Health care is one of the most difficult environments in which to discuss customers and customer experience. First providers won’t acknowledge we are customers; they call us patients. That is definitely a misnomer. When you feel bad, you are anything but ‘patient’.

With so many negative images of health care, I want to highlight an agent of change within this sector: George Taylor, the Vice President of Customer Excellence at Cardinal Health website. Cardinal the $95B health care services giant that currently sits at number 19 on the Fortune 500 list has a customer experience leader like no other.

 One of the customer experience movement’s original advocates, George initiated customer experience at Cardinal in response to seeing accounts regularly turning over. When your clients are as big as Cardinal’s are, defection of even one could result in $100M in lost revenues.

Without a doubt, George made a bold move attempting to take Cardinal from a Goliath-type company focused on operational excellence to a more interactive, customer-centric company. But Cardinal’s mantra became: “Do the right thing by our customers,” and it worked. That attitude has been adopted by and now permeates every function of their 20+ business units. It’s even become an over-arching theme at their investor meetings.

How did George do it? He systematically reached out to leaders across all levels of the organization. Through literally hundreds of 30 minute meetings, he helped business units discover how to focus and align toward becoming more customer-centric. George confides that “making internal metrics around service delivery and operations better oriented to the customer’s view” went a long way toward making their processes more customer-centric. At each step, he solicited internal and external feedback and measured progress.

George stresses, however, that engaging leaders at all levels of your organization will not happen overnight. In Cardinal’s case, it took 18 months before their leadership fully embraced customer experience management.

Cardinal has been on the customer experience journey for quite some time now, and their success in building differentiation through customer experience provides a blueprint worthy of emulation. In fact, the company was among the top finalists this year for the Voice of the Customer Award presented by Bruce Temkin of Forrester Research. George is now in the process of sustaining their momentum and ensuring customer experience remains embedded in all areas of the company.

 

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Healthcare in the U.S., on average, is frustrating just ask anyone who has a chronic illness.  Chances are they have been misdiagnosed or had to fight to get the tests they need to find out what ails them.  Most likely they also felt crazy half the time. 

Imagine if, in your own business, you told your customers, “Hey, I can refer you to a psychologist for an anti-depressant because I don’t know how to fix your problem.”  This is a regular complaint from people trying to uncover a difficult-to-diagnose illness, just check the internet for people with MS, MG, RA, Thyroid, Wagner’s, etc. 

What are the underlying emotions people have toward health care providers if this happens? 

BITTER HATE. 

Basically, patients end up hating these physicians, and they will tell everyone they know for the next 20 years.  Clearly, that emotion does not create a life-time customer. 

We will be exploring healthcare over the next month in a short series.  And the first thing I want to expose you to is Microsoft’s Future Vision of Healthcare. Will this help us make better connections, faster and with more convenience to patients? 

What is good about this and what might not be?

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I’d like to invite you to request an invitation to our ACES Laboratory #2. It will be held Feb. 17-18, 2010 in Atlanta, GA.

Join other CEOs, decision makers and leading executives to engage in 2 days of rigorous learning all about customer experience strategy.

You’ll explore:

RELEVANCE
Current trends
Strategic choices
Competitive advantage

INSIGHT
Unveil the mystique surrounding customer experience tools and analysis
Discover where you currently are on the customer experience journey
Develop a Strategic Customer Experience Plan

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