This episode features an interview with Alexandra Morehouse. Alex is Chief Digital Officer and Chief Marketing Officer at Banner Health, a health system with hospitals and facilities in six states. In this episode, Alex talks about addressing data deprecation in the cookie-less future, integrating disparate systems after an acquisition, and the “Know Me” principle.
This episode features an interview with Alexandra Morehouse. Alex is Chief Digital Officer and Chief Marketing Officer at Banner Health, a health system with hospitals and facilities in six states. In this episode, Alex talks about addressing data deprecation in the cookie-less future, integrating disparate systems after an acquisition, and the “Know Me” principle.
Quotes
*”Marketing used to be seen as the people who issued the invitation to the party. And now it's come to mean you better have the chips and dip and the drinks ready. Because if you stimulate all this demand, people either show up online, in a call center, or in your retail location. If you don't have this integrated experience, then your brand looks disorganized and of lower value.”
*”Healthcare in particular is under tremendous financial pressure. So digital transformation is simply taking transactions that used to be done with expensive people and moving them to technological self-service. And when you get that self-service in place, the customers are way happier.”
*”Baseline is, know who I am. So if I go into Urgent Care over the weekend because I sprained my ankle, and then they tell me, ‘Hey, you need to go and follow up with your primary care next week,’ when I show up next week, they better know that I was in Urgent Care over the weekend. And I think that's probably more important. That's what builds trust. And it's that continuity that says, all right, no matter where I show up inside your system, you know it's Alex and you're not going to treat me like a stranger. And because the whole industry has grown through acquisition, that is the challenge on the CX side.”
Time Stamps
*[0:13] The Case of Bringing Digital Transformation to a Highly Regulated Industry
*[0:39] Introducing Alexandra Morehouse, Chief Digital Officer and Chief Marketing Officer at Banner Health
*[9:29] Evidence #1: New tech systems from acquisitions don't mesh
*[19:05] Evidence #2: Not prepared for data deprecation in the cookie less future
*[26:04] Evidence #3: Unclear how much information to collect from clients
*[30:36] Evidence #4: Call center is slammed
*[37:51] Debrief
*[38:54] HGS Pub
Bio
Alexandra Morehouse is an experienced board member who brings digital transformation experience and strategic focus to her board assignments. She's worked with companies through M&A, turnarounds and growth efforts.
Alexandra additionally has deep leadership expertise focused on Diversity and Inclusion. She's managed global teams of over 2,000 FTE and P&L’s up to $10B. She has led decentralized global teams at organizations including American Express, Charles Schwab, AAA, Kaiser Permanente and, currently, Banner Health.
Her board committee assignments include compensation, governance and audit. Her background in DEI has been instrumental in pursuing ESG work on her boards.
Thank you to our friends
This podcast is brought to you by HGS. A global leader in optimizing the customer experience lifecycle, digital transformation, and business process management, HGS is helping its clients become more competitive every day. Learn more at hgs.cx.
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Lyssa Myska Allen: Well hello, come on in, we’ve caught a case. This one’s highly confidential because we’re dealing with protected information. I figure you, of anyone, is up to the task. Here, listen to the message our client left us.
Client: Hi CX Detectives, I’m hoping you can help me. I founded a virtual therapy company, so people can get counseling from their home computer. But we’ve run into some challenges managing customers’ private data because it’s such a regulated industry. There are times therapists will need to pass on critical information to other healthcare providers, for instance, so we want to make that as seamless as possible. Can you help me?
Lyssa Myska Allen: You bet! And I have someone in mind to help me tackle the case: Alexandra Morehouse. Alex is Chief Digital Officer and Chief Marketing Officer at Banner Health. She’s a digital transformation expert who has worked with global teams at American Express, Charles Schwab, AAA, Kaiser Permanente and, now, Banner Health. From finance to healthcare, she has waded through the waters of highly regulated industries and brought about incredible digital transformations. Together, Alex and I are cracking the case of bringing digital transformation to a highly regulated industry. Because we are CX Detectives. Real cases, solved. I’m Lyssa Myska Allen, VP and Global Head of Marketing at HGS. Let’s get started.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Alex, I'm so thrilled that you're here with us today, that you are my co detective. It looks like you have had an illustrious career that will help us solve the challenges of the case that we're cracking today. Um, do you wanna tell me a little bit about your background?
