4 simple ideas to improve patient experience

Written by: Kushal Dev | Co-founder, Customer Guru

Patient experience is fundamental to the healthcare industry. The profession is not just about clinical care anymore but requires care that addresses every aspect of a patient’s encounter with your hospital, including their physical and emotional needs.

People always remember how you made them feel and you should be sensitive about it. Let’s look at some simple initiatives you can take to provide a better patient experience.

• Build compassion – Create an environment which makes your patients comfortable and at home. It’s important to have one on one friendly interaction to establish an emotional connect and build a feeling of compassion. This makes your patients feel welcomed and instils trust.
• Listen – To understand your patient’s needs it’s important to listen to them carefully, acknowledge both the good and bad and most importantly engage. Tell them how important their opinion is to you and you are willing to go that extra mile to provide them a stellar experience.
• Collaborate – The different departments in your hospital should work in unison towards a common goal of better customer experience. You should ensure a consistent delivery of patient-centred care across departments. Create a platform/medium where all the departments collaborate, deliver and evaluate change. Technology is great enabler here. Use it to your advantage.
• Accept change with open arms- Always remember your policies and processes are in place to provide better and efficient service. It’s important to review them from time to time. If they are not fulfilling what they are supposed to or there is better way to accomplish something, try it. The idea is to make small incremental changes. Measure its impact and either retract and try something different or iterate and replicate.

Please leave in your comments, thoughts and ideas.

Reach kushal at kushal@customerguru.in

10 easy to implement Net Promoter® best practices

Written by: Vivek Jaiswal | Co-founder, Customer Guru

While Net Promoter System® (NPS) is quite easy to understand, it is still fairly new as a concept. As more literature is published on how to make the best of NPS and the Voice of Customer (VoC), it is also becoming difficult to find best practices when implementing NPS or VoC process in your organisation. I came across the “Ultimate List of Net Promoter® Best Practice Tips” that contains close to 40 tips, and thought of sharing the ten easiest and simplest ones as an excerpt. Anyone interested in going through the entire list may visit the blog originally posted by Adam Ramshaw. For those looking for a quick bite, read on…

1. Keep in mind that NPS is not a market research tool

NPS is a measure of your customers’ experience and loyalty with your brand. It is meant to be short and sweet, unlike most market research. Most importantly, it is an operational tool that triggers action while market research is ‘research’ that is passive and is meant for knowledge building.

Both are great tools but are meant for different purpose and have different end goals.

2. Close the loop

It is probably THE most important thing to do from the very beginning of any customer feedback program. Irrespective of what metric is used, closing the loop will improve customer engagement as well as create promoters just out of sincerely following through with customer feedbacks. Implementing service recovery or an account review meeting based on customer feedback will help recover detractors. But reaching out and thanking your promoters for their support is equally important; do not overlook the goods.

Closing the feedback loop is critical, it should be a part of everybody’s activity list.

3. Read the verbatim, they are a gold mine of information

First of all, it is purely out of respect for the time your customers invest in sharing their feedback that you should read every comment. But when tons of automatically analysed and beautifully reported data is available, why would you want to read through the free text comments, right? Wrong, because:

• 1 in a 1,000 customer survey responses is the gem of a business transforming idea – you don’t want to miss that right?
• 4% of responses ask you to take an action for the customer, including providing a quote for more business – again not something you want to miss.

4. Share customer comments across the organisation

Sharing your customers’ voice internally brings everyone closer to your customers. Don’t just share the good feedbacks but also the bad ones. It keeps employees motivated as well as on their toes at the same time.

5. Have the right attitude towards customer feedback

Every company has flaws and it’s best to acknowledge them. Customer feedback is like a mirror for an organisation, showing what is what. Abstain from shooting down customers feedback by saying ‘the customer doesn’t understand the process’ or ‘that was a one off’. If customer feedback is embraced with the right attitude it could really transform your organisation by continually improving and fixing problems that customers are pointing out.

6. Frontline employees know your customers best, get them involved in the process

Frontline employees would feel more committed to the success of the NPS program if they are involved directly in improving it. More over, most of the customer issues are already known to them and they are brimming with creative ideas to solve those problems. Listen to your customer facing employees, empower them to take action and they will make a huge difference in customer experience.

