Consumer Experience Transformation As A Catalyst To Long-Term Financial Sustainability

The chief financial officer (CFO) no longer acts as just a steward of budgets. The current pressures of sustainability, competition, and consumer expectations mean that CFOs must become strategic architects (see The CFO As A Strategic Architect) with a hand in driving financial performance and value—wherever and however that value can be gained. This includes data collection, metrics, and analytics for both understanding outcomes and acting on them to achieve organizational success, especially for compliance and payer negotiations. 

Accomplishing that success now depends on three critical competencies that haven’t traditionally been attributed to CFOs but are increasingly part of their portfolio as they collaborate with executive leadership in shared decisions: 

• Mastery of digital transformation technology solutions to support strategic goals, guide investments that enable efficiency, enhance consumer experience, and improve clinical outcomes and financial sustainability. 

• Understanding consumer-driven performance expectations and the ability to align financial operations and performance with those benchmarks. 

• The integration of consumer experience into financial strategy planning, ensuring that every dollar spent on experience produces measurable returns. 

By understanding how financial outcomes link with consumer satisfaction and loyalty, CFOs make better investments for the organization and become central to building the infrastructure needed to excel in these areas. The potential outcomes include: 

• Improved financial outcomes. Engaged consumers keep appointments, which helps prevent scheduling gaps, and they pay bills promptly if they have the means to do so, reducing collection costs and strengthening revenue cycle performance. 

• Lower costs. When consumers are empowered to make informed choices, such as using telehealth instead of the emergency room (ER), provider organizations can reduce their costs. 

• Operational efficiency. Digital tools, such as artificial intelligence, streamline administrative tasks enabling staff to focus on higher-value work. 

• Competitive advantage. Superior consumer experience increases consumer loyalty for repeat business, as well as increases treatment adherence, creating the potential for a more durable market presence. 

Many health care organizations have historically struggled with managing the consumer experience. Consumer experience has emerged as a top priority for 61% of health care leaders in 2025 (see State Of HX 2025: Thriving In The Face Of Change), up from 57% in 2023. Among those consumer experience programs, only 27% are well established in 2025—with 12% just starting this year. 

The CFO’s Focus Areas 

For CFOs to turn consumer experience into a leading indicator of revenue growth, payer satisfaction, and organizational sustainability in value-based care environments, these executives must first set the stage by acquainting themselves with five key areas. 

Digital Transformation 

CFOs must invest strategically in solutions that enable patients to access registration, bill payment, appointment scheduling, and their health information. Then, leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to identify cost drivers, personalize communication, and forecast demand. 

Data & Personalization 

CFOs and their executive peers must be aligned on investing in a robust data infrastructure to collect and analyze consumer information securely. That data is a critical contribution to the chief operating officer’s responsibility to deliver individualized consumer experiences that are designed to build trust and loyalty. As the CFO role broadens to include new challenges and opportunities working with leadership teams on strategic decisions, involvement in investment decisions increasingly is becoming more than just running the numbers. 

Patient Experience & Billing 

CFOs must align with leadership to invest in an organization-wide redesign of Revenue Cycle Management (RCM) process looking at it from the consumer journey perspective: from initial contact to collection of co-pays, to payment tracking to final billing, to ensure every interaction is coordinated, convenient, and transparent. Central to this is the implementation of self-service payment portals and flexible billing options. 

Value-Based Care (VBC) Alignment 

Consumer experience models and processes must be built to align with VBC to make sure organizations are collecting the right data. Then CFOs must purposefully link consumer experience outcomes to the metrics that reward high-quality, cost-effective outcomes in value-based care contracts. When done well, all consumer experience strategies should enhance the CFO’s ability to negotiate contracts that align reimbursement with consumer experience metrics. 

Measuring Consumer Experience: A Five-Step Framework 

A consumer experience initiative requires the wherewithal and discipline to invest in various types of infrastructure and data. CFOs should treat it like any other strategic investment—one with measurable outcomes and continuous improvement cycles. The following five-step framework outlines how to design and execute a high-impact consumer experience program. 

Step 1: Define The Purpose & Objectives 

Organizations should first review the contracts to make sure they are designing a program that meets contract requirements and collects the right data in the right format. Then CFOs and all relevant stakeholders should establish one primary objective that can be connected directly to strategic and financial outcomes. CFOs can facilitate this by using a priority matrix that weighs financial impact against organizational readiness and organizational gain. 

Step 2: Choose The Right Metrics 

Every strategic initiative that a CFO is involved in must provide a way to measure success and then tie that success to a definitive financial and/or contract outcome. For consumer experience, common measures may include: 

• Net Promoter Score (NPS): NPS gauges loyalty by asking how likely consumers are to recommend the organization. 

• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): CSAT measures overall satisfaction on a percentage scale. 

• Customer Effort Score (CES): CES evaluates how easy it is for consumers to navigate the care process. 

For most organizations, NPS is the ideal starting point. It provides a single, powerful indicator of whether consumers are advocates or detractors. CFOs can also augment quantitative results with open-ended questions to capture qualitative insights that reveal underlying drivers of satisfaction. 

Step 3: Plan The Logistics 

CFOs should decide which consumers will be surveyed for NPS, CSAT, or CES, and how those surveys will be distributed—e.g., in person after visits, via email, or via patient portals. Many organizations may find that they need to adapt or upgrade their infrastructure to support large scale surveys, such as purchasing a customer relationship management (CRM) system that can automate feedback collection and analysis. 

Step 4: Collect & Analyze The Data 

CFOs should categorize feedback into themes, such as communication, wait times, and cost transparency, then perform an analysis to detect emotional tone and frequency patterns. Benchmark these scores against industry standards and track progress across service lines, locations, and demographic segments. The CFO’s team should integrate these results into existing performance dashboards to monitor trends over time. 

Step 5: Communicate, Act & Refine 

The final step is to act on the findings, which may include the realization that the organization needs to make big changes and big investments in the tools and capabilities that will improve consumer experience. CFOs should build a plan on how they will address or implement those changes and investments. The plan needs to include a timeline, resources needed, and who is responsible. CFOs should consider four action steps to support the plan: 

• Empower the team: Train staff to interpret and act on consumer data. 

• Share insights: Use dashboards and regular reports to foster transparency and accountability. 

• Act decisively: Invest in targeted changes, whether redesigning billing statements or improving appointment scheduling, and measure their impact. 

• Refine continuously: Treat consumer experience improvement as a “forever strategy.” CFOs should update metrics, survey design, and operational interventions as new data emerges and new consumer experience patterns emerge. 

From Feedback To Financial Sustainability 

When organizations measure and improve consumer experience effectively, they can achieve stronger consumer relationships and a healthier bottom line. Consumers who feel valued tend to be more loyal, more engaged, more compliant with care plans, and more willing to pay their bills on time. They are also more likely to refer friends and family to your services. 

CFOs who invest in consumer experience measurement and management are also investing in the future competitiveness of their organizations. Financial sustainability can only be strengthened by delivering value, transparency, and trust at every step of the consumer journey.