patient experience scores, reducing access pain points, strengthening provider relationships, or informing value-based care objectives. Clear goals determine which audiences to include, which methods to use, and which KPIs to track.
List the people you need to hear from and the moments that matter. For example, new patient scheduling, pre-op education, discharge, specialty referral, and billing. If you serve multiple markets or lines of business, segment thoughtfully so you can see differences that matter.
Pair methods to goals. Surveys to size and prioritize issues. Interviews or focus groups to understand root causes and language. Consider oversampling vulnerable populations or service lines where experience differentials are likely. Align with privacy and HIPAA requirements, and determine whether your work needs IRB review for publication.
Keep surveys short, plain-language, and mobile friendly. Use validated scales when possible, then add a few targeted open-ends. Make it easy for clinicians too. For interview guides, use neutral prompts and clear probes.
If you want help writing, our VoC question guide is a useful reference.
Cadence beats one-off studies. Post-visit pulses gather immediate impressions. Quarterly or semi-annual studies track brand and loyalty. Always-on review and portal monitoring catches emerging issues. Consistency gives you trends you can trust, rather than noisy snapshots.
Our research team explores the value of collecting continuous customer feedback in the video below.
Raw data does not fix problems. Look for trends, drivers, and segments that behave differently. Tie insights to KPIs the organization already watches. Share results with practical recommendations, not just charts.
If you are standing up dashboards, prioritize a small set of decision-ready views tied to owners and due dates. Our team specializes in turning analysis into action plans within healthcare market research.
Tell patients and providers what changed because of their feedback. Even small wins build trust. Internally, set owners and timelines so improvements move from slide to standard practice. Externally, consider sharing selected improvements in your patient communications and web content.
If you need a partner to design, field, and activate your program, we can help. Our team builds custom VoC for health systems, plans, and digital health teams, then turns findings into clear actions. Start with a quick scoping call, or ask us to review your current approach and recommend improvements.
