[Webinar] Beyond the Voice of the Customer: Richer Signals for Continuous Improvement

Speaker A: Foreign.

Speaker B: Welcome to today's webinar. It's part of the Kynexis Continuous Improvement webinar series. It's titled beyond the Voice of the Customer. How Richer Customer Signals can Improve Continuous Improvement. I'm um, Mark Rabin, ah, a senior advisor with Kinexus. I'll be your host and moderator today and I'm very excited that we're joined by uh, by two presenters. I'll introduce them more formally in a moment. They are Volker Probst and Annette Barenzmeier. They are both managing partners with their firm Resonance Growth Partners. At our uh, presenters today, first off, Annette Barensmeyer. Annette brings more than a decade of experience designing enterprise CX strategies, customer experience strategies, analytics frameworks and feedback to action operating models across different businesses. A uh, global CX leader and Forrester certified CX Professional, she's unified customer facing functions under shared goals, embedded customer insight into executive decision making and guided organizations through CX maturity transformations globally. Having worked both inside a leading CX platform provider and as a senior CX executive, she knows where traditional VOC approaches create value and where they quietly limit impact. And we're also joined by Volker Probst. Volker brings more than 25 years of experience turning customer insight into action at enterprise scale. As a former global CX and operational excellence executive, he has designed and led CX improvement systems that move organizations towards signal based behavior driven experience improvement. His work has helped global organizations reduce friction across critical journeys and translate customer signals into operational change, delivering lasting gains in business impact, experience and engagement. Creating a tailored experience system, he helps CX teams move from listening to customers to fixing what actually breaks the experience. Um, again, very excited that you're both here, Volker and Annette. I'll turn things over to you for the presentation. Thanks.