7. Make the NPS program your own, brand it

Rename it, brand it, give it a logo, a tagline and even a mascot! Make sure that the program is well recognised internally. This is probably the best way to get everybody excited about any new initiative – make it your own.

8. Be transparent, make it visible at the top

Install digital signage in CXO’s cabins, share daily/weekly/monthly scores and summary of customer issues. Show what is being done to improve NPS and make it visible through the NPS trend. Be bold, be transparent.

9. Take action on the feedback, utilise the data

So many organisations collect a host of data from their customers and report like crazy. However, they completely miss on making changes in the business and ultimately resort to blaming the process that it doesn’t work.

“If you do not use the information to make changes in the business, shut down the whole process because it is just a waste of time and money.”

10. Invest in automation – to reduce cost and failure

It is a bad idea to have your NPS or VoC program dependent on a person. Every time that one person is sick or leaves the organisation, the process should not come to a standstill.

Invest in a good NPS solution, automate as much of the routine survey process as possible: data collection, validation, collation, analysis and reporting.

 

It was hard to select just 10 out of so many other great tips. These are however the easiest to get right from the beginning. Let us know your favourites in the comment below.

5 incredibly simple customer experience strategies that will make you a customer magnet

Simple customer experience strategies that improve customer retention and loyalty!

1. Understand how your customers define “Customer Experience”
   1. What is important to your customers?
   2. What ticks them off? For example, is it the fact that you do not have a particular item in stock or that your sales person doesn’t know about it.
   3. Acknowledge that customer experience is driven by every customer touch-point – all elements of your media-mix and across all departments of your organization, customer facing or not.
   4. It is imperative to maintain a high quality experience throughout the relationship, not just when you are selling or renewing.
   5. Customers are sensitive about data privacy. How you handle personal data is an integral part of customer experience now.
2. Customer satisfaction is a given, focus on improving customer engagement
   1. Customers are no longer passive recipients of ‘push’ marketing. They prefer doing business with companies that engage, listen to, and act on inputs from them.
   2. Be where your customers are – the device, the medium, and the communication. Match it to your customers’ preference to increase engagement.
   3. To come closer to your customers, actively listen to their preferences and personalize your marketing and services accordingly.
3. Deliver a multichannel experience
   1. Today’s customers are present across channels – social media, email, offline billboards etc. Marketers need to engage and be available across every possible channel.
   2. Be relevant and consistent across channels to avoid confusing your customers.
   3. Customers are easily annoyed or they lose interest if multichannel communication is not as per their preference. Don’t become ‘multichannel annoyance’.
4. Rethink how you engage with customers
   1. Don’t be fixated by tried and tested strategies. Leading brands constantly try creative ways to engage with their customers and more often than not, customers love it.
   2. Data privacy is becoming contextual. Customers are willing to share business/personal information if they trust you to deliver a personalized experience.
   3. Through meaningful exchange of value and information, companies are delivering better experience to customers; and customers appreciate that.
5. Show your customers you care: when you promise something, deliver
   1. People never forget the way someone made them feel. Similarly customers never forget if you made them feel special by caring to send a birthday note, or by apologizing for a delayed delivery by sending a souvenir.
   2. When you ask for feedback, show that you read it and are going to act upon it. This simple gesture reinstates your customers’ trust in you.
   3. Customers and prospects view personalization as the next step in a company’s commitment to service excellence.

Are there any other customer experience strategies that are working for you? We’d love to hear them!

9 amazing quotes on customer experience that all entrepreneurs should take inspiration from

7 Customer Experience Experts You Should Follow

Want to stay up to date on the latest and greatest customer experience tactics? These are the people you should be following.

Written by: Vivek Jaiswal | 25 Jan 2015

Customer experience is still an emerging field of study and most business leaders are learning by doing. While there is a host of information out there, it is easier if you know what the experts are saying. Here is a list of seven customer experience experts you should follow on Twitter or LinkedIn to stay ahead on everything related to customer experience.