Alex Morehouse: Sure. I spent the first half of my career at American Express. And financial services was sort of the first industry to go actually financial services and the airlines. And they had to get really good across a lot of business units, um, call, click, or visit putting together all that information so that they knew the left hand on the right hand knew what was going on. And when you're marketing a service instead of a product, that customer experience essentially becomes your product. So we had to make sure it was a seamless experience and they got so good at that, that they actually spun off a subsidiary that went and built these customer experience platforms for other companies. And that was how I got to the west coast. I opened up their office and we did it for Wells Fargo and B of A and Nordstrom's. So that's how they know what kind of shoes you want. And, um, some of the Telcos, but that's how I got started. And then I moved over to healthcare in 2010. And healthcare is much later to that journey. They, of course, were in the service business also, but they have customer records all over the place and a harder time coordinating them into an integrated customer experience. And we've all had some of the frustrations in dealing with that.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Absolutely. It's really interesting because both of those industries are highly regulated, but in very different ways. And customer data in those industries is regulated. It seems like in different ways. Is
Alex Morehouse: It's regulated the same way in that, um, in financial services, somebody's credit data is highly protected. And if you don't honor that you get into trouble and you get into you get fines and penalties and all sorts of regulatory issues, it is the same issue, but it's a different, different topic. So we can't know what Alex's, uh, credit score is on the financial services side and, um, PHI or my personal health information is what you can't, um, mess around with on the healthcare side. And we want both of those industries to be very, very scrupulous about protecting our privacy, but, uh, same issue manifested differently. One is private financial data, the other's private health data.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Yeah, that makes complete sense. And it makes sense too, then the order of the rate of change, um, into personalization, uh, well to some extent, I don't know. Does it? How, how do you see the two industries? Like, are they learning from each other or is healthcare completely learning from finance?
Alex Morehouse: They're not learning from one another whatsoever. And I think because, um, the topics are so different. So a lot of it is just is a reflection of our judiciary system. When you have case law that says, Hey, these are the ways you can and can't use financial data early on because financial services needed it to issue credit cards and do all the things that would allow you to issue a mortgage. And if you're going to pay them back or not, They had their interactions with the judiciary system. And there were many lawsuits brought and either won or lost. And so there's established case law that says, Hey, here are the guidelines for financial data and what you can and can't use. And what the fair credit reporting act says you can and can't do. Um, we are just taking the first beginning baby steps on the PHI and because it is so regulated and because privacy is so important, um, the entire industry is erring on the side of caution. So the basic, 'if then' that is well-established in financial services. So if you have a FICO score above this, then you can be issued that credit card. We don't have that 'if then' on the PHI side, on the health information side yet, but everybody's taking small steps and everybody's looking at the other guys to find out what what's going to fly and what isn't with regulators.
Lyssa Myska Allen: And so as that translates into customer experience and marketing with your role how does the, how nascent the industry is in terms of regulation feed into how you're looking at marketing or customer experience?
Alex Morehouse: So on a practical level, it's quite easy. Because whether you're using your CRM tool or any of the other applications that you have in your tech stack, there are some basic 'if then' modeling. And it allows you to say, ah, if Alex has diabetes, then I want to send her this message. And so what we do on a case by case basis, those are rules that are loaded into whatever your CRM tool is. Um, what we're doing on a case-by-case basis is, um, before we fire off any communications, we have the capability, but we're clearing everything with compliance and regulatory, just as a checks and balances and we don't move until they say yes. So we have a regular kind of editorial calendar. We bring it to them. They tell us we're comfortable with these, but not with those, or we're comfortable with these if you make these changes. So that's how we're proceeding so far. And I, I think, um, that's probably the only way you can move forward and still be safe.
Alex Morehouse: The only thing we didn't touch on that's really important, uh, for the customer experience is, um, the outside in listening tools. So that would fall into sort of reputation management because of. we all have the court of public opinion. When we have a lousy customer experience, we, we take to the interwebs to say something about it. So, um, Listen, pay attention and act. So that has been a really important tool for us. So there are a number of different vendors in that space, but if you listen on a regular basis um, you, you will get comments. We actually have it set up. Um, and I did this in a prior life too. Where if somebody posts something cranky in a public forum, it doesn't matter which it is. Um, it goes immediately to the, uh, customer experience. And a rep will call them within 11 minutes. So I'll call up and say, listen, I'm so sorry that your surgeon didn't know that you'd been into urgent care. Um, you know, what can I do to make it right? And so that in turn improves rating and reviews, which guests what, um, dramatically impacts your SEO rankings. So if you pay attention, to what the customer experiences, not only will you get, um, a happier customer, but you're going to get better, um, public recognition of it, better ratings and reviews, which attracts even more customers. So it's a virtuous cycle. So that's the only part of the tech stack that we didn't talk about.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Yeah, I mean, within 11 minutes. That's amazing. Um,
Alex Morehouse: Yeah.
Lyssa Myska Allen: How big is your contact center operation?