Speaker A: Fantastic. Thank you so much Mark. And um, thanks everybody for having us. Like Mark said, we are at Resonance Growth Partners and our focus is really on helping organizations connect three items. Customer understanding, employee insight and then business performance. And so over the years we've noticed continuous improvement and customer experience teams are often trying to solve many of the same problems and they're not always looking at the same signals. Um, today's session is not about teaching CX though, so I can reassure you there. Um, it's also not about introducing a new methodology at all. It's really about exploring how those customer signals can strengthen the improvement systems that many of you would already have in place. So you will see practical ways that customer uh, understanding can, can help identify friction earlier, strengthen Prioritization, and then improve outcomes for all, for the customers, for the employees, and the business. So let's start with a very, uh, simple idea. Every process problem is a customer problem in disguise. SCI professionals, you're already experts at finding ways, reducing variation, improving flow, solving operational problems, but customers experience those very same problems differently. As I mentioned, I'm actually in Germany right now. I don't know if anybody's dialing in from Germany or has maybe previously visited Germany, um, and perhaps traveled by train if that's the case. One example that probably resonates with you is the German railway system, um, doesn't always have the. The best reputation, if I may put it that way. So, uh, imagine, and this is a real story, I'm traveling to a meeting, and I need to make a connection. So there is an app, which is great, right? I check the railway app, and I see that my first train is delayed. The app tells me, you have plenty of time, and I decide I'm rather going to stay in that cozy cafe instead of rushing to the platform. Right. Makes sense. However, the train arrives only a few minutes late instead of the much longer delay that was predicted in the app. And so by the time I actually realize what's happening, the connection train has left is gone. Now, pause for a minute in the story and think from an operational perspective, right? From your. From a dashboard perspective, this is just a, uh, data accuracy issue, right? Or schedule variance. But now I'm standing there, and from my perspective, what I'm feeling, what I'm experiencing is somewhat different. I'm standing on the platform. I'm wondering, how am I going to get where I need to go? I'm realizing I'm missing an important meeting. Most likely I have to figure out some kind of alternative route. And then, fun fact, um, in Germany, often there are different train operators. So my next train is operated by a different company, which means I cannot use the ticket that I already have. I actually have to now figure out a way to buy another ticket. So, from my customer, uh, in this case perspective, what started as a small operational issue has now created uncertainty, frustration, effort, of course, and additional cost. So the operational issue and the customer issue are two sides of the same coin. They're experienced differently, but they are two sides of the same coin. And that really is why customer signals are so valuable. They help us understand not just where a process is breaking down, but how that breakdown is being experienced by the people we're ultimately trying to serve. So a delay becomes uncertainty, um, the handoff becomes frustration. A defect is a broken promise. A complicated process is unnecessary effort on the customer side. And so one of the things that we've learned is many organizations are very good at solving problems, visible operational problems. But the opportunity that we want to look at and discuss today is how customer signals can help us identify the problems we don't yet fully see and help us prioritize the ones that matter most. So it's not replacing VOC voice of Customer. It's to add another lens that helps us understand where friction already exists and where that improvement work can create the greatest value. So before we go a little bit deeper into those signals, let's just, um, establish a common language around customer experience. And I promise we're not going to go into detail here. I'm sure you've heard, um, this, uh, this definition and maybe customer experience as a methodology or maybe as a team before. But just to make sure we use the same language, Forrester defines customer experience as you can see here how customers perceive their interactions with an organization, whether those interactions are effective, easy, and emotionally engaging. And there's four words that I want to just quickly point out. One is perceive perception. The funny thing about perception is it doesn't matter if it's the truth. It really doesn't, unfortunately. And anybody on this call that's in any kind of relationship knows that perception is not about the truth. Right? It's how the customers perceive their interaction. So it's entirely up to them. And then the other three are, uh, all starting with an E. And this is what Forrester calls the three E's, right? Effective. Did the customer accomplish what they needed to accomplish? Pretty simple, easy. How much effort did it take? And emotionally engaging. How did the experience, that number of interactions, that single interaction, how did the experience make them feel? And we make a lot of decisions based on how we feel about an experience, if we think about it for a minute. So what's particularly relevant for you is that approach, uh, operational friction impacts all three of these three E's. A delay makes an experience less easy. A process failure makes it less effective. And poor communication can create frustration. I certainly felt that anxiety and loss of trust. Next time I book that train connection, will the same thing happen? So customers don't experience process variation or workflow inefficiencies. Right? They experience confusion, effort, waiting and uncertainty. So when you hear us speak about customer experience throughout this webinar, uh, what we're really talking about is the customer's perspective on the operational system we all work within. And so that brings us to customer signals. So let's look at the full spectrum of customer signals. What you see on the left, you're very familiar with that. Most organizations collect customer feedback, right? I doubt there's any out there that don't do any of it. Right. I mean, how would they stay? But okay, I should never say never. Right. So on the left hand side, you know, you are familiar with this. Surveys, interviews, focus groups. These are valuable. We're not saying they're not right? They are valuable. They aren't going away. Even if survey response rates are dropping globally, they're still not going away. I see some comments. So maybe that means, unfortunately for some of us, but, but they are, they are here for good. But they are all examples of solicited feedback. And so that brings me back to, to the uh, voc, right? We ask customers what they think. It's the voice of the customer. So they have to do something to have their voice heard. They have to speak up. So if you're asked to speak up, if you have to do something to make your voice heard, what do you associate that with? Effort. Right. There's effort immediately implied in that. So what's exciting really in today's time is the growing ability of everything that's going on on the right hand side of the slide. And that's the ability to learn from signals that customers generate naturally as they interact with our organizations. So take a quick look at this list. Repeat contacts, transfers between teams, escalations, frontline observations. So what's interesting is that many of these don't look like customer feedback at all. If you first look at them, they look like operational data. And uh, that's exactly why they're so powerful. Many organizations wait for complaints before recognizing fiction friction. But by the time a customer complains, they've often already experienced not just one, but multiple process failures. A repeat contact is a signal, right? A transfer is a signal. An escalation is a signal. Frontline employees saying, I've heard this issue three times this week is a signal without the customer saying anything in their own voice. These signals almost always come before the survey score even moves, before the complaints increase, before the customer leaves. So today what we'd like you to encourage to do is think differently about them. They're not just operational metrics, they're customer signals hiding inside your operational systems. And when we start treating them that way, we can identify friction earlier and prioritize improvement work more effectively. So we will revisit this question later. Uh, where do unsolicited customer signals Hide in your organization. So already keep that in the back of your mind if you want an extra few minutes to think about. But these already exist in your organizations. They do. So how do we connect them to improvement systems in a way that drives action rather than simply generating more data? That's exactly what FOIKA is going to walk us through.

