If you spend as much time as I have reading websites of businesses in the healthcare sector, you will start to see a few patterns.

For instance, almost every possible product, platform, or service is going to give you “efficiencies.” And every single one of them will also deliver “high-quality care.” Needless to say, they are also all very “cost-effective.”

In fact, there are so many similarities, it can be hard to know what a given company actually does.

Why make things hard for your potential customers?

Not surprisingly, this can all be very frustrating for your prospective customers. And that means trouble – after all, when someone doesn’t immediately understand what a company does, they’ll click away.

Luckily, this tendency towards corporate-speak and buzzwords can work to your advantage – because you can go in a different direction.

Voice-of-customer research offers you a new path.

Let me give you an example. Say you have a competitor who talks about how much more efficient teams will be with their platform. Sounds good, right? It might capture someone’s attention.

But now say that you talk about how your platform means your customers no longer have to spend the weekend catching up on their paperwork.

Instead of general efficiency, you conjured up an image of all the weekends they’ve lost to mounds of paperwork.

Which do you think means more to your customer?

Customers want you to “get” them.

The more specific you are with your imagery and your phrasing, the more your prospective customers will feel like you understand their world. And that’s half the battle. After all, why would anyone choose a vendor who didn’t understand their world?

But you can’t fake it. You have to know what they really think and what they really experience.

That’s what you get from voice-of-customer research. And that’s what will help you stand out from the competition.

Photo by Thomas Kinto on Unsplash