Alex Morehouse: Big it's big. Yeah. Um, but it's particularly important because by the time somebody, uh, arrives at one of our facilities, they're escalated. Something is, you know, unless it's a routine annual, that's something that's troubling them. So if you have somebody in, in an emergency room who hasn't been seen in an hour, we immediately, we trigger that off. Cause they'll, they'll fire off a blast on Twitter or whatever their favorite complaint platform is. Um, and we'll make sure that they, that the person who runs that facility comes over and says, Lyssa, I am so sorry. Can I buy you a cup of coffee? You know, we got a whole bunch of it. There was, uh, you know, uh, Some sort of wreck on the highway that happened right before you were so sorry, we were backed up and you can expect to be wedding X more time, but that goes a long way towards, and that is the customer experience and empowering the people who are on the site, especially when you have many, many locations, empowering them to know what people are saying and to go in, in the moment and improve that experience is really important.
Lyssa Myska Allen: We’re getting ahead of ourselves and already getting to the good stuff. Before we go too far, let’s take a quick break to hear a word from our sponsor. Welcome back! Now that we’ve learned more about Alex’s experience and know that she’s very well credentialed, let’s get into the case. Let’s touch base with our client. I want to hear about what’s going on with their customer experience.
Client: So my company has grown significantly through acquisitions. Through each acquisition comes new systems and we need to either consolidate the systems or make them all communicate. Because currently everything is disjointed, and accessing even simple information can be a convoluted process.
Lyssa Myska Allen: And I’m sure if our client is feeling it on the back end, customers are probably seeing some issues on the front end as well. How should our client navigate the jumble of systems? I know you have some experience with this issue, Alex.
Alex Morehouse: Okay. First, let me start with marketing overall. So it used to be that marketing was the words and pictures people, right? So, you know, you have beautiful Superbowl ads. That's what most people think of. Um, and then it, it started, and again, it started in industries like the airlines and unfinished surfaces saying, 'Hey, the experience that you have of booking a flight on American Airlines, uh, of, um, taking out a credit card with a Visa or American Express, the experience of that service is just as important as stimulating demand. So it's sort of like, um, marketing used to be seen as the people who, uh, issued the invitation to the party and now it's come to mean, oh, you better have the chips and dip and the drinks ready. Cause if you stimulate all this demand, people either show up online in a call center or in your retail location. And you're not. And you also don't know, Hey, I sent a special offer to Alex and then if I show up and say, Hey, I want my special offer. If you don't know, if you don't have this integrated experience, then your brand looks disorganized and of lower value.So, that's why, um, a number of marketing people have moved over into customer experience. And, um, if you seen one CFO, you've probably seen most CFOs, uh, CMOs and CXO are sort of overlapping now because in many cases they say, Hey, you're not the words and pictures people you're not just stimulating demand. You actually have to fulfill on the demand too, and all the way through to the mobile app, the website, all the different places where your service, call centers, for example, all roll up to mean any single place that, um, in inside banner health, if, if you're having an experience, then I I'm air traffic control for those experiences. And we have to make sure, particularly since healthcare of all industries has grown through acquisition. So all the major health systems now have, um, have grown up by acquiring other things or other systems and Banner's, a great example. We acquired Urgent Care. We acquired imaging. We acquired labs. We acquired all sorts of physician practices. We acquired an entire academic medicine institution. So all those things are part of Banner, but they came with backend systems that didn't talk to each other. So the reason Banner hired me was, Hey, can we put Humpty Dumpty together again? We've got to create an integrated experience. And the place we started was actually at the board level. And so I proposed a change in our mission. And the mission had been around high quality clinical care. And we actually went out to a broad panel of consumers and they said, Hey, w we know you have great care. We know the quality is high, but can you just make my life easier? So our, our revised vision was healthcare made easier, so life can be better, and that it is our standing mission. And it has been since I got to Banner and we, we got this cleared with the board, but just as importantly, um, we actually focused our strategy around the customer experience and because I was having a tough time and I I'm a non-native to healthcare, I just, I migrated from financial services. The people would talk about the patient and the patient is sort of amorphous. So we actually created a persona and her name is Sophia and she is married. She has a couple of kids. You know, parents and in-laws, that are older and she's Erica air traffic control for all of their health care. And, um, she was instantly adopted. And any time you go into any Banner conference room or back when we're,when we're back to corporate offices, anytime we open a meeting, any document that you opened, there is a picture of Sophia. We actually hired a local actress and we, we use her for all of our video assets and all of our things, but everything we do is centered around Sophia's experience. And we actually have metrics built into our bonus plan that reflect, Hey, is Sophia having a better experience this year than she did last year? So we, we sort of adopted that wholesale and we talk about Sophia's experience at every single meeting we have at Banner, and it is made it personal in a way that kind of, um, abstract customer experience wasn't, wasn't able to.
Lyssa Myska Allen: I love that it's both personal and universal across all of the companies that you've acquired. So it gives you, uh, a unification point.
