Consumer behavior and customer relationship management in mental health services

Abstract

Mental health services are perceived differently in different socio-cultural settings. The connotations accorded to mental health, especially in terms of need awareness and evaluation of alternatives, vary from culture to culture. Understanding these differences is critical to attract and retain patients suffering from mental conditions. Generic literature on consumer behavior does not provide direct answers to many of the problems in this regard, primarily because such literature does not take into account the deviant mental states of these patients. In this paper, we review findings from mental health specific studies conducted in both Western and Asian countries, evaluate the importance of decision-making factors for both public and private service providers, and offer directions for future research. Interdisciplinary literature on customer relationship management, consumer behavior, mental health, and healthcare marketing, guided by the principles of systematic literature review constituted the methodology of this study. The research methods are analysis, synthesis, classification and grouping. The empirical base included about 250 peer-reviewed articles on the topic under consideration. We find that doctor-led service provision is still the most prevalent form of relationship building in the Eastern societies, especially in the less developed countries of South East Asia. Consumer-initiated mental health treatment schemes are more common in more developed Western economies. We also observe that, among the innovative set of providers, there is a trend of increased use of telehealth. Among other things, this includes more proactive and digitally-savvy identification, acquisition, and retention of patients. The results of the study can be used as the basis for marketing strategies of drug manufacturers and mobile application designers in the field of online medical services.