Relentless Health Value - EP236: Customer Experience Advice: When Building to Simplicity, It Has to Be Perfect, With Liliana Petrova, CEO/Founder at The Petrova Experience

EP236: Customer Experience Advice: When Building to Simplicity, It Has to Be Perfect, With Liliana Petrova, CEO/Founder at The Petrova Experience

07/25/19 • 33 min

In this podcast, Liliana Petrova, CEO/Founder at The Petrova Experience, translates her experience as director of customer experience at JetBlue to the health care industry. Her advice is practical and designed to actually work in environments as complex and regulated and driven by safety concerns as the airline industry—and also, coincidentally, health care.

In the past in health care, some have perhaps underestimated the impact of customer experience. But it’s hard to continue to do so in the face of Forrester research showing customer experience drives revenue growth by double digits compared to laggards in markets where there’s competition. Actually, this growth difference is true even in some markets where there’s not much competition. Why? Because when the customer experience is really bad, customers might choose to abandon the service/care altogether and just not return at all, anywhere. And Gartner touting facts such as 89% of companies these days are competing on a customer experience battleground.

But back to today’s conversation. Somewhere in the middle of our chat, Liliana says, “When building to simplicity, it has to be perfect.” I loved it! This is a really simple, if you will, maxim with a lot packed into it that we spend some time unraveling. One spoiler: Good customer experience makes it easy for customers, makes it simple for customers. And second, perfect means perfect from the patient’s or customer’s point of view, not ours.

One of the parts of the conversation I loved was Liliana’s dissection of just the physical space of a typical waiting room from a customer standpoint. I never thought about it before, but that desk that the front office staff usually is sequestered behind? That tall desk with the glass window? It resembles a payday loan place in a bad neighborhood. What’s the subliminal message there?

Liliana wrote a few articles about lobby design, among other topics, by the way; and the links are in the show notes.

I met Liliana at the Pharma CX conference hosted by PanAgora.

Learn more at thepetrovaexperience.com.

Liliana Petrova, CCXP, is a proven leader in the field of customer experience (CX) and innovation. She pioneered a new customer-centric culture, energizing the more than 15,000 JetBlue employees with her vision. She has been recognized for her JFK Lobby redesign and facial recognition program with awards from Future Travel Experience and Popular Science.

Liliana wrote a few articles about lobby design, among other topics, by the way; and the links are in the show notes.

I met Liliana at the Pharma CX conference hosted by PanAgora.

Learn more at thepetrovaexperience.com.

Previous Episode

EP235: The Right Providers Will Maximize Health Care Value. So Who Are the Right Providers? With Suzanne Clough, MD, CMO at ArmadaHealth

Here’s a vital question, “How do you make sure that the physicians your employees or members are seeing are high quality in a given area of focus?” Getting to the right doctor matters when you consider that something like 70% of back surgeries are unnecessary and medical errors are the third leading cause of death in this country. And also because, as Suzanne DelBanco put it in EP224, if a payer simply cuts out the bottom performing 10% of practices, the returns are outsized from a cost and quality perspective. The challenge is how to actually accomplish this. How to measure quality in a sea of dirty data and noise and whatever the opposite of interoperability and aggregated data sets is. With the confounding factor also that outcomes are rarely if ever included in data sets, especially when you consider that the outcomes that matter to patients are really the outcomes that count.

Today I speak with Suzanne Clough, MD. In a former life, Suzanne was a co-founder of Welldoc, the first FDA-approved digital health platform and also featured on EP102 of this podcast. Now, Suzanne is the chief-medical officer over at ArmadaHealth, a company that aims to become a GPS for health care helping to get patients to the right doctor quicker.

You can learn more at www.armadahealth.com

Dr. Suzanne Sysko Clough, MD, is Chief Medical Officer of ArmadaHealth, a health and data science company that navigates consumers to quality health care providers using big data, AI, and proprietary quality algorithms that together produce 360-degree profiles of physicians. The platform enables precision matching of physicians with patients based on diagnosis/condition and nonclinical attributes. Before ArmadaHealth, Suzanne was a co-Founder and Chief Medical Officer of WellDoc, the first FDA-approved digital health platform. Dr. Clough completed her medical training in internal medicine and a fellowship in endocrinology at the University of Maryland Medical Systems and served as an assistant professor in the Division of Endocrinology as well as Medical Director and as the Founder and Medical Director of the Center for Weight Management and Wellness.

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undefined - EP237: Improving Health Care Value by Pausing and Asking Questions, With Derek Winn, Cofounder at Distilled Concepts and Consultant at the Business Benefits Group

EP237: Improving Health Care Value by Pausing and Asking Questions, With Derek Winn, Cofounder at Distilled Concepts and Consultant at the Business Benefits Group

Bad things have a propensity to occur in health care when patients are placed on a trajectory and then simply follow the yellow brick road—to an Oz potentially filled with unnecessary surgeries, MRIs that cost 10 times what they should, low-quality providers chasing RVUs (relative value units) like their paychecks depended on it ... I could go on.

Today I speak with Derek Winn, cofounder at Distilled Concepts and consultant at the Business Benefits Group. His distilled advice is to recognize that every transaction with the health care system is a waypoint on a larger journey—and also an opportunity to pause and ask questions. Payers of health care have a profound opportunity and perhaps growing obligation to help employees/members/patients, first of all, to recognize that a “look both ways before you cross the street” modus operandi is safer from both a monetary as well as an actual patient safety standpoint. Derek and I discuss the ways to make this happen, when/if it will become standard operating procedure, and the likely impact on providers and insurance carriers and Pharma if employers choose to take this route.

By the way, BUCA stands for Blue Cross, United, Cigna, Aetna, and Anthem. We use this acronym in the interview.

You can learn more by contacting Derek on LinkedIn atDerekWinn or by visiting distilled-concepts.com.

Derek Winn is a lead consultant at the Business Benefits Group, where he has consulted clients regarding employer-sponsored benefit programs for nearly the past decade.