Alex Morehouse: Yes. And the most important thing about Sophia is that like all of us, she's short on time and short on money and she just wants you to make it easier. So how do we make that experience easier for her?
Lyssa Myska Allen: Yeah. The other thing I think that's really interesting that you brought in here is the technology and the importance of the technology. And you touched on the disparate systems. And so as we look at CXO and CMO, I think you're also seeing CTOs and CIOs who are becoming very involved in the customer experience because they have to be in order to do some of the things that you're talking about, making life easier and better on limited time with limited money, right?
Alex Morehouse: Yes. And that was actually, so when I worked for this subsidiary for American express, that was all I did. And that's what I've continued to do and what I did at Banner. So I'm, I'm basically a glorified plumber, and most CXOs are plumbers. So I'll give you an example. At Banner, we had 400 different phone queues sitting on nine different telephony platforms. We had to bring that down to one, but I happened to put it on Genesis. Uh, we had 15 different websites. We had to bring that down to one. Our product is our physicians. We had nine different physician directories and 40% of all the records in them were inaccurate or out of date. So we can't sell our product if we don't even know which physicians we have, you know, physicians would retire, new ones would come on, wait, wait. That was completely a mess. Uh, we had, uh, 28 different apps. , we had just a complete chaos of these backend legacy systems. And so, um, the funding that I got from our board of directors, that digital transformation is always the same thing. How is it that you get the plumbing, um, uh, integrated and getting all these backend systems to talk to each other and then getting the middleware or the service layer in place so that you can publish and subscribe that data so that all the great apps that you plug into it and have clean data to plug into. And, you know, no matter where I show up, I show up as Alexandra, Morehouse, Alex Morehouse, or under my married name, Morehouse-McReynolds, they know I'm all the same person and they can follow me and create those experiences across all of them.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Yeah, and that, and that's so daunting. And I think for some people, that's why Digital Transformation feels very daunting. For someone like you who's ready to go in with your plumber's wrench, um, how do you, how do you ease the fears of the board, the different constituents, the teams that are affected by doing that and, and help them understand the importance of digital transformation?
Alex Morehouse: Digital transformation for better or for worse is one of the buzz words in all the media and in the industry. So everyone's reading about it. If you ask any CEO or any board, should I do it? Oh yeah, of course. It's, it's important. Um, and I think it's, um, important to demystify sort of why you're doing it and every company, but healthcare in particular is under tremendous financial pressure. So digital transformation is simply taking transactions that used to be done with expensive people and moving them to technological self-service basically. And when you get that self-service in place, the customers are way happier. So for example, at Banner, we, we put an open table capability in place so that if you want to see a doctor, you just go online. You don't have to call any place. That is way cheaper for us because we don't have a human being answering the phone. And it is way higher satisfaction for the person who who's able to book at 10 o'clock on a Sunday night. So, um, Getting clear on what it is you're doing and why I think is pretty straightforward. And, um, then painting the picture. Cause in order to get the money, you have to be able to paint the payback picture. So, and it, particularly since they take a long time, I've done it a lot, myself. So. Um, I was able to finish on time and on budget, but they're always afraid it's going to take longer or it's going to cost more money. So, um, what I needed to do, uh, was to, to say to my board of directors, Hey, um, you don't have to trust me, or how about trust and verify? So I said, give me a little bit of money. And then every 12 weeks, which is basically every quarterly board meeting, I'll show you what kind of progress I'm making. If you're not happy, pull my funding. And of course we were able to, we over-delivered every quarter. And then by the end of the, of the three-year initiative, we were able to fully have it in place. But I, I think it is, um, getting a very clear return on investment because if you get more customers in and you get them to stay longer and to have more transactions with you, then the payback is pretty straightforward. But I think building that confidence and then partnering with, um, IT and the initiative was coming from me, but I didn't, um, I didn't go alone in front of the board. I made sure I partnered with my CIO and we signed up for mutual, um, mutual goals because we made it clear. Um, if they succeeded and I failed, then they failed. So, and likewise, if, you know, if I succeeded, but they failed. So if you set it up so that you succeed together with your IT partner, um, it, it gets a lot easier.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Let’s get deeper into that relationship with IT in a minute. First, let’s check in with our client to see what else they’d like help with.
Client: One thing I wanted to ask you about is the cookie-less future. I’m worried that we’re just not prepared for data deprecation. Can you give us some tips on how our marketing team can prepare for it?
Lyssa Myska Allen: Absolutely. Alex, what have you done at Banner? Because you’re going to be navigating the cookie-less future as well.
