Can You Imagine Amazon Without a Checkout Button? How About a 3-Week Delay for Your Order?

// By James A. Gardner //

Let’s imagine Amazon’s website without a checkout button for a moment. And a three-week delay on all our orders. It would be unimaginable.

You’d be asked to load your cart and then phone or email in your order. Or fill in a form and wait for Amazon to get back to you. Either way, they’d probably want to call you a few times to get clarifying information about your order. And then, you’d wait. And wait. And wait some more.

It would be an intolerable customer experience that we’d all passionately dislike and tell our friends to avoid.

So why do we expect our new customers — new patients, that is — to endure a similar experience on our hospital websites?

We’re talking about appointment scheduling. At the end of their carefully orchestrated journeys through our online and offline marketing efforts, how many of us jettison our bottom-of-funnel prospective customers into unstructured, unmeasurable phone and web form experiences?

Do these new customers convert to appointments and visits? Yes, the more persistent among them will overcome the hurdles we put in front of them and make it work — but more than a few will give up and abandon care or find an easier path to treatment.

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