Speaker C: Hey, thank you Annette. I will start with a small story to highlight you know, typical CX voice of the customer approach and you know uh, CI voice of the customer approaches out there. This might not be typical for your world, but it's really how we started thinking about this. So a few years back, uh, actually it's quite a few years back when my wife was in the hospital for the last phase of her pregnancy, nurses or clinical assistants would come by every day, take vitals among uh, many other important tasks and write them. And then they would write down the, the vital vitals on a piece of paper to document it into their systems at the nursing station later on. And I know all the CI folks out there, you guys are already thinking about there's all kinds of waste already with that kind of process. How however, while she was doing that she often also reminded my wife about a survey where my wife should rate uh her or him with a 10 out of a 10. Um now while the care was excellent and she never saw the nurse's document or acting upon some of the feedback she would provide related to her experience. So every uh, while everyone of there was at that point focused on the, on the, on her outcomes, she never experienced an impact on uh, on the feedback of her experience as a typical CX approach. Just like Anati shared a lot of organization focus on satisfaction indicators like csat, NPS and uh customer sentiment. Around these three E's Annette introduced right Ease, effort and emotion right While customers experience you know, the actual product or the actual care. In this case, however, while they identify customer sentiment, CX teams often lack the ability to act upon the feedback and often focus on just reporting out uh this customer value.

Speaker A: Right?

Speaker C: On the other hand, I was attending a uh lean conference some months ago and while I was networking I asked many of the CI practitioners attending the conference how they integrate voice of the customer into their improvement efforts, how they use voice of the customer to funnel their improvement efforts uh, and prioritize their efforts and how they uh know that their improvements would add value to the customers experiencing their products or services. The answers I got ranged from VOC being something the customers are willing to pay for certain process steps without ever having spent time with their customers. Um, many were using quality or delivery data as a basis for improvement opportunities, while several uh, said that they would be interviewing a few customers and using those insights to create their KANO or QFT models to identify improvement efforts. Most of the practitioners I spoke with really focused then on generating business value with their, uh, improvements. What we want to share with you, uh, today is a little bit of a three step approach to bringing these functions closer together. First, as Anetta described, using solicited and unsolicited customer signals and customer value to create cases for improvement. Second, you know, the ability to prioritize these signals for action based on this business, uh, based on actual business value.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker C: Uh, thirdly, really apply the CI framework to act upon the feedback rapidly generating solutions and business impact based on what customers value. The critical element of this three step approach is the one in the middle that prioritizes customer signals with problems with the problem solving action. You know, to govern that process. We look at the business value on the one side and customer value on the other side as a Venn diagram. Right. Just because our customers or your customers value certain things doesn't mean it's the right thing for your business to act upon. For example, customers, um, often highlight price is a detractor. Uh, and if you reduce that price to, let's say, zero, I'm sure customers will love it. Your NPS is going to go through the roof, but I doubt you will have long, uh, term success as a business on the other side. You work hard to improve the delivery speed and really drive out variation in your manufacturing processes and decide for that additional feature and capability to add some fees to your customers. While that drives business value, it might also drive customers away. The governance to align customer value and business value in the center of the Venn diagram is critical for creating real impact with improvements or investments. Right. I want to talk to you and I want to walk you through quickly an example where a nursing unit solicited youth, turned solicited and unsolicited patient feedback into a, uh, daily experience improvement and drove business value. As many of you know, healthcare organizations have standardized surveys for overall, uh, care experiences and outcomes, which used to come in the mail after a visit. Additionally, many organizations now have started to actually purposefully learn from their patients while they're going through the actual care process. This shift is subtle but profound because these organizations are moving from measuring satisfaction after the fact to identify friction and turning that into action in real time. Patients are continuously telling the healthcare teams where care is difficult Confusing, delayed or stressful. And the impact of that is seen in operational data. Imagine a 32 bed medical surgical unit, uh, we used to work with. Like many nursing leaders, the manager receives HCAH scores, patient complaints, uh, service recovery reports, call light data, readmission statistics, staffing metrics, safety event and so on every day. The problem in this particular unit and for this manager was that everything for her arrived separately. By the time she was able to understand trends and see trends in her monthly reports, all those patients who gave feedback already had gone home. Right. The team was looking in the rearview mirror and improvements were slow to change the overall performance of the unit. We worked with the team and altered their existing daily huddle slightly to create what we called a 15 minute patient signal.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker C: Instead of reviewing only operational outcome metrics, the team, um, included every morning patient signals, solicited ones like hcahps, comments, discharge surveys, follow up calls, family feedback forms, and unsolicited signals like bedside rounding responses, nursing interactions, caregiver observations, escalations, transfer delays, room changes. Every interaction became a potential learning opportunity for the unit. Through this they identified many friction themes in the process. One of those friction areas for patients was around imaging and testing, um, really highlighting that nobody tells me as a patient when my tests are happening. Patients also shared the anxiety of waiting for imaging and the frustration about the delays, which while interestingly on the other side, no formal survey had highlighted this um, as an issue. Right. Operational signals however, showed that several of the functions supporting imaging, like transport or the imaging organization, uh, itself, you know, had operational challenges throughout the day. So what the team did was they added this friction area to their daily huddle board to prioritize for action. They would ask in their huddle then, which issues impacts most patients? Which issue can we influence today? The problem statement for this particular friction imaging, friction came became something like patients are experiencing anxiety and dissatisfaction because diagnostic test, uh, timing and status are not consistently communicated. A frontline nurse then took ownership and started to lead an effort. Right? Leadership, uh, nursing leadership and leadership started to see a change from the traditional 60 to 90 day cycle of a patient survey coming in to consolidated report to committee to potential action being transformed into daily signals supported with some AI, uh insights, daily huddles, kinexus entries into, you know, uh, into the dashboards and local improvements within days. And a system where the most powerful patient feedback wasn't found in a survey score, it was found in thousands of moments where patients would tell or data would show what confused them, what worried them, what delayed them and what made care Harder than it needed to be. As this med unit com combines some of these solicited feedbacks, unsolicited patient signals, uh used an AI insight generator and their daily management huddle, they created a structured problem solving approach using in this case, Kinexus. They created something much more valuable than just uh, another voice of the customer program. They created a system where every patient interaction became an opportunity to improve care for the next patient.