Alex Morehouse: So we basically, um, laid out what the tech stack needed to be. And you don't have to guess because every industry's gone before, so he needed a CRM implementation you needed a customer database, um, you know, with data deprecation headed towards us, that's kind of a, um, a no brainer. Um, the, the components are pretty straightforward and it, it doesn't matter if you're in manufacturing or the airlines it's, it's the same. But what we did to make sure we stayed aligned was we went through the RFP process together. And then, um, because I was the business owner, I was the decision maker on the tool. Um, but they had veto power. So if I chose a tool and they said, look, this is going to be impossible to maintain, or we hate this particular vendor personally, or whatever it is, I wouldn't move forward. And we had to accommodate one another that way.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Got it. That makes sense. Yeah. Let's dig into some of the data. So you mentioned CDP, um, you know, we think that's super important too, especially as, as we head into the cookie-less future. Um, how do you in a regulated industry make sure you stay within those sort of compliance barriers using customer data?
Alex Morehouse: Well, um, you have to take away your crutch. So we've been using cookies where, you know, as of next year, we're in a cookie-less future, the only way around cookies is to have a customer database and to fire all of your, transactional data always trumps, um, aggregated data and, you know, Google, who is the purveyor of all this is using aggregated data. So it's the right thing to do. And it's what other industries have been doing for a long time, but because, um, because healthcare has had a crutch, they have had a crutch for 20 years and that crutch is their electronic medical record and they have all along said that is the customer database. It's not, it is, from a customer standpoint, maybe a third of the customer database. So it only has whether or not Lyssa had her flu shot and whether or not she had her annual, you know, the clinical picture of Lyssa is completely incomplete. And so, um, the reason that the, um, health system participants have been slow to build customer databases, is they, one, they don't know what the privacy guardrails are and two, um, they, um, they've been relying on their electronic medical record, and three it's financial, because most of them went to their board and said, we need this, you know, ghastly sum of money to digitize our electronic medical records. And most boards thinks, oh, thank goodness, we're done, you know, we did our digital transformation. Uh, that's a starting place. That's not a welcome message. But to say, Hey, you actually need a customer data mart in order to survive in a cookie less future, or w you know, beyond data deprecation. And PS, that's also your way forward to value-based care. So until I can fire the, 'if then' messaging that said, so w we I'll use myself without divulging, you know, undo PHI. So, um, I, because of the pandemic, somehow, I thought I'd been in for my annual and guess what? It's been three years. Hmm. Okay. Um, and I got a friendly message from Banner, and it was my own logic coming off my own tool saying, Hey, Alex, and from my doctor saying, Hey, Alex, it's been awhile since you've been in, can you come in and schedule, you know, your annual wellness visit? And I did, but you can't have that. You can't use cookies for that. That is entirely fired by your internal CRM tool. And that is in turn populated by your customer data mart, which keeps track of those things. So that is table stakes now going forward, it is table stakes for pop health management. You cannot manage a diabetes patient or a CPD patient if you can't reach out on a regular basis and let them know, Hey, it's time to come in. And, uh, you actually haven't fulfilled your, uh, medications, you know, can we help you? Or are you confused about how to take your medications? That kind of thing. So the path forward for all health systems is a customer data mart. The trick is the size and, uh, privacy. So, uh, we're on Cerner. Cerner, so for me, Cerner has a thousand fields. You cannot drag a thousand fields for every single patient into your CRM application, or it will tank. So it literally was, you know, there's a data dictionary. I literally is my CIO and I had to sit down with the data dictionary and say, you know, which of these fields inside the EMR that are the most, um, useful or most predictive of driving behaviors. So the end, they're pretty straightforward. Who's my primary care doctor? Do I have a primary care doctor? Have I had my vaccinations? When was the last time I went in for a visit? All of those kinds of things. But we have to skinny down a thousand records to under 20 and then join it to all the call center data, all the web data, all the social data, all the blog data. We have all the other, other stuff, all the billing data, all the regulatory data. So that's what I mean by it's, you know, it's only a small part. Your, your customer record is only a small part of your clinical or actions. Most people care about their bill and you know, what did this bill get messed up? Um, where they care about their scripts, they care about, you know, the insurance parts of it. So, um, that's why, uh, you know, with data deprecation screaming down the highway at us, you, you got to get your customer data mart stood up or your, you won't be able to compete and you won't be able to roll into pop health management either.
Lyssa Myska Allen: When you say pop health management, what do you mean?.
Alex Morehouse: Um, so pop health is, um, so.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Is that like an industry specific term? Or is that a term that me as a consumer should understand?
