For obvious reasons, Customer Experience (CX) in healthcare tends to focus on the needs of patients as customers, but for HealthShare NSW, the focus is firmly on the people providing the care to patients. Jaymie Ling, Associate Director of Customer Experience at HealthShare NSW points out that in an industry that provides critical services, taking care of customers is a priority, and HealthShare NSW has made CX central to its operations servicing a workforce of 140,000 people who care for more than 1,000,000 patients each year.
Having embarked on its CX journey three years ago, the organisation recently ramped up its efforts, focusing on its contact centre to find a way to capture customer feedback and sentiment quickly. HealthShare NSW wanted to move away from large scale surveys, so problems could be identified and dealt with quickly. inQuba provided a solution that not only achieved these goals, but that has opened up opportunities for further improvements, Ling says.
“inQuba has helped us put CX in front of everyone’s eyes all the time.”
“Three years ago, no-one really knew what CX was, and no-one talked about it; it was largely conceptual. inQuba has helped us put CX in front of everyone’s eyes all the time, and makes it part of the day-to-day conversation in the business, serving as a reminder that CX is a strong strategic focus and that we are constantly improving,” he says.
“CX puts customers at the heart of what we do, and we have seen continuous year-on-year customer satisfaction improvement as a result. Providing real information about how agents are performing and what customers think, our CX programme allows us to track individual agents and teams as well as providing insights to solve customer problems quickly. It has had a huge effect on overall customer satisfaction internally and externally.”
“CX puts customers at the heart of what we do.”
According to Ling, the continuous and ongoing feedback, easily available through the custom dashboard built by inQuba, has not only allowed the business to immediately see what customers really think and resolve issues quickly, but enables customer service agents to see the results across teams and the business as a whole. In addition, sentiment analysis allows the company to track how individuals, teams, and the business are doing in reaching their goals.
“Initially, it was a bit overwhelming for the agents, but by building the custom dashboard with the team leaders, inQuba helped us make it more consumable, reducing the overwhelming nature of the vast amount of data. By putting the information in one place, it is easy for people to see where we are with respect to key quality drivers, what customers really think, and whether their issues have been resolved.”
“inQuba has also helped HealthShare NSW to identify who the customer is…”
inQuba has also helped HealthShare NSW to identify who the customer is by building customer personas, identifying what their challenges are across the business, and improving their journeys, Ling explains. inQuba’s solution has been integrated into the organisation’s PCMO, incorporating the customer voice into project planning.
Ling points out that the organisation’s CX programme has not only improved the lives of its external customers, but the experiences of its internal customers, and looking to enhance it the future. “We want to start capturing data in the clinical environment and link CX with employee experience even further. We are building a digital CX strategy that will involve the users from beginning, and we will continue to put CX the heart of what we do in order to improve the experiences of both internal and external customers.”
Read below for the full story….
MB – “Jaymie, tell us about the Customer Experience programme at HealthShare NSW?”
JL – “Sure. We’ve been building up our programme slowly over time. Our original intent was to get the CX platform set up in the contact centre environment. Through doing other research in the past we’ve come to appreciate the huge impact that the contact centre has on overall Customer Experience and on HealthShare NSW as a business. For us, it’s very important to capture the customer feedback and customer sentiment really quickly. To achieve this we’ve moved away from the large scale lag surveys that we traditionally did, to much more continuous and ongoing feedback from customers. This way, if there is a problem we can jump into it straight away. And that’s one of the reasons why we engaged inQuba, in order to use your platform for our customer service desk.”
MB – “What has made the programme the success that it is?”
JL – “It’s about behaviour change, and the need to operate differently. We worked with inQuba to build custom dashboards, which are used alongside all the other information that the platform provides us. Dashboards were developed with the team leaders to make it a bit more consumable for them, which helped with the extent to which the solution was accepted within the business, and made it more consumable for team leaders on a day-to-day basis. Not only can team leaders see the result of their own agents and teams, but they can also see the results of the whole floor and the whole business. And a little bit of friendly competition is always good. We’re trying to be transparent by not hiding important information from anyone. The platform also does a really good job of putting all the information in one place. Users don’t need to go somewhere else for another piece of information. Especially in a contact centre environment, having the ability to present all the customer information in one place is really fantastic. It’s real information about how our agents are performing and what our customer think. We’re always looking at metrics like key satisfaction and quality drivers, overall satisfaction and even simple questions like ‘Was your issue actually resolved today?’ So putting customers’ feedback in the right context has been really helpful. And I really like the sentiment analysis. It’s a really interesting supplementary metric that tells us how our agents and teams are doing, and also how our customers are feeling about us as a business, which is great.”
MB – “It sounds like you have all the tools, insights and information you need on hand, so that your teams can really focus on getting the change and the improvements and problems solved quickly?”
JL – “Yes. As much as the business and the Customer Experience team are trying to make things easy for the customers, I also have a responsibility of making things easy for internal customers too. And that’s one of the things that this solution has made possible.”
MB – “You’ve been on this journey for a few years now. I imagine the landscape is different today compared to a few years ago?”
JL – “A few years ago there wasn’t a very good understanding of customer experience. Today, Customer Experience is in front of everybody all of the time and is part of the day-to-day conversation and vernacular, and being referred to a lot. It really puts customers at the heart of what we do, and does the job of reminding people that CX improvement is a big strategic focus. A few years ago it was a lot more conceptual. This system has really helped me put things in context and given me something to hang my conversations off. It’s no longer about “listen to me”, but rather “listen to our customers and what they’re saying.”
MB – “What’s next for HealthShare NSW strategically?”
JL – “There are a few pieces of work that this programme has really helped with, and we’ll be continuing with. For instance the building out of our customer personas. We have really good information to feed into customer journey maps and customer empathy maps. We’ve also been able to identify who our customer champions are within the business. Combined, this is really valuable information for the business. I’m going to ensure that this information is shared broadly and that it brings the business together around who our key customers are and what the key customer journeys look like. The customer is included in all our strategic planning and project planning.
The programme has also helped us identify people in the contact centre who are delivering exceptional customer experiences, and move them into coaching roles.
I’m also looking forward to linking our Customer Experience to our Employee Experience. We’re almost certain at this stage that peaks and troughs in customer satisfaction, by business area, will also be evident in the employee satisfaction for the same areas.
Finally, we’re going to be continuing to build out the digital CX strategy, which we all agree is important and part of our overall strategy. We’ll be incorporating the digital tools and channels into the broader closed loop feedback process.
We have some adventures coming in our CX journey ahead, but we’ve got really good tools and data to grab the insight and help us along the way.”