Speaker A: So this is one example, right? And uh, we're going to share another example. But this was one where customer signals revealed operational friction and then also helped prioritize the improvement work. But what does it really mean for you as CI leaders? What we see and have been seeing is that the organizations that make the most progress don't treat customer understanding and the understanding holistically of the experience. So in this case of the patient experience as a separate activity, right? It's not separate, it's not add on. It's built directly into the improvement system. And so this integration really is what's key. So notice uh, that none of these actions required a major transformation effort. Right? The huddle was already there. Signals were already received. Many of those signals are already there. The repeat contacts, transfers, frontline observations, um, the complaint trends. But the opportunity is to start viewing those inputs into prioritization and improvement decisions. So imagine what if every improvement portfolio included customer impact alongside operational impact, if that was just the norm. Or um, what if daily huddles always surfaced patient or customer friction alongside operational issues? And then the same at the end, at the wrap of um project teams coming to a review pause. What if they routinely asked, not just did we improve the process, right. But also did we improve the experience of the customers that this organization serves. That's where those customer signals become powerful. Not because there's more data, right? It's not about more here, but because they help direct improvement energy toward the issues that matter most to customers, employees and the business. So at the end it's not about adding another program, it's about enriching the signals we use to prioritize improvement work. Let's look at one more example.

Speaker C: All uh, right back to me. Another example of aligning customer signals with concerted improvements comes from a medtech organization we used to work with. For many years, customers were telling this company in surveys that one of their biggest dissatisfier was around the lack of transparency of the entire process. From when these, the customers would prescribe the product to um, the actual delivery of the product, right? To the making and delivery of the Product so end to end because it made their patient scheduling operation very difficult and it impacted their revenue when they would have patients scheduled. But the clinical product didn't arrive on time. Right. Improvements for this customer feedback were often deprioritized as no real business value was attached to the feedback. In parallel, however, uh, the operations team, the manufacturing team worked incredibly hard to reduce the variation of their end to end operational processes and even enabled within that a express shipping option for customers. Because more and more customers started calling the contact center to expedite their cases because there's so much variation and uh, long lead time. Now even though manufacturing reduced the lead time significantly for the customers, the call volume into the contact center was about 40% asking where's my product and can you expedite my process? And it kept steadily increasing even with the operational improvements. Right. After looking at behavioral customer data, really understanding why customers were calling and why they were expediting even after the lead time improvements, understanding churn signals correlated with this uncertainty of the process of customers moving away from the medtech organization to their competitors. Because of that and shifting our customer interviews from the doctors to their staff, where uh, um, who was responsible ultimately for the scheduling process, we were able to create a business case that demonstrated the business value to address this customer friction issue. Right. We align them uh, these efforts and build an end to end improvement map around visualization of their progress status in the platform using some predictive machine learning. You know, similar to what you experience in a doordash or pizza tracker app. Right. We also did further improvements in the in operations, reducing the need for express shipping for expedited cases and products altogether and reducing its higher cost and then also enabling customers to interact with the process directly in the platform and requesting product expedites by themselves with a click of a button using a Genai Chatbot. All these improvements along the value stream reduce the overall call volume, the overall call volume by over 30%. Some customers would still call in the, in the beginning due to their habit of having had to call to expedite a case and uh, only trusting the system once they had made their call. So we had to uh, create some scripts for that. But we reduced the annual shipping cost by over $10 million and reduce the annual the actual churn customer churn generating more than 20 million of annual recurring revenue. Once we understood the impact we could generate connecting unsolicited customer signals and um, solicited feedback with operational data, our improvement teams started to work much much closer together with the customer experience team to Replicate this process across other long standing customer friction areas. So as you, as you think about your CI work and opportunities to advance your work with more customer signals, we would recommend, you know, the following simple activities. Um, you could start as