CUSTOMER RETENTION

Customer Retention in the Health Service Industry in United States

Customer Retention in the Health Service Industry in United States

Introduction

Healthcare and wellness of an individual is his or her basic right. Everyone, no matter to which culture, class and race he or she belongs to deserves a proper system that provide healthcare benefits. In U.S, healthcare industry is huge. It is the industry that constitutes 15% of the overall economy of U.S and is considered as one of the largest and best healthcare industry all over the world. When any industry operates on such a huge level and involves more of the private entities rather than the government, it is likely to get affected from malpractices of different sorts. This is the reason why customer retention is vital for the healthcare industry. this paper discusses the different ways in which the health service industry retain their customers, what is the process of customer retention in health services and the recommendations to improve the customer retention process.

Customer Retention in Health Services in USA

In recent times, the popularity of maintaining profitable relationship with customers, i.e. practices of customer relationship management has engendered numerous researches, which have analyzed the influence of customer attainment and strategies for retention on the performance of an organization. The relevancy and significance of examining the relationship between a customer and the organization is reflected in the Marketing Science Institute's 2002- 2004 Research Priorities (Brown, 1992). Three of the five top tier priority topics are directly related to evaluating the customer-firm relationship (e.g. assessing marketing program productivity/ROI, valuation of customers, retaining customers, measurement of the lifetime value of an individual customer, customer loyalty measurement and valuation, customer acquisition, and understanding customers). Academic research has begun to investigate how relationship marketing has affected business-to-business (B-to-B) and to some extent business-to-consumer (B-to-C). In summary, Bolton (1998) finds that satisfaction affects duration times in four ways, which are defined below.

Preceding collective satisfaction has an outright affect on the customer at times.

Customers who have many months of experience with the organization will consider their preceding collective satisfaction more heavily.

The influence of comprehended losses, which will arise from failures of service or transactions at different times, is instantly weighed by preceding satisfaction.

There is appreciable heterogeneity throughout customers in conditions of usefulness and utility for the service.

Lately, most Americans are dissatisfied with the health system of their country, and many interest groups have lobbied politicians to change the system to one that guarantees universal coverage, by health insurance for all citizens. However, as every country in the world, many of the proposed reforms have been lost as political promises, and meanwhile the U.S. health system is deteriorates more each year according to public opinion (Hughes & Blegen, 2008). The only certainty is that America as a nation has not considered the issue of health as a human rights issue but as a free market enterprise.

According to Gounaris & Stathakopoulos , customer satisfaction is a key result of activities of marketing and it ...