Strategically Addressing Low-Volume Customer Concerns

Experience Action. Let's stop just talking about customer experience, employee experience and the experience of leaders. Let's turn ideas into action. Your host, Jeannie Walters, is an award-winning customer experience expert, international keynote speaker and founder of Experience Investigators, a strategic consulting firm helping companies increase sales and customer retention through elevated customer experiences. Ready set action.

It's the Experience Action Podcast. I'm Jeannie Walters and I cannot wait for your question.

Hello, Jeannie. My question is around prioritization of customer experiences that might not impact financials in the same way as other projects, but impact customer experience and brand reputation. For example, I work in healthcare. We receive calls from customers notifying us a patient passed away or a patient was recently diagnosed with a major medical need, such as cancer. Where should unique customer experiences fit in our prioritization of projects and how do we show value in these situations where the number of customers impacted may not be as high or as valuable?

Oh boy. So when we talk about really making sure that we're prioritizing customer experience efforts sometimes that gets immediately equated with it must have the most impact on the most customers in the most financial way. In this example from our listener, I mean think about how emotional that experience is. If you lose a loved one, if you're trying to take care of some of the outcomes that are left undone, frankly, that is a really important moment to consider on behalf of your patients and customers. So One of the things that I like to sometimes break down here is thinking about when we talk about the value of the efforts, when we talk about why something is priority, that's really about making sure that we get the return on the investment of that effort. But when we talk about the return or the value, we have to make sure we're not just talking about kind of black and white financial outcomes. Yes, those are important, but there are a lot of things that are more implicit that lead to those outcomes, and one of them is around your brand reputation and loyalty. So, even though we might see this as the end of a relationship, the end of a customer journey, when we are thinking about how important moments like this are to the people that we're serving, that will lead to better outcomes overall. When we think about things like how will this impact our brand reputation? Think about things like how will this impact our brand reputation? What would it mean if somebody reported to their friends how they felt in this situation, when they weren't handled with care, when they weren't shown empathy or compassion? That friend might then want to tell everybody don't go to that hospital.

Now I actually recently experienced something personally where there were there are all these mergers and acquisitions happening in healthcare with a lot of big hospital systems and we were discussing it. Just a group of family members and I, who live in different parts of the region, and two family members at once, said I'm so disappointed in this merger because one of the hospitals that was acquired was one that both family members had been to, the emergency room for, something no big deal right. But both family members said I went there once and I will never go back again because of how I was treated. Now that's just one visit. So on paper it looks like one thing, but you're actually missing the opportunity cost of what that really means, because now there's this bigger organization and my family members are making decisions on whether they're even going to frequent the larger organization based on the experience they had with one of the hospitals that was acquired.

This is real. These outcomes are real and sometimes when we hear from our leaders that we must only focus on things like the question of, well, how many people does this impact really? That is not necessarily the right question to ask. In my opinion, I think we should be asking what is the return on the investment of time and effort? And when we think about the return, we think about the value. We want to make sure we're prioritizing the programs and projects and fixes and improvements. We need to make sure that we are consistently delivering around the ideas of brand reputation, loyalty and word of mouth referrals. If we feel like this will have a dramatically negative impact on those things, that's how we make the business case.

The other thing I'd recommend here is looking at well, if you've promised, for instance, to be a compassionate healthcare provider, if that is part of your mission, if, ideally, you have that patient experience mission statement that gives you the tool to say you know what? We're not living up to this mission. We're not making sure that we're delivering on that promise way to really have those conversations about why we need to invest in this, even if it feels like maybe it's not impacting all of the customers or maybe it's only impacting a small segment of them. It matters enough to live up to that mission. And then, finally, I would look for other ways that you can define value. So if you aren't getting attention with that idea of word of mouth referrals, of really looking for opportunities for growth in the community that way, or just really making sure that your brand reputation is solid, then consider what the opportunity cost is, and this is where you can get into really understanding. How much does it cost when a customer or patient or a patient's family has to keep calling about the same issue? What are those service costs? What about the opportunity cost of what if we could get them to not only feel so good about this relationship and the way we compassionately handled this that they will then want to participate as a patient themselves? Are there opportunity costs around that? But look for those two levers that we're always looking at in any organization how can we improve revenue and how can we decrease expenses? Sometimes the conversations we have to have around these specific scenarios, where maybe it's not impacting a huge group is around the service cost. What if we could bring that service cost down, so that then that means more profitability for our organization? And, by the way, even nonprofits track profitability, so in their own way. So you know, don't be scared of really speaking in these terms, because we want to demonstrate the value of this.

The storytelling aspect can also be really powerful here. You know, gather and share those stories of what's happened when this was done well or what's happened when this wasn't done well, because there is nothing that will move a leader more than hearing the true voice of the customer, of connecting on that human level. We can show graphs and charts and everything all day long, but if we don't get to that emotional connection, we are serving people. Every single one of those numbers is a person with a life and they are trying to get something done. They are trying to move through what could be potentially a very difficult time in their life and we've agreed somehow, someway, we've agreed to partner with them. So we have to take that seriously. And by sharing the voice of the customer through things like contact center recordings, through the frontline workers actually sharing their experience, what did they hear? What has been frustrating to them because people call in again, and again and again. All of those things can really make an impact on getting that investment that we need.

In order to do this well, we need those employee feedback mechanisms. We need to give them the power to share those stories as well, and then, as the CX leader, we want to make sure that we are sharing that story throughout the organization with our leaders to get that buy-in that we need, both emotionally and financially. So I just want to say to the person who asked this question I really admire your compassion here and I think that's something that we should never lose sight of. When we see something that's not right, we don't need a million surveys to tell us it's not right. If we connect with that, we need to look and understand what our organizational situation is. Sometimes we have budgets, sometimes we don't. Sometimes this is a priority, sometimes it's not, but if we feel like something's not right, it's up to us to at least do our best to make the case, to make it right, and the more that we can focus on that, the more that we can prioritize in the right way around our customer experience mission, around our customer experience strategy and the overall success of the organization. That's how we make this robust case, and then sharing the stories helps everybody throughout the organization connect with that culture of compassion and understanding for our patients and customers.

Thank you so much for this great question.

Now for all of you leaders out there, Experience Investigators works with leaders like you to make sure that you are living that customer experience mission, that you are able to get the resources and investment you need to prioritize the right customer experience efforts. Now, of course, we do this through consulting and speaking and training, but we're very excited because we also offer CXI Ground School™. This is where we walk you through those foundational pieces so that you can succeed in the most meaningful way. Check out experienceinvestigators. com and please check out cxiflightschool. com. Applications are open and I encourage you to go ahead and apply so that we can work together on issues just like this one that we heard about today. We love your questions. Keep them coming, keep up the great work and I will talk to you next week. To learn more about our strategic approach to experience. Check out free resources at experienceinvestigators. com, where you can sign up for our newsletter, our Year of CX program and more, and please follow me, Jeannie Walters, on LinkedIn.