 
 

Fellow at Bain & Company, best selling author, speaker, and creator of the Net Promoter System®, Fred has been called the “high priest of loyalty” by The Economist. He is a leading voice and a strong advocate of employing the “Golden rule” to create customer and employee loyalty. According to The New York Times, “[he] put loyalty economics on the map.”

 
 

Co-author of ‘The Ultimate Question 2.0’, Rob heads Bain & Company’s global Customer Strategy and Marketing Practice. He is a keynote speaker and through his NPS Loyalty Forum, he brought together, for the first time, business leaders from across the world to share best practices in creating a culture of customer advocacy.

 
 

Micah Solomon is a renowned keynote speaker on customer service and customer experience,. He has written 100+ articles on Forbes.com covering customer experience, customer service, and corporate culture that foster loyalty. Author of bestselling “Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit: The Secrets of Building a Five-Star Customer Service Organization”, Micah is a leading voice in creating outstanding customer experience in the hospitality industry and has worked with some of the leading brands in creating the “Five-Star” experience.

 
 

An entrepreneur and customer experience consultant, Adam is a regular contributor on various customer experience and customer feedback forums on LinkedIn. His blog on www.genroe.com is a gold mine of information covering customer experience, customer feedback management, and research on key customer loyalty trends. Adam is a keynote speaker at industry forums and conferences in Australia. He works with global B2B and B2C organization to build a customer centric corporate culture.

 
 

John is an “Ex-Disney Guy” and Customer Experience Coach. He has been successful in showing businesses, teams and communities how to create a Disney-like experience and culture. He is a leading contributor to Tourism, Hospitality and Service Industries alike. He brings a wealth of knowledge and hands-on experiences to his keynotes and seminars. John is consistently helping his clients create a magical customer experience like Disney.

 
 

As erstwhile Global Head of Customer Experience and Insights at Aviva, Rod brings with him a strong track record in driving systematic improvements in the customer experience. He is recognized as a customer experience leader and his roundups on www.rodsroundup.com provide great insights on creating a rewarding customer focused culture.

 
 

Learning his way through experience, Michel is a renowned customer and employee experience keynote speaker. He has worked with and coached senior managers at leading brands in North America. Michel’s energy is infectious and his views on customer experience an eye opener. He has been featured and has contributed on Time Magazine, Yahoo Small Business Advisors, Yahoo Finance, Forbes, Digiday.com, BC Business, Business Talk Radio, Business2Community, and 1to1 Media.

Do you follow any other customer experience evangelists and like what they say? Let us know in your comments below!

How to increase profitability per customer

Written by: Kushal Dev | Co-founder, Customer Guru

The enormous scale of markets in India and China provides an immense scope to grow for organisations. A key criteria for growth is customer acquisition, which organisations spend a lot on through marketing, discounts, loyalty programs, 24 hours sale….its endless! But is this sufficient? Imagine a customer getting such poor experience with this organisation that she defects even faster than she was lured through these “smart” customer acquisition strategies. Hence its important that customers are given such stellar experience that they become loyal to you and stick around. Losing customers at a rate faster than acquiring new ones will only lead to a shrunk customer base and decline in profit.

Both Loyal (read “promoters” according to Net Promoter Score® philosophy) and not so loyal customers (read detractors) have their own lifecycle and impact the bottomline accordingly

Promoters	Detractors
They are happy doing business with you and hence buy more Come back for repeat purchases Recommend to their friends and family leading to more business Willing to understand your genuine problems Complain less which means service cost is low Fewer complains means happier employees Happier employees are more efficient and serve your customers better!!	Detractors buy less Unless you dominate your market they will not come back. Will defect at the first opportunity though! Spread negative word of mouth creating a –ve chain reaction Enraged at minuscule issues Escalate at every opportunity consuming more of your team’s bandwidth Dent your employee’s morale. Unsatisfied employees means low efficiency, job dissatisfaction, higher attrition!!

Since loyal customers lead to lower costs, happier employees and repeat business leading to higher profits we should explore how to set this customer experience environment in your organization.

