January 15th, 2024, Bhavika Bansal
Fuelled by greater digital connectivity consumers are turning to online resources to inform their purchase decisions, even when it comes to selecting healthcare services. The advent of user-generated content has given rise to a burgeoning culture of online product reviews, where individuals share their experiences with everything from restaurants to electronic products. However, does this reliance on online product reviews extend to healthcare services?
While more than two-fifths of our respondents across 17 international markets say they regularly use online reviews by other consumers when choosing hotels (44%), restaurants (43%) and consumer electronics (42%), this proportion falls to 23% when it comes to healthcare services. Less than one in five respondents say they use online user-generated ratings when buying financial and investment products (19%) and video streaming services (16%).
A closer look at the data for healthcare services by market reveals some interesting differences.
Though the APAC markets of Hong Kong and India (39% and 38% respectively) significantly outpace the international average in using online reviews to make purchase decisions about healthcare services, consumers in Singapore (26%) and Australia (21%) are much less likely to do the same.
Our European respondents also register scattered opinions about online reviews of healthcare services. Compared to a third of consumers in Poland (33%) and nearly a quarter of consumers in France (21%), just a tenth of Danes and Britons (11% and 10% respectively) say they regularly rely on online consumer ratings when it comes to choosing healthcare services.
Similarly, such reviews of healthcare services are much likelier to be viewed by consumers in Mexico (37%) than in Canada (21%) and the US (19%).
Much like their North American counterparts in Mexico, slightly more than a third of respondents in the UAE say they use online reviews to pick healthcare services (35%).
Data from the YouGov survey also reveals that 35-to-54-year-old consumers (25%) are most likely to make purchase decisions about healthcare services using online consumer ratings, followed by consumers aged 18-34 (21%) and 55 and above (19%).
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