Below is an Autogenerated Transcript

Don: I mean, I guess one of the things that I would come back to. So, you know, I too have had quite a few clients that have come along due to, you know, COVID and just wanting to explore their customer practices a little bit more. What surprised me in my sort of discussions, and I’m by far, nowhere near as highly rated as you are in terms of your service guru, you know, expertize, is this idea of forcing the customer journey on the customer. So, you know, I had one particular client that essentially said, hey, look, this is what we want to do. 

We want to provide, you know, results to the customer within hours or minutes of getting the diagnostic. Essentially, the customers were saying, hey, look, I need the answer when I turn to go get it. I don’t want it forced on me. I don’t want you messaging me. I don’t want you sending me all sorts of information about the fact that it’s ready. But whenever I open my app on my phone or I go to my computer to log in. I want the information to be there. Essentially this company kept saying, but we want to provide it to you. 

Ron: Right, because in our world, we think immediate notification must be valued by everybody else. There’s a great example where they will set for themselves an internal KPI of notification within X number of hours. Then they’ll hit it and they’ll pat themselves on the back. But they will lose market share because customers are over here saying, you didn’t give me the choice.

Don: Right. Right. So, I guess that leads me back to another question- How do you get, what I would say, is the real customer’s voice so that it’s not overridden one, by clients of yours or two, you know, it’s not sort of formed in the way that the client wants it to be, Right? So, how do you get back to that very basic you know, customer experience? 

Ron: Yeah. The issue there is not in the voice of the customer. It’s in the listening of the service provider. Mm-hmm. So the conversation is always both parts, right? We say, let’s capture the voice of the customer. Yeah. But what do we do with it? So I will give you an example. I met recently with a very esteemed gentleman who’s been CEO of a number of hospitals here in Singapore and still very active in the population health space for the nation. He was talking about a hospital that he looked over many years ago. There was a certain arrogance among the senior medical professionals. 

Of course, if you look at the way medical education works, you can understand perhaps, you know, how that happens. We see it in the community. He was concerned that the very senior medical professionals, doctors, clinicians, weren’t really listening carefully to what the patients had to say. So what he did was he went through the records of complaints and he invited in groups about ten complaining patients or complaining family members. Out of the ten that he would invite, maybe six or seven would come and he’d have them come and he’d arrange some food, etc. and have them all sit, you know, in a little semicircle.

On the other side right behind him, he had all of his clinical directors and senior doctors sitting there waiting to hear this. What he said to the patients was, what we need you to do is essentially scold us. Tell us the truth. Tell us what happened. Tell us how you felt. He made it very clear to all of his colleagues, you don’t get to say anything. You have to sit. To listen. 

Now, what he also said to the patients was, see all that nice food over there? We don’t get to share it with you until you know, till you tell us. So, they started talking. What happens is one starts to say what happened, then the other patient, then the other family member, and pretty soon, you’ve got a full volume and emotion of what actually is happening to these people. 

You’ve got the clinicians sitting there not wanting to hear this. Right. At the end of the session, he turned to the clinicians and he said, now you can answer. All you can say is thank you. Then they went and they had their food together. They did that over and over and over again. 

They’re legendary. They’re called scolding sessions. But I want you to hear what it is he was modifying, not the voice of the customer. He was modifying the listening of his colleagues. After a certain number of sessions, they started to get it. Sure.