Improve your employee experience (EX) to build better outcomes for your customers (CX).

by Noah DiJulio

20 years in, and the word innovation has almost lost its meaning. Today, innovation is more synonymous with change. Every organization is chasing their competition in the pursuit of being ‘innovative’. Like the word ‘disruptive’ and other design thinking buzzwords before it, to be innovative is missing the point. 

Your customers don’t want to be disrupted. In the conversations I have with our clients' customers, everyone shares the feeling of being stretched thin and a level of uncertainty that makes long term planning and investment difficult to justify. So trust me when I say people are not looking to be disrupted, they are seeking stability, joy and brands that do the hard work to make their lives simpler.

As a consultant, willing to do the hard work, making people's lives simpler often comes from looking inside an organization. This inside, out approach or Employee Experience (EX) is still overlooked by many organizations. When you apply the same investment and attention to your employees - how they are trained, the systems they use, and how they can collaborate with one another towards a shared purpose - good things start to happen.

Inside the health and wellness space is no different. Legacy and heritage brands historically have struggled to innovate from within. Healthcare companies are often forced into a buy vs. build mentality. Stakeholders need to show quarterly results, and often coming at the cost of access to data that would haven driven valuable insights. Companies get stuck renting an experience that is shared with their competition, leading to less differentiation in the marketplace.

No leader wants to ‘ship their org chart,’ however, the seams that divide teams internally create tangible points of friction for customers, members and employees alike. These seams often make simple changes or improvements difficult - leading to huge inefficiencies that erode culture, lead to burnout and your most talented people looking for the exit.

In today’s competitive job market retaining talent is as important as a strong brand that people aspire to be a part of. Ask any HR Director and they will tell you that attracting new talent, hiring, and onboarding new employees – only to lose them less than a year later – exhausts a tremendous amount of time and resources. Time that could have been spent migrating to a better software platform, overhauling your KMS, or limiting the back-to-back virtual meetings each day. We’ll save the importance of hosting Stay Interviews for a later post.

“A 2023 Gallup report found that employers lose 15% to 20% of their employees to voluntary turnover. ‘They look elsewhere if they’re not feeling cared for.’

"The ROI of centering employee well-being,” 2024.

One area of healthcare that has always baffled me is the lack of investment in customer service agents. Your customer service team should be the crown jewel of your organization. Empowered to make judgements based on what is in front of them and equipped with direct access to insights and information for how to serve even the most extreme of circumstances. Why? Well, simply put they are the ones who are shoring up the cracks in the system left by out-of-date technology, bad data quality, stunted KMS, poorly designed IVR’s, and too many platforms to keep straight. Most agents are trying to navigate the same resources that the average customer has available to them. Which means they are trying to help people with complex issues with one hand tied behind their back.

Inspiring a change in service

Healthcare in the US is overly complicated, heavily regulated and MacGyver’d through to a host of duct tape, paper clips and chewing gum if you look under the hood of a lot of tech stacks and infrastructure. In contrast, a few incumbent brands stand out like Collective Health, Oscar, and Maven Clinic who have created highly trained, highly responsive, high-touch advocates or concierge care teams to help people navigate their care. However, many companies continue to deprioritize the Employee Experiences for agents in favor of other improvements that have more direct paths to profitability.

Self help will help

If you are struggling to know where to begin, investing in your online self help tools and resources are a great way to reduce call volumes and improve your customers ability to find what they are looking for. Most customers today expect to be able to find answers thanks to services like YouTube, Miro and other SAS companies. Often they have simple questions regarding their health plan benefits, finding a provider they trust, and education on ways to live better, for longer. By strengthening your self help strategy you will also improve the resources available to customer service agents. Resources they can send as direct video follow ups, anticipate FAQs asynchronously or use for in-real-time education during a call or instant message exchange. This incremental approach can be transformational over time as you combine different forms of media from video storytelling to LLM, indexed search and NPL capabilities. It’s important to remember that no amount of technology will replace the value of human connection (especially when emotions are high or lives are on the line).

“Your customer is the most important thing. Without your customer, you’ve got nothing… through that unexpected anticipation of a customer’s needs, you really leave a mark in their mind and show them that spark of magic.”

Ali Diab, CEO and Co-Founder of Collective Health, “The Art of Anticipating Needs”, Often Imitated Podcast

Elevating your Customer Voice

How well do your employees understand the customers they serve? Do they understand how their interactions affect other teams and how they impact the overall experience? When was the last time you spent quality time with your customers in the field - learning their motivations, attitudes towards health and wellness and their expectations for their care? It might be time to hit the road or at least schedule a Zoom to learn first hand where your brand can serve them better. Using insight to create shared, accessible tools like Personas, Journey Maps, Service Blueprints and direct voice of the customer feedback will not only inspire empathy, it will help your employees make decisions and prioritize your customers needs in their daily decision making. Whether you are standing up a new service or trying to keep up with your rivals, your best bet is to know them to serve them. Afterall, health is personal.

"Companies would be nothing without the employees who work to keep their customers satisfied. Happy employees foster satisfied customers, growth, and innovation."

Rebecca Zucker, “Want Happy Customers? Focus On Employee Experience”, Forbes

Training and up-skilling

The best thing you can do is create a Knowledge Management System (KMS) that is exhaustive, easy to navigate, data driven, and scenario infused to help agents navigate ‘unhappy' paths where you might have service gaps or extreme situations where the ‘right’ answer is elusive. A dollar spent improving your KMS can reduce the amount of money invested in multi-week classroom training. Consider saving training time for agents who have demonstrated they are going to stick around and show growth potential. And yes, of course, using a LLM and AI can help provide next best actions for agents to consider how best to guide customers, but we’ll need to save that for another article.

Leading with vision and values

The importance and investment into the EX needs to come from the top. A clear, shared vision for how employees come together to create the ideal customer experience is essential to create momentum. A vision that is as inspirational as it is attainable - broken down into stages that build towards your end goal. A goal that inspires the best talent, puts people first and aligns to your organization's core values as a brand. It should remind employees that on the other end of their effort is a human who is worth putting in the hard work, to make their life simple.

Have a passion for EX or want to simplify your CX?

Just love acronyms? DM to AMA and hopefully this wasn’t a CWOT.

— Noah DiJulio ✌️