Innovation at the Edge

Part I (external communications & engagement)

Engagement: it's not about you; it's about them. It's always about THEM.

At HealthyOps, we’ve been working to help leaders in enterprise innovate and manage their businesses effectively by giving voice to their “experts.”?

By this we mean first to customers, as they are the ultimate “experts” in terms of their preferences, needs and experience. Equally important is giving voice to the internal experts, namely, to the incredible front line service team, as they are the most intimately connected to customers.

We’ve been doing this in the context of quality, customer experience, identifying and predicting risk conditions that lead to bad outcomes, lost revenue, and worse. And it goes way beyond a single NPS “score” or “stars” or typical backwards-looking one-size-fits-all stale measures.

Much can be learned when mirroring and comparing the real-time customer data with staff input and reflection. As has been said for millennia,?

“the first part of wisdom is clear vision.”

The art is to find a balance between being intrusive or “all about what WE need,” and being of service, by offering THEM a voice, a say, and respect for their time and experience, no matter what they have to say. ?

In doing the hard work to earn this trust, we can then return their investment, in terms of actions to improve process, adjust procedures and communications, and truly innovate at the edge, at the point of service and engagement. For the benefit of the customer. ?

The inside and outside of “Return On Engagement”

From a customer perspective the “ROE” or “Return on Engagement” pays off in terms of the usual ROI revenue drivers, and as described by the loyalty and static, historical “NPR” numbers. But the most potent are the creation and cultivation of customers who become “raving fans” (creating multiples of positive impacts (1-to-4 and as high as 1-to-16) and minimizing/mitigating the even more potent negative multiplier effect (some say 1-to-30 or greater), the death-knell multiplier, for the brand.

From a staff/team perspective, these ROEs come in many forms, and many are especially acute in the current environment of Summer 2021.

The first is avoidance of burnout. By earning the staff’s trust, and inviting carefully crafted frequent /longitudinal feedback, with alerts in real-time, we can hep enterprises flag early signs of the slide from work fatigue to burnout.?

This is a cousin to the other big worry; retention. The cost of a lost non-MD worker, for example, in healthcare, is over $78,000 in re-hire, re-training and getting up to speed operationally.?And in some regions, there are just no qualified workers to back-fill resignations. The costs stairs-step up as we go into management churn.

As painful as these are, the risks are even higher when combined with the lack of engagement at the tail end of a worker’s tenure. ?The first indication that a worker has mentally checked-out is usually the act of giving notice, and more disturbingly, simply not showing up.

Both outcomes (burnout, churn) carry a high (unacceptably high) risk of on-the-job human errors.

Disengagement/burnout can be life-or-death in some industries, including healthcare

In some industries that is not so important. In healthcare it can mean a hit to the brand, or worse, harm to the patient/customer.?

Realtime; mastering the pulse of your business and operations

The upside of realtime data from staff, is the insight and expertise to flag and mitigate ineffective or even risk-laden processes or communications, as they are the closest to the customer / patient experience. Using this paring of parallel data, organizations can easily see where their perceptions of customer process and care is different from those of the customer/patient.?

Staff’s real-time insights and alerts to these conditions help organizations stay in tune with, and even ahead of problematic trends even before they're obvious.

Adjustment, innovation, adaptation instead of post-mortem

The magic of using real-time alerts and data, is that this can enable rapid iteration, real-time innovation “at the edge” of a large organization, which is where it belongs. No need for complex and stale look-back data or waiting for an externally prepared or developed report; the real-time flow tells the story and helps teams adjust course in real time. Before the ship hits the reef.

Checklist:?Innovating At The Edge?

How To Avoid “fumbling” Outbound Communications

To innovate at the Edge first requires solid engagement and leadership commitment.

This post (Part I) focuses on customer or end user communication and feedback, trust and engagement, and one aspect that has gained in popularity over the past decade, and even more during the pandemic: Outbound text and email.

Embraced because of the perceived “immediacy” of reaching customers as well as nominal “low cost,” email and then text/sms is a powerful engagement and conversational tool.?

And like all tools, it can be unintentionally misused even with all good intentions.

Over the past few years we’ve been asked repeatedly about engagement platforms for outreach, follow-up and feedback/quality, safety and experience.