Alex Morehouse: Uh, you know what, I'm glad you asked that because it is,deeply meaningful to the industry. So in general, the industry is having a tough time with fee for service. Because the fees are going down and the government is paying less for those fees. So top of mind when, um, modern health care just did their survey six weeks ago, top of mind, across all CEOs was how do I get into the insurance business, where I'm, um, investing in covered lives? And Banner Health, for example, this is a perfectly representative poster child. Within five years, we want at least half of our revenues to come from insurance premium instead of fees for doing surgeries. So that means, and this was actually started in 2010. There was legislation put forward and you might've heard of the triple aim and inside it was population health management, which basically is code for, we, the government are going to start paying you and compensating you for keeping people well. You can't keep on just, you know, doing more and more procedures on sick people. You know, the math doesn't work. We're going to have to start compensating on wellness. And population health management is code for we're going to pay you to keep your populations well, and out of the hospital, instead of paying every time they check into the hospital, it means nothing to consumers and it's it's inside baseball. So thank you for clarifying.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Of course. Thanks for explaining it. Let’s hear from our client again and see if we can help them with anything else.
Client: In an industry like ours, we want to be listening to customers about how their experience is going without being too invasive. It seems like a balancing act. How should we be listening to them? And how much information is too much to collect?
Alex Morehouse: Um, uh, so there are several things that we're doing. So one of the most powerful things that we do is, is, uh, through the call centers. We, you know, we handle 50,000 calls a week and we use, uh, language analytics to tell us, okay, so w where is Sophia? And when every time I say Sophia, she's the standard. And that she's every woman for our patients. Where is Sophia confused?
Lyssa Myska Allen: Love it.
Alex Morehouse: And where do we have operational hiccups that we can improve upon? We also, um, uh, found out that what are the 20 most, we call the moments of truth, what it really is, what are the 20 most annoying interactions that you have with any healthcare provider? And of course, billing comes to one of them and the clipboard of doom. Every time you come in, you have to clipboard again. Um, and so we do, we have regular listening posts. And so we survey, we do 450,000 surveys a year at each of those annoyance points. And then we discover through those, okay, where do we have operational issues? And where can we improve, sophia's experience? So we put that into place. Um, the other thing we do is, um, is work. And we've had to do, um, pretty good research on the patient side, because there is in healthcare, there's a fine line between being helpful and being creepy. So, um, if, if you intrude too far, you're going to say, well, you know, why do you know about my psychiatric in-patient stay? You know, I really don't want to talk about that. Um, but, um, we definitely have permission and that the example I like to use is we'd like, at least what we get from our car. So most of our cars will tell us your air pressure is running low. You need to change your oil. We w we just, we need those kinds of routine maintenance reminders. So what we have been doing to keep people healthy, because people do forget, you know, life intrudes, and it's really not something where you want to spend a lot of time. So we've been setting up a series of reminders based on who you are, what your health circumstances are, and you can trigger some basic if then logic I, that the example I gave, I was on one of those. Oh, you really haven't been in for, uh, an annual checkup in three annuals. How about c'mon coming in? And then as a followup, the minute I scheduled. Then they send another one. And again, this was the logic in there. Hey, you've got an, your annual visit coming up. Would you like to do your lab work? We own the labs. Would you like to do your lab work before you get in there so you're prepared? And I was too busy to schedule that. I mean, I'm, cobbler's children. I should know all this because I worked for Banner, but that's the kind of thing that we set up to make sure that, um, we are getting people taking care of their health, so they don't have to end up having some sort of health episode. I would rather proactively keep you healthy, then reactively try to heal you.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Right. Yeah. Yeah. That makes a ton of sense. What have you tried that like really hasn't worked, Um, are there things that you've either run into regulatory hiccups or we're just not adopted from a customer perspective? Like the, what were the creepy things? Uh, without throwing yourself under the bus for that.
Alex Morehouse: Um, well, I, in this job, because I've learned from the last job, what are some of the creepy things you can't, um, can't do. There were, um, you know, we always aspire to, um, handle times in the call center. If a phone doesn't even ring once, when you know your phone rep picks up, they think it's, I don't know, you're talking to the CIA or something. They know that you're going to call. That's it, that's just a funny one. Um, probably where I've stubbed my toe and, and again, I've done, many of these is to, um, overestimate the power of technology and underestimate, uh, how challenging it is to get people and processes to change because the technology is, is really a three legged stool. And particularly with people who are spread very thin, and I'm sorry, if you're a doctor, a nurse, you're spread very thin. And you think, oh, they're going to adopt this sight unseen, um, you're wrong. And so, um, I stubbed my toe in a prior life by not having a panel of physicians participate in it by getting a panel physicians to own it, you know, stir the cake batter before it was baked. Um, but gotten much further, faster, but, um, I guess every time I stub my toe, it's been on change management because you're changing either somebody's job or the process through which they go through a sequence of onboarding a new patient or whatever it is. Those are the things where we, we typically end up with some heartburn.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Ooh yeah, that’s something we hear a lot. Change management is tough. Speaking of, let’s hear from our client on what they want to change about their customer experience.