early as tomorrow. First, just reach out to your CX organization if you have one in your organization or your patient experience organization, engage with them, um, around customer signals and customer friction areas they have identified through their work in their reports and dashboards. Then take that back, audit your project inventory, see if you have opportunities to add friction elements to each of your projects, existing projects, or if you're even missing areas, missing opportunities for improvement. Right. Build a process to add more signals to your improvements and use a tool, could be Kynexis or any other tool to function as a prioritization engine for your improvements. Right. I think that's really, really critical because I think most organization, we often assume that organization know what action to take, but most organizations don't. They have decades of dashboards, surveys, alerts and workflows. Yet the same problem still uh, exists. So as you build a, this bridge with Kinexus as the, as the prioritization engine, I think that will help to identify opportunities and add friction elements so you can drive the improvements. And just like in the example before, as you close out uh, projects, figure out a way to understand whether your improvements had actually made a difference to your customers and added business value at the same time you had anticipated for it. So we have a couple of resources for you to look at. They're all going to be in the slides. Just to read up more on this and get more inspired and excited about adding customer signals into your CI work. What we wanted to start having a conversation now is like where are unsolicited customer signals hiding in your organization right now? Just as Anethe was uh, explaining before. So I think that is the moment where we would like to really open up for a good conversation. Over to you, Mark.

Speaker B: All right, thank you Volker and Annette. Let's leave this up on screen for a minute here. This prompt if um, anybody wants to put into the chat and answer thoughts about this question. Unsolicited customer signals that are hiding. I think what you both shared is really powerful. The difference between solicited surveys or solicited input, kind of the self selecting nature of who responds to the invitation versus things that are more directly observable. That's really interesting to me as a lean practitioner. Um, and then maybe let's put, well we'll leave the chat still open so I think everyone's had a chance to absorb that prompt. I'll go through a few announcements. We'll open things up for Q and A and maybe read and discuss some of the things people are putting in the chat. There's a couple thoughts here already. Okay, next slide please. Just a few announcements. Our next webinar is going to be presented on July 22nd, 1:00 Eastern, our usual time. Jeff Roussel from Kinexus, he is our chief revenue officer. He's been at Kinexus for Gosh, I think 12 years. Um, he has talked with hundreds and hundreds of leaders and organizations about CI programs and he's kind of distilling his different observations and recommendations on this theme. The webinar is going to be titled why Great CI Programs Don't Get Funded and what to Do About It. There's the most important, uh, part. Um, so we invite you to register for that. You'll receive an email, um, if you've attended this, uh, webinar. If you're watching this on, uh, YouTube or listening to the podcast, you can sign up to get notified of Future webinars@kinexus.com and then there are well over 100 recorded webinars from the past decade. If you check out, click on the big button that says Webinars on Demand Library. We also invite you to check out the Kynexus YouTube channel. Next please want to, um, let you know about other free resources that we offer. Uh, one is our blog. We have new content on there every week about continuous improvement and navigating everything that we're all working on. You can find that@blog.kynexis.com you can also sign up if you'd like to be notified about new blog posts via email. So again, check that out please. Blog.kynexus.com and then next is our podcast. There's our friend, our semi official mascot, Ophi, um, on the podcast logo on the Kynexis Continuous Improvement Podcast will have the audio of today's session. A lot of other things that we put in the podcast feed, discussions between myself and our CEO, co founder Greg Jacobson, other readings of blog posts and things that you can listen to. So please check us out. Uh, subscribe wherever you find podcasts. And then next please, final thing, speaking of surveys, speaking of voice of the customer, I put a comment in the chat. I mean there's so many surveys. We get surveyed about everything. We do invite you, please do give feedback. We do read all of the feedback. The feedback does matter. It doesn't go into a black hole. We don't do it because you're supposed to ask for feedback. Your feedback about today's session, your thoughts and ideas about future webinars really do guide our direction. So please do take a couple of minutes. That should pop up when you go to exit the webinar with that. Okay, we're going to leave this up on, on screen. And we've got a couple comments. Um, I think answers to your prompt about, um, those customer signals. I'm going to read them and, uh, Annette and Volker, you can comment as you like. Um, so Karen, who looks, uh, like works in healthcare, listed, um, comments to staff care, techs, food delivery, housekeeping, nurses, things that are not captured otherwise.