The first step should be to measure your customer loyalty. As the saying goes what gets measured gets improved. To measure it effectively its important to quantify it and make it understandable for everyone in the organisation. Net Promoter Score® (NPS) is this simple and easy to understand metric. The beauty of NPS is its simplicity. Since its easy to understand the focus can quickly shift from analyzing the score and how its arrived at, to focusing on why did you get this score and what actions are required to improve it. You then use it to establish a flow of information across the organisation creating a social environment around it. Individuals, teams, departments and different entities within an organisation can use it as a mirror to evaluate and improve themselves. When the teams understand how their actions directly impact customer loyalty they stop waiting for the higher management to show them the way and start thinking and taking action on how to improve customer loyalty  themselves. A detailed explanation on how to implement NPS successfully in an organisation can be found here.

Reach Kushal at kushal@customerguru.in

NPS as a KPI – the good and bad!

Written by: Kushal Dev | Co-founder, Customer Guru

One of the first few questions that organisations ask on adopting NPS is “should they set NPS as a KPI?”  While the intention could be right to ensure that the team is serious about NPS, it is equally important to ensure that the program has reached the maturity level of adopting NPS as a KPI. Do it too early and it will face a lot of resistance from the team. Do it too late and the program loses its value.

A few pointers to keep in mind while you are on the NPS journey

“We are in it with you”. The company should give out a clear message to its employees. Imagine the detractors reaching out to your front line employees. When they voice their concern, then other than acknowledging it if your team is clueless on the next steps it will only lead to repeat complains and further customer dissatisfaction. With no defined system in place the frontline feels helpless and this effects their morale. Any organisation would definitely not want to get in this vicious cycle of unhappy employees and customers. The solution here is to define a process for handling customer issues and equipping the team with the right tools to collect customer feedback, analyse this data and take necessary action to address these issues. The employees should get the message that the company is in it as much as the team and willing to equip them with the right processes and tools.

“Data is key”.  To create the finest quality product you need to use the best raw material. Similarly if you want to get the best result from your NPS program it is important that the data you are collecting and using to make key decisions is relevant, reliable and a good representation of your entire customer base. Initiatives based on non reliable data will face resistance from all the departments effected. This resistance will also be rightly justified as decisions on unreliable data will not be credible and yield minimum result. Some points to consider for data reliability

• The team must be trained and system should be put in place to avoid “gaming” (surveying only satisfied customers, colour coding score chart to suggest scores to customers, pleading customers for high scores indicting bonus for the team etc).
• Some geographies are culturally tuned to lower scores. Its should be accounted for while making key decisions
• Try to get a good response rate. With more and more internet users on the mobile it could be your key to higher response rate
• Organisations with high NPS may want to focus on issues creating passives rather than the ones creating detractors.
• Focusing too much on the score may dilute the essence of the program to resolve customer issues.

Though it is advisable to set NPS as a KPI it is important to commit along with you team, support in their initiatives and in the process always be focused on the ultimate goal to WOW you customers.

Reach Kushal at kushal@customerguru.in

An Indian context to NPS

Written by: Vivek Jaiswal | Co-founder, Customer Guru

Since my return from Amsterdam, I have been repeatedly told that it’s great to have the experience of helping European organisations implement NPS, but I’ll have to keep the ‘Indian context’ in mind while implementing the same in India. Some even cast doubt on whether NPS is applicable in India because Indians rarely respond to surveys. It got me thinking if it’s actually true, if there really is an ‘Indian context’ to NPS. With respect to the same, I would discuss three major questions.

1. Is the NPS question relevant to the Indian community?

2. Do Indians have a relatively low response rate to surveys vis-à-vis people of other nationalities?

3. Can NPS be skewed because Indians are culturally inclined to give low scores?

I started by conducting small experiments locally. Whenever I went out to purchase anything of value – a new mobile connection, an Internet dongle, or new earphones for my iPhone, I would always ask the NPS question to the salesman:

Would you recommend this product to your friends and family?

And

Why?

It was a fun experiment because almost always it made the salesmen think for a while. It was different from asking ‘Is this product good?’ to which they instantly responded ‘Yes! It is one of the best set of earphones we have.’ But when asked the NPS question, I was given an honest answer – ‘you should buy this one instead because it has so and so advantages over the other one’ OR ‘absolutely, in fact a friend of mine has the same product and is very happy with it.’ Having run this simple experiment across several small and big purchases, I received the same level of engagement from the sales people. It reinforced my faith in the NPS question and it is safe to extrapolate the observation across all Indian organisations.