One of the more frequent requests is around outbound text and text followup. This is one of the most misunderstood, most frequently “fumbled” opportunities, even in teams that have nothing but good-intentions.

Here is a kind of a best-practices checklist we’ve developed for enterprise leaders around Innovation At The Edge, with respect to outbound and follow-up text messaging of customers:

Innovation At The Edge

Checklist: Outbound communications (texts, email)

#1: It’s all about them, not about you (or what you want)

One of the most important concepts about outbound communications, much less “engagement” efforts, is to make it all about the customer/prospect, and NOT about you, or what you’re wanting them to do.?

Consumers can spot a “taker” a mile away, and will quickly ignore, or worse, opt-out of these kinds of spammy, smarmy, self-interested communiques. Your brand will suffer, and your customers or prospects will feel like a piece of meat. The impression will be the opposite of your intention:?instead of seeking to engage them so you can be of service (and yes, eventually collect revenue), it will land as a spammy “please buy from us” or “we want your money” to put it bluntly. It is a recipe for failure and damage to your brand.

Instead:

#2 Be a Giver not a Taker

This seems obvious, but it bears repeating: Your company is in business to be of service to customers with a product or service that solves a need, addresses a problem, and in one way or another improves their lives. To be successful, you must be of service TO THEM.?This must be forthright and reinforced in every customer interaction.

In that sense your entire organization is (presumably) positioned and predisposed to be a GIVER. You can read this in your company’s mission statement, and perhaps even in your company name or tag line. You are claiming high-ground by declaring yourselves committed to being of service TO THEM first.

Unfortunately so many marketers and operations teams, in pursuit of continuous process improvement, higher NPS and other “scores” and of course higher revenue, retention and other internal metrics, lose sight of how their well-intentioned queries land with customers.

“First seek to understand, and only then seek to be understood.”

So the second mile-marker is to change perspectives and seek to be first a giver and only then be a taker. Or perhaps not to be a taker at all!?Remember: it’s about them, not you.

#3 Check your language; check your sequence (intention, offer, ask), check your organizational ego

In practice, we coach leaders to be consistent in their outreach language and practice.?

What this means is that an outbound text or email, especially after an encounter or transaction, needs to be offering to be of service.? "What did we score?" is not an offer to be of service. That is self-serving and disrespectful. "How can we do better by you?" is a more appropriate framing of an "ask" or "intention." "What more can we do for you?" is an even better ask. High EQ questions focusing on the customer/patient. You get the idea.

This can mean offering something of value that is consistent with your brand connection. In other words, offer something of value that is logically consistent with your core service or product. Make it organic to their expectation of what your brand means to them. If you are in healthcare delivery; what can you offer to them that might have value to them??Links to Information, resources? Perhaps free services, like webinars, content, materials, coaching and other high-value experiences. Products or equipment (carefully curated) that can help them stay on top of their health and wellness, including devices or services.

Extend this metaphor to whatever consumer-focused industry sector you occupy.

By leading with the expressed intention to be of service in better ways, and then to offer some related benefit to them, you can earn the right to your ask; which is their engagement.?

Notice the sequence, or order of the communication. ?

First the intention, then the offer, and lastly, the ask.

#4 Treat customer time (attention) as limited and very expensive

Presuming you have already clearly stated your intention, and that you have built a context of wanting to be more effective in being of service TO THEM, and that you have offered something of value to them (be it in terms of better service, more responsiveness, different features, or some content or other offer of value), the next step is to do so in a way that respects their time.

Like it or not, you must treat the customer/patient/end user as though they have an hourly rate of $1,200. This reflects a similar rate as that of a large law firm Senior Partner.

Being respectful of their time in this way will help you gauge your “ask” in terms of time, effort and depth of query.?

If your ask is for 10 minutes of their time, treat it like you would have to pay $200 for that time. And recognize that you’re probably not going to get that from them.?

If you ask for 30 seconds of their time, which is more reasonable, then you are only asking them for a $10 time commitment, and you’re much more likely to get them to gift that time to you.? Treat it as such: a gift to you.

This is especially true if they feel that there may be something in it for them.?Remember the old “WIIFM?” adage? It’s very appropriate here.

They know good and well that there must be something in it for you. What you need to do is recognize that exchange, tacitly or not, and then respect their time by not wasting it on “your ask.”