Speaker A: I think that that theme of Frontline being such a bearer of essential customer signals is really key and that that's coming through here. Right. That's across industries that we're seeing that Frontline often senses and hears those friction points way before anybody sees any survey. But there's not often a good channel for Frontline to actually provide those signals. Right. Now, I remember we've worked with organizations where, you know, you start a project with CICX and you share that eventually with a sales Org, and they say, well, finally somebody's doing something about this. We've been hearing this for years and years. Right. And then you're wondering, what is that channel? Because that also has an impact on the employee experience. Imagine feeling like you know the answer, you know where that friction point is. You hear it from the customers day in, day out. Um, so, yeah, I fully agree across industry Frontline signals. Frontline customer signals are key.

Speaker C: Yeah. Just to tapping one more thought into this. And, uh, you know, especially in healthcare.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: Uh, I think it's a very, in my opinion, it's a very unique environment because you have your customers around you all day, right. So, and you interact with the customer, so you get real feedback all the time. And oftentimes this Frontline team gets the impact, I think, uh, or gets the insights, enabling them to document this easily and then moving that feedback into a prioritization engine. I think that's really, really critical. So that not only the employee sees that, hey, I collected something and somebody is even is actually doing something about this, I think it drives a lot of engagement. Um, and even if nothing comes out of it, but then if there's a feedback loop saying, hey, you know, it's a good insight. But we have 35 other projects we're writing. We have prioritized before that, but we have captured it. I think that's critical. And I think as with, you know, I talked just briefly about AI in healthcare, that's a very challenging ah, thing. But as interactions can get documented in a way, you know, I think there's an opportunity to become much more natural in documenting these interactions and these themes and then mining these themes for potential improvements.

Speaker B: Yeah, I'm reminded of uh, a situation as being the family member of uh, somebody receiving healthcare. And you know, you talk about the need to have some feedback loop and channel and there's the insights that the frontline staff hear. And what I saw was the frontline staff being impacted in a very negative way was me making a comment about trying to go pick up uh, a prescription at a hospital's outpatient pharmacy. And there was a disconnect between the posted hours online and if you called, what the voice thing said about the hours. And I took a chance and went at like 8:05am um, hoping that they really opened at 8 and not at the later time. And sure enough they were open at 8. And I said, I think in the friendliest of ways to the pharmacist or pharmacist tech that was helping me, you know, about this disconnect and it's confusing. And then the poor guy, you know, the sigh and he wasn't rolling his eyes at me. I felt bad at that moment bringing it up because sure enough then he said what, I've been mentioning this for a long time. They won't fix it. And you know, that's sad to hear when, um, you know, that that lack of feedback loop is not only frustrating the customer or the patient or, you know, uh, it frustrates those frontline staff. Right. Tell us more about your experiences around that. You know, how, how do we not wear down the frontline staff by, by having these problems get constantly repeated.

Speaker C: Yeah, I think a lot of that, you know, has to do with, you know, making those insights visible and making, you know, and making this friction visible which exists out there. And then, you know, you know, having a, uh, way to, to identify improvement opportunities against that. So if there is friction where there's no improvement against it, then that's an opportunity for us to really look and see, you know, how would we. And then there's two options. We either accept it with some rationale or we do something about it. And I think that's really, really critical because that visibility then leads down to, as I described before, the ability for, and the trust in your frontline Employees to say, hey, I brought something up and somebody took care of it or I brought something up and it's somewhere in schedule. And it's not something which will done in four or five years from now, but it's something which will be addressed at some point shortly, hopefully as well.

Speaker B: So there's another comment, I think this is an answer to your prompt about customer signals. Sean wrote number of touch points, get actions completed, orders placed, returns or exchanges facilitated. So I don't know if that's in a retail or E commerce kind of setting.

