Digital Customer Journey as a Quality Management and Managerial Decision-Support Instrument in Digitally Transformed Medical Laboratory Services

Digitalization transforms the way organizations order their processes, make decisions and interact with customers, even in regulated industries like healthcare services. Digital platforms, data integration, and greater process transparency have changed how organizations design services, track performance and relay service quality to customers. Because of this, the digital customer journey is no longer only a customer interaction–oriented concept. Of course, the digital customer journey can also serve as a management tool that helps with process control and guided by data.

In literature, past works depict the digital customer journey from a customer experience perspective whereas management of service quality in healthcare is mostly investigated through internal standards, procedures and accreditation mechanisms. The conceptual distinction constrains the understanding of how patient processes can embody internal quality management systems into tangible and understandable signals for patients that emanate through digital channels. This creates a gap between the service quality that is internally delivered compared to what customers perceive.

This paper assumes a theoretical and conceptual approach and addresses the following research question: how can the digital customer journey be conceptualized as a managerial instrument for quality management within the process of business digitalization? The analysis starts with the literature review on digital transformation, customer journey, and service quality management. After that it is adapted to the organizational context of medical laboratory services and it is applied to the specific characteristics of the pre-analytical, analytical, and post-analytical process chain.

The conceptual results show the potential to create a new model in which the digital consumer journey brings together business digitalization, service quality management and strategic managerial decisionmaking. The proposed model illustrates how the digital visibility of processes can facilitate treating data generated in the digital customer journey as managerial resources. This, in turn, aids in bridging the gap from intangibility to service quality as perceived internally which matches up with the external assessment of organizational performance.