How are customer success concepts being applied in healthcare?
Customer success has become a rich discipline with its own tools, best practices and competency models. It is most common in subscription businesses, and a number of companies in healthcare and medical technology are moving to subscription models. What are the best practices to applying customer success concepts and approaches in healthcare?
I have seen a number of organizations take the idea of a customer journey map and create a patient journey map.
Best Answers
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@Steven - so excited to see this question out there! I'd love to share our experience.
As we prepared to launch our first SaaS solution with our healthcare customers, we engaged a national innovation and design firm to educate our team on design-thinking and utilization of some common tools to build out a new customer journey map. We did primary and secondary research with long-time customers who had seen success with our legacy solutions and then validated our understanding of how their user experience would change with our new product + service offerings. Some of our customers even participated in ideation and the mapping process with our teams. Discovery (with the customer stakeholders as partners) is now an essential part of our design process so our implemented solution can be more easily adopted and utilized from day 1.
Our primary end-users are clinicians who balance patient care with complex technology every day. There were so many opportunities to improve. We laid out our front-of-stage experiences and back-of-stage business processes/technologies for alignment and educated our own multi-disciplinary teams on how it would change (including a subset of our value-added resellers). We selected pilot sites for our SaaS solution that were willing to benchmark with us and measure outcomes. We are tracking costs/resources internally for the new business model. We're still early in the process, but we've working to refine our customer journey map, identify gaps in our back-of-stage processes and technologies, and build that outcome database so we can PROVE the value we're selling.
We've seen excellent engagement from health systems which actively practice design-thinking and have their own centers for innovation. Our teams now have a beginners skillset to work with a customer who may want to build a patient journey map (for ex. improve ED throughput) using our technology. For Enterprise-level technology implementations across multiple healthcare facilities, the complexity is best visualized in a customer journey map. It keeps the customer needs statements front-and-center to solution alignment and our business decisions.
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At Varian, we witnessed the classic approach to implementing Customer Success, every section of the company knew they needed it and took off in different directions! Well here we are many months down the path and we are lining up our initiatives and capitalizing on the efforts that each branch has accomplished.
As stated above, it was our SaaS group where CS was seen as most needed. As a company with a very large hardware (big iron) division, I saw a much broader customer need. The customer journey can be quite long for many of our customers (from sale to install to steady state use) can be years. Having a constant through that journey is very beneficial to the customer and the company.
Many of the standard tools either have been or are being implemented (journey maps, health score cards, playbooks, etc.). The biggest challenges we have seen is the internal adoption of the role and the mindset change of the customer ( getting them to see the broad spectrum of what CS can help them with and not just calling when something is hot)
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