Speaker C: Probably

Speaker B: thoughts about like looking at touch points of you know, the customer saying, well um, it was effective but it wasn't as easy as it could have been. It sounds like it's in that category.

Speaker A: I think that's really crucial looking at the number of touch points because um, I remember an example where you know, it was about closing a ticket, um, by what. And your dashboard was green. Everything was fantastic. But what, what was actually happening is that there was a transfer to another team happening and every time the ticket got transferred it got closed. So the first core resolution looked fantastic, bright shining green on the dashboard. But really it took several touch points for the customer to get their action completed. Right. So that was found out because they did exactly that. They looked at how many efforts did it take for this on an individual customer basis to get from this request to have it fully resolved. And that all also pointed out an issue with the KPI management.

Speaker C: Yeah, similar to that. You know the example I shared before in terms of touch points. Right. So customers would look into that medtech platform every day to see, hey, is there a change? Do I have finally a um, uh delivery link attached to my order so I can follow the order as it's been shipped. So they would do this uh, every day and then you know, so there's a lot of touch points and then they would pick up the phone, try to call. Right. And you know, there's a lot of interaction that way and it's, it's really a lot of effort on the customers to find out when their product would be shipped to them. Where all of the effort, the improvement effort was on reducing that effort and making it really easy for those customers to see and then to take action with uh, regarding their scheduling, regarding their clinic runs. And I think you know, having that visibility and removing the manual work out of their environment through, in this case that visualization and the ability to inter interfere with the process in a simple one touch way was really powerful. And I think uh, that to Me is like, you know, we talked about the three E's, right? So it's effort, ease and emotion. You know, when we spoke with our customers after implementing. Right. And really getting additional feedback on the tool itself, tools itself, you know, the one thing which really stuck with me is like, customers would say, it's now so easy for us. Uh, we are so excited to interact with the platform and that we never had heard before. And so I think these three E's, they really work in tandem together. So as you look into removing touch points, you know, exploring touch points, understanding your customer and what takes effort for them is really, really critical.

Speaker B: We have, um, a comment from Shannon, who, who, uh, wrote, when I was in medical imaging, I would visit patients waiting while the imagers were reviewing cases with the radiologist, I would pop in and ask about their visit. What's gone well, what could be better? It was one of my favorite activities because it's also the place to capture positive feedback as well, to share with other departments. And yeah, I've blogged about this before about like getting all the surveys and not once do I remember, uh, an office manager or somebody asking me, like, what went well? What could have gone better? Like, we do this after meetings at work all the time. The plus delta. And you know, you have the actual voice of the customer. You have the customer right in front of you. And a lot of industries that's not true. So I think it's, I mean, it's great to hear that Shannon did that. I would hope others do. I see you both nodding. You probably agree, but anything to add about, you know, the impact or, you know, do's or don'ts about capturing live face, uh, to face feedback, I think

Speaker A: what really stands out to me is not forgetting that positive side. Right. I've heard many times that, um, customer experience teams, departments become the naggers, the bearer of bad news. Right. This is wrong. And I can see how this could potentially happen to a CI team as well. Right. Like, this is not good enough. This needs to be improved. And so making sure that it's balanced to get champions has to be part of the design. To also capture positive feedback from similar signals oftentimes is really crucial to change the culture, right? To change that, to get that motivation going of, uh, wow, this, this really resonated with the patient. We should do more of that. For any employee, if you have somebody that, that says, well, thank you for actually helping me with this, you want to do more. Right? So that motivation is, is really crucial.

Speaker B: It's a Question from Mark. Any suggestions for how to capture these signals from teams and call centers or service desks or similar IT technology operations easily in all caps because many frontline ticket workers are already overwhelmed filling in the tickets.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I love that Easily. Then you don't, you really don't want to ask frontline employees to become data entry clerks, right? I mean that's really not. Nobody wants that. So I think the first step is starting with the signals that already exist in the work. So look at those repeat contacts, the escalations, um, the transfers, uh, the reopen tickets, um, and you know, the recurring keywords in those descriptions. So there's all signals that are already there and I think they can give you a lot of information. Um, and then the second one to me is capturing signals shouldn't be an add on. And I know this is an ideal word and it's behavior change, right. But it, ideally it's part of an existing routine, right. It's not creating a new one. So for example, in that daily huddle, right, Ask one of those questions like what issue did you hear repeatedly this week? And you don't need everybody like to fill in every time. But if that becomes a habit, right. It shouldn't be an extra on. And then what Folker said, I mean AI is our help here, right. Instead of asking the employee, like categorize and summarize those issues, this is where speech analytics and AI can analyze those cool transcripts, the ticket notes, the chat conversation and comment to hear that, you know that that is something that keeps on coming up. Right. The customer mentioned something even sentiment analysis. Right. These customers calling about this particular issue have like more negative sentiment percentage than they usually have. So there's, there's something going on there without anybody having to fill in more data, Right. It's not about more data. It's about using the technology we have and the data and the signals we have or ready.