Client: One thing I’ve been thinking about is how our call center gets jammed up sometimes with customers trying to get a hold of their providers to ask questions, make appointments, etc. Is there a way to ease that stress point?
Alex Morehouse: Healthcare has essentially trained us, myself, included to call when you want something, call. If I want an appointment, I always say, you're need to get it faster. If I call. So untraining that. And, um, actually enrolling and enlisting our physicians to say, because what ends up happening? I come in. Oh, Dr. So-and-so. It took me forever to get into. Well, unless Dr. So-and-so says, Hey, did you know, you can schedule online? Is you're going to get in a lot faster. That never happens. So it's, it's that kind of thing, um, where we have to essentially retrain Sophia that, Hey, there are all these other tools there. And, um, the pandemic was actually really helpful because our default is seeing a doctor is literally, I go into bricks and mortar. I wait in the waiting room, I go into an exam room and I see somebody. And being able to, um, roll out these, um, symptom checker chat bot for symptom checker, uh, video visits. We have a nurse hotline now because a huge portion about a third of our calls into the call center are clinical. They don't ever have to talk to the doctor. If they talked to a nurse on the nurse hotline, they can get their medication question answered, or, you know, I'm having this pain in my right ear. They can, they can have those questions answered. So a lot of it is retraining Sophia that, Hey, there's all sorts of different ways to get, um, to get your needs looked after.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Yeah, I love that. And that probably to some extent, increases customer loyalty. Like in terms of the better the experience, the more robust the experience, the more they trust Banner Health as their sort of healthcare provider.
Alex Morehouse: Yes. And the more choice. So if we say, Hey, you don't have to come in. How about we do a video visit or you talk to a nurse online, a nurse hotline? Um, they are happier and they just, it goes back to our mission. If we make it easier, they're happier. So our overriding customer experience mandate is to make it easier for him or her.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Were you guys doing tele-health before the pandemic?
Alex Morehouse: We were doing tele-health before the pandemic, um, and it suffered from the same plumbing issues. So I think we had 14 different tele-health platforms. So we had one that was just for cardiac patients. We had one that was just for trauma patients. We had one that was just for, uh, gastroenterology. And so, um, we had to put all those together. So we had a single platform and connectivity between them.
Lyssa Myska Allen: And this is just curiosity question. Is there data you're collecting from those visits as well? Like, are those somehow easier to turn into actionable data on the patient or are those like also completely regulated and kind of like off limits in terms of data collection?
Alex Morehouse: They're off-limits. So they all, they all go into electronic medical record. And so they become parts of, I have a video visit, the, you know, if I went in for a, I burnt myself on a cooking stove that will go in to the record. Um, and then the same guidelines apply as to whether I can or cannot use that piece of information for outreach and messaging.
Lyssa Myska Allen: What would you say the key to a good patient customer experience is? And I, and I if you're probably going to say your mission, right. Um, that that's Sophia has an easy, better experience. Um, is there anything else you would kind of tell someone, looking to input digital transformation to consider, um, as they, as they go through the process?
Alex Morehouse: Um, I would actually, I probably wouldn't say the mission, which is to make it easier. I would go the next level down. And that would be, um, demonstrate you can't say it, but demonstrate that you know, your patient no matter where she shows up. So I'll go back to the clipboard. So you and I would both be outraged if every time we called United or interacted with United, they asked us for a frequent flyer number. They asked us whether we liked to aisle versus window. If they asked us for a credit card, if we had to repeat that information over and over again. And, and if they, if the flight was, you know, was being carried out by a, you know, a regional, if we add to sort of connect with that regional separately, We still, you know, we, you know, if you show up at a new doctor at most health systems that clipboard comes out. That baseline is know who I am. So if I go into Urgent Care over the weekend because I sprained my ankle, you know, doing some athletic thing and then they tell me, Hey, you need to go and follow up with your primary care next week, when I show up next week, they better know that I was in urgent care over the weekend. And I think that's probably more important. That's what builds trust. And it's that continuity that says, all right, no matter where I show up inside your system, you know it's Alex and you're not going to treat me like a stranger. Um, and because the whole industry has grown through acquisition, that is the challenge on the CX side.
Lyssa Myska Allen: That's so interesting. And actually that happened to me in the bad way. I actually tore my Achilles doing an athletic event, um, and went to urgent care and then went to the surgeon and he had no idea what happened at urgent. However, my dog was hit by a car and went to emergency vet care. And then to her regular vet and her regular vet knew everything, knew what she had been prescribed, what tests they had taken. Um, so my dog had a much better like health care experience than I did. Um, which is, is like a weird juxtaposition. Right.