Now comes the question of whether we Indians have an inherently low response rate? That is to say that we rarely respond to surveys. I believe that culturally we are very enthusiastic about sharing our product knowledge with others. Like the rest of the world, we regularly seek and offer opinion about products/services we would like to or have used, often volunteering to help with purchasing decisions. Though offline, these are manifestations of customer feedback. Then why is it that companies fail to capture them? In a recent call with a prospective client, I was told – “Customers don’t have the time to respond to surveys.” it prompted me to think “Yes, as long as they are sent 10 page long questionnaires, the response rate will remain abysmal.” Traditionally customer surveys have been extremely lengthy. And, along with corporates, customers have come to believe that if it’s a customer survey; it will be lengthy. However, does the length of a survey really affect response rate? Well, our dear old Surveymonkey guys have the answer to that. As one of the most widely used survey platform, Surveymonkey studied around 100,000 customer surveys for a correlation between respondent dropout rate and length of the survey. The results are depicted in the following chart:

C, Brent. “Does Adding One More Question Impact Survey Completion Rate?” SurveyMonkey Blog. https://www.surveymonkey.com/blog/en/blog/2010/12/08/survey_questions_and_completion_rates/ (accessed July 20, 2014)

So, if you are a company that really wants to improve customer response rate, you have to cut down the number of questions. It’s that simple! Again, since NPS relies on asking just the two questions I mentioned earlier, its response rates are phenomenally higher than traditional customer satisfaction surveys. To give you some perspective, CustomerGauge, our technology partner, gets NPS response rate of  >60% in B2B and >25% in B2C. This is across more than 130 countries that CustomerGauge receives responses from, India included.

Finally, some would also point that NPS could be skewed because of cultural bias: that Indians do not have a tendency to rate an organization very highly. However, in contrast to the notion, I believe Indians are more generous in that regards compared to their European counterparts. On a global scale if India scores lower than other markets, it should not be assumed to be because of a cultural bias, rather the service quality in India should be closely observed. As long as service levels are delightful, companies can be assured of receiving a 10 from Indian customers. Adam Dorrel’s (CEO CustomerGauge) blog – “Net Promoter: is there a ‘Dutch effect’?” corroborates this view.

It is important to understand that NPS is a way to measure customer delight and is a must have for every organisation. What Indian organisations really need to implement are the processes that make it easier for customers to share feedback and NPS facilitates that process most effectively.

What is Net Promoter Score® or NPS®?

Written by: Kushal Dev | Co-founder, Customer Guru

Net Promoter Score® is a loyalty metric developed by Fred Reichheld, a fellow at Bain and Co. In 2003. It is a management tool widely replacing the traditional customer satisfaction (CSAT) research and is being used by global brands to gauge the loyalty of their client relationships.

It is based on the fundamental construct that by asking one simple question –

“How likely is it that you would recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague?”

Measured on a scale of 0 to 10 every company’s customers can be divided into three categories

1. Promoter (Score 9 and 10) These are loyal enthusiasts who will keep buying and referring others thus fuelling organic growth
2. Passives (Score 7 and 8) These are satisfied but unenthusiastic customers who would easily switch for better offering
3. Detractor (Score 0 to 6) These are vocally unsatisfied customers who damage your brand and impede growth through negative word of mouth

NPS = % Promoters – % Detractors

Net promoter provides easy and quick customer feedback. The power of NPS however is not driven from data collection but from using this data effectively. Its easy to collect data using any of the survey tools available online but can effective data collection alone lead to NPS success? The real value is in evaluating this data effectively and deriving actionable insights so you exactly know the actions you need to take to delight your customers. An organisation striving for NPS success needs to realize that NPS is not just about measuring customer loyalty but also a way of doing business. NPS should be seen as a change agent that transforms an organization into a customer centric one.

Disclaimer: Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score, Net Promoter System, and NPS are trademark of Satmetrix Inc., Bain and Co., and Fred Reichheld.