Speaker B: Um, another question. This is a question I was thinking about during the session. Thoughts about. You know, we talk about voice of the customer and sometimes one customer is one customer. Like how, how do you help navigate conflicting customer feedback or trying to figure out when the voice of one customer is that representative of enough other customers, if not all customers.

Speaker C: Yeah. So maybe I get a first stab and aneth you can add to that. But oftentimes you, you, you know, in, in the med device, med tech environment, you have key opinion leaders, right? That might be your biggest customers, your customers who do the work. Well, uh, you know, most, most experienced with the product or, you know, what not so. And they oftentimes dictate what, you know, you want to improve in the product on, um, per se. Right. So to counter that and say, hey, what's the broad audience saying? Is it the same? Is it different? Why is it the same? I think this is where we start utilizing, you know, our critical thinking and really looking at, is this a one off? Is this noise? It might not be because it, it's a big key opinion leader. But, you know, how do you deal with that? How do you interact with that when the data might say something totally different? So you might have different strategies to deal with it. I don't have a real prescriptive answer for that. But it's, you know, if you get feedback, you have to do something with it, right? Because otherwise feedback is a gift. Right? So positive or negative. So if you don't do something about it, you basically tell this customer, however important or whatever his opinion or her perception is that it doesn't matter. So you have to figure out a way to deal with it. Now how the improvement work comes after is like you really look at all the unsolicited signals and say, and that will help you then to frame an improvement path. And it might be in line with what this customer is saying or it might not be. And if it is not, you might want to close that loop with this customer and tell him or her, hey, this is, we heard you and this is what we're doing about it. It might not be what you expected, but we're doing something about it.

Speaker A: Yeah. Maybe to add to that, um, I think this is one of my favorite moments when you get contradicting feedback because this is like that puzzle that you have. You know, something is going on here. Right. I mean, that's just the starting point. It's like finding a really thick book and you read the first five pages and you know, you're like, wow, I still have so much more to go. So I love that moment. Um, it means there's a story there, there's something to understand. And I remember one example where there was feedback from. It wasn't a huge amount of customers, but, you know, solid enough. Um, that said, this one product is, it's really not working. It's, it's frustrating, it's just not, it's terrible. Very, very negative, critical feedback. And then I took this with the team to, to the product manager and, um, the product manager was like, no, this is, this is completely wrong. Like, let me show you all the feedback. I Have everybody loves it, all the customers loves it. And so, um, the product manager came and had absolutely contradicting feedback. And the short of the long story was we were looking at different customer groups and this product was designed for the experienced customers that Folker was referencing earlier. And they loved it. Right. Like all those very highly experienced customers leaning in. Right. Fantastic. But the m, like the bigger, uh, chunk of customers, the ones coming, you know, in from university the last five to 10 years, they could not work with this. Um, and for them and their staff, this was not a useful product. And so there was a big story underlying the contradicting feedback. So whenever you see that, if I were you, I'd get excited and just

Speaker B: dig deeper, lean into it.

Speaker C: Yep, there you go.

Speaker B: Um, we've got a couple thank yous for the ideas and suggestions. Um, I think that is all we have in terms of questions, uh, questions and input from the audience. So I think that will bring us to a, uh, close. I want to certainly thank everybody for attending. From around the world today, I want to thank our two presenters, Volker Probst and Annette Baronsmeier. You know, I think for, um, some people, this is maybe a first introduction to, uh, the terminology and the approaches to cx. I think, you know, there's so much, um, to think about in lean terms, about observation and the expression about data versus facts. You know, I think these customer signals, uh, and emotions, uh, or facts that are sometimes not always represented in data. So, um, I want to thank you both. I want to encourage, um, everyone please join us for future webinars, including In July with Jeff Roussel. So, um, thank you both. Have a great day.

Speaker A: Thanks.

Speaker C: Thank you.