Alex Morehouse: Well, I'm sorry for you and your dog, but that's actually a very good example because that's why I'm glad. Um, but that's what we have come to expect. And I have noticed it's interesting that you bring up your vet. I have noticed that my dentist has some sort of awesome CX. You know, tool B because they know everything. And I never have to guess as to whether or not I need to come in for a cleaning or where their x-rays are. Do they know everything? And I get the text reminders for my appointment and confirmation calls and all of those things. And we have to be able to do at least as well as our vet and our dentist. So the bar is low, if you do anything, you're going to look great.
Lyssa Myska Allen: But I think that's also translatable across other industries, right? So we're, we're talking about healthcare and we've talked a little bit about financial services, but when you look at retail, same thing, I'm really annoyed. If I go into a store that I purchased something from online and they don't have a record of it. So I go to Nordstrom and I have to bring my paper receipt. Do you have my email address? You know, I ordered this.
Alex Morehouse: Exactly. Exactly. So that's the 'Know Me' principle. And I think that's the most important thing. And because it's scary because if you come in to your surgeon with a torn Achilles, and they have no idea, it really makes you think, do they know what's going on here? What the heck?
Lyssa Myska Allen: It's really incredible how much you have implemented. Um, especially with all of the, uh, tech challenges and, all the acquisitions that you have, um, and pieces you have to stitch together. At that volume, being able to have a consistent customer experience And the McDonald's hamburger of customer experiences or the Starbucks cup of coffee, whichever, um, that's consistent across that many locations and touchpoints is incredible.
Alex Morehouse: And just the Know Me. So do I, no matter where he show up, do you know who the heck I am and who my primary care doctor is? And last time I, you know, came in for a visit, have I had my COVID vaccination? You should know these things.
Lyssa Myska Allen: There is a ton to take away from our conversation today. Let’s debrief.
First, integrate any disparate systems and make them all communicate. Replace expensive manual labor with automation. And partner with your IT team. Hold each other accountable by setting mutual goals.
Second, create a customer database. This will prepare you for data deprecation in the cookie-less future. On top of the medical record, it includes transactional data and will keep track of when customers are due for visits and more.
Third, use call center information as a way of listening to customers without being too invasive. You’ll still get important information without crossing the TMI line.
And finally, create a self-service option for customers. This will free up the call center and give customers more freedom, flexibility and power over their experience.
Client: Thanks so much for your help today. I definitely have a better idea of how to solve for some of these pain points. I appreciate it!
Lyssa Myska Allen: Amazing! I think it’s time to celebrate cracking this case. Let’s head to the HGS pub.
Lyssa Myska Allen: That's Okay. We're there now.
Alex Morehouse: We're there now. Okay. Here we are.
Lyssa Myska Allen: you can, you can cheers like my virtual or my cup of coffee and pretend like there's something else in there, but, um, how are you, yourself, staying healthy right now?
Alex Morehouse: Oh, um, it's one of the mixed blessings of working from home, which I like to say it's actually living at work, but, um, I can take meetings outdoors and this time of year it's beautiful. So being able to go outdoors or take a walk. And, um, the one thing that we all learned from this pandemic is we need one another. So staying connected, staying connected to friends. Um, there's an amazing team inside Banner and all this work that we've been talking about. This was not me. I, I activated it, but this was a village. This was a metropolis pulling all this together. So staying connected with people, being outdoors, getting exercise, the usual.
Lyssa Myska Allen: I love it. What are you reading or listening to that you're excited about right now?
Alex Morehouse: Oh, boy, this is a guilty pleasure. Well, I, rather than listening about, or, or seeing news about the Ukraine or more about COVID or anything taxing, I just a nice friendly murder. So listened to all sorts of British true crime podcasts. They walk amongst us and then the gorier the better, I don't know, that takes my mind off of things. I shouldn't be talking about this publicly.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Who will you tell about this pot to listen to this podcast?
Alex Morehouse: Oh, I will talk to all my partners who, who got us there. So I'll be telling all of our, it partners, all of our clinical partners and all the people on our team and especially the people in our customer experience center, because they are, um, they're pretty awesome. And we have, uh, the team, uh, Uh, builds our website because the website really is our digital front door. We have an awesome leader there and he's been amazing in his team has been amazing. And, um, that those are the people I will tell,
Lyssa Myska Allen: Well, that's awesome. I love how connected to your people you are. Alex, this has really been awesome. Your experience is so impressive. And, um, your ability to just rattle off everything you've done, um, that we spend so much time talking and thinking about at HGS and within CX, like it's incredible. So I really appreciate you joining us. Thank you for listening to CX Detectives, brought to you by HGS. If you liked what you heard today, tell a friend, a colleague, the guy who builds your website and his amazing team. And don’t forget to rate, review, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Next time there’s a CX case to be solved, we’ll be there!