#5 Communication and engagement is a contact sport

Unless your team is resourced and committed to authentic and long-term conversational communications, it’s best to wait.

The promise of engagement via text, email, chat, phone, blog, twitter, et al, is that there is a caring, empowered and motivated voice at the other end. Not a vacuum of empty space.

Customers are quick to recognize when there is “nobody home.”?

From a staff perspective, once you open that all-important door to real time, authentic, trusted feedback, you are obligated both in integrity and in pragmatism, to respond to that feedback. Otherwise you damage or destroy trust.?

Gauge your engagement to the kind of response and level of conversation / interaction you can support. This means in practice, to narrow the scope of feedback you might ask. Or to be careful not to over-promise in terms of “publishing results” or “changing process” or “getting back to them.”?

Start with a plan as to what you want to achieve in your engagement with customers and staff, and where in the business flow or Customer Journey you want to have these engagements impact or reflect.

Then come up with a 9 month initial plan that anticipates a slow ramp, with simple engagement “asks” and learn about your customers’ and staff comfort and enthusiasm and willingness to invest their time and trust.?

Expect that you'll get it somewhat wrong at first, and plan on adjusting, iterating and evolving as you learn more about your staff and your end users/customers along the way.

At all phases of such an engagement program, keep in mind that it’s not about you. It’s all about them.?Always.?Only then will you discover ways of innovating and improving that were previously hidden from you.?

You will find innovations that are perhaps even invented by your customers and team members.?

One fortune 100 CEO once quipped:?“when the customer (insert “staff” as well) invents ways of using our product that even we had not imagined, then we win.”

Happy engaging. Be A GIVER

Intention: be clear and consistent

Offer: something of real value to them

Ask: respect their time & insights

Consistency: treat this as a "lifetime" commitment for the organization

Matthew Weeks is the Founder and CEO of HealthyOps.

About HealthyOps

HealthyOps is used by healthcare leaders to help control and improve operations, identify risk conditions, predict adverse events, staff engagement gaps, burnout and churn, and optimize patient experience, loyalty and outcomes.?

The company provides a proprietary turn-key “Edge Innovation” engine, the industry’s only real-time alerting system, and a patent-pending patient engagement channel that is HIPAA compliant and the fastest real-time patient-to-clinician communications conduit in the healthcare sector, or in any consumer sector.

HealthyOps now uses our proprietary "Touchless Tech" platform to enable healthcare enterprises to manage point-of-service and post-encounter engagement in the safest possible manner, and even "follow the customer home" in a safe, secure, anonymous fashion for later engagement at the option of the customer.

What's Next:

In 2022 HealthyOps will introduce the first healthcare industry payment platform and patient financial management service that addresses the payment and affordability gap in the US healthcare system.

Affordability is a gap that creates so much patient/consumer suffering, and is responsible for much of the degradation in population health across all economic strata, destructive financial burden, bankruptcies and generally a lot of stress and misery on top of medical concerns. ?

All of us are familiar with a family or friend's story of healthcare financial burden. In some cases we see heartbreaking crises where the impossible choice is lifesaving or restorative treatment or financial ruin. This does not have to be so. And non-acute conditions do not have to fester and go untreated, progressing to acute or life-threatening conditions simply due to healthcare financial burden.

The two biggest barriers to health equity are access and affordability. Our new product directly addresses affordability, and with greater affordability comes increased access, and reduced deferral of care, which is extremely damaging, expensive and can even be life-threatening.

Non-acute care is equally essential. Deferral of well-care and regular preventative visits has a direct and devastating impact on population health.

We believe we can, and must do better as a healthcare Industry and as a society. Population health and financial health are, unfortunately, deeply intertwined today.?

When we think "social determinants of health" we are not simply talking about the indigent or lowest economic rung. We are, today, talking about all strata of the economic ladder.

Going far beyond Revenue Cycle Management, this new best-in-class platform puts the consumer/patient at the center, while relieving the financial pressures for them and the provider networks. Deferred or delayed medical treatment is mitigated, financial hardship is handled with dignity and proactive assistance, at zero cost.

Called “HealthyPay?" this service is set to launch in private beta in Q4 2021 with selected partners, launching in general release in early 2022.?

Inquire if this is of interest to your organization.?

Contact:?[email protected] or visit www.healthyops.com for more information and to open a conversation.