Navigating the Future of Healthcare Engagement: Smart Communications Included in Forrester’s Q4 2025 Customer Experience Platforms Landscape
By John Zimmerer, VP of Healthcare Marketing at Smart Communications
Payers and providers looking to create personalized and empathetic healthcare customer experiences will need to modernize their engagement strategies. Forrester’s “The Customer Experience Platforms For Healthcare Landscape, Q4 2025” (Forrester Research, October 2025) offers a comprehensive overview of 27 vendors with engagement offerings. Among them, Smart Communications stands out for its robust capabilities in addressing extended use cases that are critical to improving healthcare customer experience.
This blog post summarizes key insights from the report and explores how Smart Communications’ suite of products—SmartCOMM™, SmartIQ™, SmartPATH™, and SmartHUB™—can help healthcare organizations meet rising consumer expectations, particularly in areas like benefits and coverage inquiries, chronic condition management, and estimating cost of care.
The Evolving Healthcare Experience Landscape
Forrester defines customer experience platforms for healthcare as technologies that orchestrate personalized experiences across every touchpoint—from plan selection to care delivery and payment. These platforms are designed to foster sustained engagement, build trust, and unlock operational efficiencies.
The report’s authors note that healthcare organizations (HCOs) are under pressure to:
- Deliver a better total experience that drives loyalty.
- Sustain engagement to improve clinical and financial outcomes.
- Reduce costs through automation and streamlined operations.
The report highlights that the U.S. health insurance industry ranks lowest in customer experience among 10 tracked industries. This underscores the urgency for payers to invest in healthcare customer experience platforms that can clarify benefits, respond empathetically, and empower consumers with actionable information.
Smart Communications: A Notable Vendor in the CX Landscape
Smart Communications is one of the 27 vendors included in Forrester’s report. Our company is recognized for its focus on extended use cases that go beyond basic transactions like scheduling and care navigation. Specifically, Smart Communications selected the following top three extended use cases as areas of strategic focus:
- Benefits and Coverage Inquiry
- Chronic Condition Management
- Estimating Cost of Care
These use cases are increasingly important as consumers demand clarity, personalization, and transparency in their healthcare journeys. Smart Communications’ inclusion in this report signals its commitment to helping HCOs meet these healthcare customer experience demands through intelligent, scalable communication solutions.
Addressing Benefits and Coverage Inquiries with Smart Communications
One of the most frequent and frustrating pain points for healthcare consumers is understanding their benefits and coverage. Confusing language, inconsistent formats, and lack of personalization often lead to member dissatisfaction and increased call center volume.
Smart Communications addresses this challenge through:
- SmartCOMM, which enables dynamic, personalized document generation—turning complex benefit information into clear, easy-to-understand communications.
- SmartIQ, which powers intelligent forms that guide members through interactive coverage inquiries, reducing friction and improving self-service.
- SmartPATH, which orchestrates communication workflows to ensure timely delivery of benefit updates and responses.
- SmartHUB, which centralizes member communications across channels, allowing for compliant and cost-effective communication storage and retrieval.
By leveraging these tools, payers can reduce inbound inquiries, increase member satisfaction, and build trust through transparency and responsiveness. Providers can reduce patient effort and relieve staff burden while securely handling health information.
Supporting Chronic Condition Management
Managing chronic conditions requires ongoing engagement, personalized education, and proactive communication. Forrester notes that many vendors are investing in capabilities that support this use case, and Smart Communications is among them.
Smart Communications enables chronic condition management by:
- Delivering personalized care plans and educational materials through SmartCOMM.
- Using SmartIQ to collect patient-reported outcomes and health status updates via interactive digital forms.
- Coordinating outreach campaigns through SmartPATH to remind patients of appointments, ensure medication adherence, and provide lifestyle tips.
- Providing a centralized communication hub via SmartHUB that streamlines the storage and retrieval of critical communications.
These capabilities help providers stay connected with patients, reduce readmissions, and improve health outcomes—all while enhancing the patient experience.
Estimating Cost of Care: Empowering Consumers with Transparency
Cost transparency is a growing priority for healthcare consumers. Forrester’s healthcare customer experience report emphasizes the importance of clear, fast resolution to cost-related inquiries, which are often a source of confusion and anxiety and drive calls to call centers.
Smart Communications supports cost estimation by:
- Generating personalized cost-of-care summaries using SmartCOMM, tailored to individual coverage and treatment plans.
- Enabling members to submit cost estimation requests through SmartIQ forms that guide them through the necessary inputs.
- Automating responses and follow-ups via SmartPATH, ensuring timely and accurate communication.
- Providing a centralized view of cost-related communications through SmartHUB, helping members make informed decisions.
These tools empower consumers to understand their financial responsibilities, avoid surprise bills, and plan for care more effectively.
Why Smart Communications Stands Out
Smart Communications differentiates itself in several key ways:
- End-to-end communication orchestration: Unlike point solutions, Smart Communications offers a unified platform that spans document generation, form automation, workflow orchestration, and omnichannel delivery.
- Personalization at scale: The platform uses data-driven logic to tailor every interaction, ensuring relevance and clarity.
- Compliance and trust: Smart Communications embeds data protection and privacy into its workflows, helping HCOs meet regulatory requirements while building consumer trust.
- Flexibility and integration: The platform integrates with existing systems and adapts to evolving business needs, making it a future-proof investment.
The Road Ahead: What Forrester Predicts
Forrester’s report outlines several trends that will shape the future of healthcare customer experience platforms:
- Agentic AI will become essential—but must be deployed thoughtfully to avoid overpromising and underdelivering.
- Consolidation will accelerate, with HCOs seeking end-to-end platforms to replace fragmented point solutions.
- Rapid change will continue, driven by regulatory shifts, economic pressures, and rising consumer expectations.
Smart Communications is well-positioned to thrive in this environment. Its platform not only meets current needs but also provides the agility and innovation required to adapt to future challenges.
Smart Communications: A Strategic Partner for Healthcare Engagement
As healthcare organizations strive to improve engagement, reduce costs, and build trust, the choice of a healthcare customer experience platform becomes a strategic imperative. Forrester’s Q4 2025 report provides valuable guidance, and Smart Communications emerges as a strong contender for payers and providers looking to address complex use cases like benefits inquiries, chronic condition management, and cost estimation.
With its intelligent, integrated platform, Smart Communications helps HCOs transform transactional interactions into meaningful engagements, driving better outcomes for both consumers and organizations.