This is what happens when Baader-Meinhof shows up in an emergency room.
Sitting in a crowded emergency department waiting for my 2 year-old son to have his gaping eyebrow sutured — without as much as a ‘how you doing?’ from the triage nurse — I began to complain endlessly to my (frustratingly-patient) husband about the infuriating experience .
I didn’t care that I’d been waiting upwards of 8 hours — my son had fallen asleep by this point. I didn’t care that I wouldn’t have to pay out-of-pocket for this medical care. (‘Cuz by hour four, I woulda.)
What I did care about was that after 6 hours of trying to be understanding to the plight** of the staff, I was forced to take charge of the situation and solicit information on what was happening with my son’s care, if anything at all — only to get a “we’ll be with you when we can” response from the triage nurse, chased by a whoa-we’ve-got-an-aggressive-one sideways-look from staff standing around the triage desk.
Further than that, this ridiculous situation was void of any empathy or even curiosity to demonstrate that the fantastic staff gave a shit about the patient, my son.
At that time, what I needed was information. That is, I needed a few words of explanation by someone in the know (or even who seemed to be in the know) in keeping with attending to my son’s needs (and by extension the caregiver’s) or even communicating to me/the patient the basic flow of this particular emergency department.
I needed something resembling a familiarity with contemporary patient care (aka patient-centered care, aka customer service).
Empathy, a foundation for good patient care and its analog, customer service, involves putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. If the triage nurses would have employed empathy they might have found a more understanding and more, ahem, patient patient.
I’m not alone in my thinking. Patient satisfaction surveys repeatedly show that healthcare workers’ interactions during patients’ experiences weigh with similar, if not greater, importance to the treatment itself.
I wish I could say that my experience in the emergency department that night was unique to me. But let’s get real. I see it everywhere.
The ‘frequency illusion’ phenomenon is real.
Since my encounter in that emergency department 6 years ago, I’ve come to notice exemplary customer service (and, of course, the shake-my-head cases of customer service) outside and within healthcare environments.
Funny how once you notice something for the first time, a word or concept, it seems to appear everywhere.
This phenomenon, known as ‘frequency illusion’ or the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, occurs when you learn something new and then encounter the same concept or word repeatedly following your first exposure.
Cognitive science explains the why behind the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon: Our brain’s affinity for new knowledge latches on to important concepts. Then, unconsciously having a heightened awareness of that new knowledge, you begin to hear it with increasing frequency. When you hear the concept again, your brain picks up on it and validates you’re seeing the new knowledge everywhere.
What up with that?
It was just over 5 years ago that the first inklings of patient-centered care, a healthcare strategy that moves patients’ experience into central focus within healthcare relationships, emerged as strategy to fix the brokenness of Alberta’s healthcare system.
Essentially, patient-centred care highlights the importance of patient satisfaction, and by extension, customer service within healthcare. Healthcare strategists across Canada have begun to recognize that measurement of healthcare value is one of the most important steps in improving health care.
Novel concept. I know😏
Although it’s not new, patient-centered care (and the overarching concept of value-based healthcare) holds this: if the outcome matters to the patient, then that is where healthcare should be putting its emphasis.
A patient-centered approach to healthcare is predicated upon the belief that value to the system is a function of the relationship between health outcomes (that matter to the client) and the cost to deliver these outcomes.
Value-based health care flies in the face of the traditional model of Canadian healthcare delivery, which is conventionally passive and encourages volume (thanks to the fee-for-service remuneration system) over quality of care, the goal of value to the system seemed to be lost.
Interestingly, although healthcare spending in Canada exceeds most of the rest of the developed world our levels of satisfaction with the system are lacklustre 😳.
This is the second of four lessons I’ve learned from working in a SaaS startup.
Is it just me or does anyone else see the similarities between a value-based approach to healthcare and SaaS’s concept of customer success?
Anybody?
Bueller?
The main focus of my role at Airstory is to develop an understanding of what makes Airstory users successful. What drives our customers to continue to use Airstory. I wanna know how they’re feeling, learn about any unmet expectations — and I wanna see data that support these conclusions or lead me in another direction.
As I settle into the user success role at Airstory, I’m learning there are several similarities between the value-based approach to healthcare and SaaS’s concept of customer success.
From my experience at Airstory thus far, 4 similarities have emerged between the customer service world of healthcare and SaaS
Customer success needs to be customer-directed.
Quick: Patient satisfaction surveys are to customer service as the _______ is to customer success?
If you said Net Promoter Score, you’re a GENIUS! 🎉👏
Collecting honest feedback has been a strength of the SaaS community for a long time through the efficient and reliable NPS metric. (Sadly, unlike American health care institutions, it’s only been recently that patient satisfaction surveys have landed in Canadian healthcare institutions.)
Much like value in healthcare institutions, the value in SaaS comes from what matters to the user. If our product hasn’t helped the customer achieve what they expected with our product, we should expect that they will leave.
Learning what customers want to achieve with Airstory — and learning it from customers — is integral to the success of Airstory.
Customer success is strongly focused on prevention.
Both value-based care and customer success take a proactive approach to churn — or not achieving the patient’s/customer’s desired outcomes.
Value-based healthcare is forward-looking. Value to the system is derived from achieving long term health outcomes — such as preventing limb amputations in diabetics — with the initial investment of periodic educational interventions by professional nurses, for instance.
Likewise, in SaaS we want to act before a customer becomes frustrated and disengaged rather than attempt to address the problem later with hopes of reengaging. Toward this goal, we collect data to ensure customers are achieving what they set out to achieve.
Customer success is data-driven.
Improvement in any field requires measuring results. Done right, customer success should unearth metrics that help track at-risk customers and prevent them from churning or, at worst, becoming detractors.
Customer success dictates that outcomes that matter to our users/customers are heard, met and collected. This is as true for SaaS as it is with healthcare (although it is just recently that the latter has begun collecting measures of patient’s satisfaction with customer service).
Not only does the data derived from customer success management tools help SaaS providers assess the health of customers they also demonstrate ROI for customer success efforts while distilling what matters most to users.
It’s not just about giving users what they want. It’s about determining, from the data and personal interactions with customers, the customer behavior that creates value for your business — and then and following customer satisfaction over time to determine the economic outcomes of different experiences.
Customer success requires a holistic approach.
Just as patient-centered care cannot be delivered successfully in silos neither can customer success.
In order to improve health outcomes the delivery of healthcare services cannot be fragmented. It must be integrative.
For instance, a patient-centered approach to the care of a person newly diagnosed with diabetes requires collaboration and cooperation across the disciplines involved in care.
Integrating mechanisms such as assigning a single lead for a chronic disease management team comprised of a dietician, physician and nurse to implement one patient-centered care plan and help ensure that well-coordinated, multidisciplinary care is delivered in a convenient and satisfying way.
Likewise, in SaaS, customer success cannot be relegated to the most obvious team, customer support. In order to deliver on the promise of reducing churn and helping customer’s achieve their outcomes, customer success needs to be approached in an integrative way.
From the CEO, to product management and support, all areas must be aware of the goals of customer success, how they contribute to it and how they can measure it.
**All too often nurses suffer from burnout, compassion fatigue and depression. However, as a former registered nurse, I feel if the healthcare machine placed greater emphasis on what are considered traditional customer service skills, one of the several variables that contribute to healthcare provider stress — dissatisfied and frustrated patients — could be allayed.
