Customer Experience

Marshall McLuhan was the first great prophet of the digital age. 

In his masterwork, Understanding Media, McLuhan coined the now famous phrase: “The Medium Is The Message.”  I remember hearing that line at various times in my life and not really understanding it.  Now that I’ve read the book, I think I know what it means.  It means that information we absorb (the “message”) is not as important as the means by which we absorb it (the “medium”).

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Dianne Timmering has been on me lately to spend more time in the field.  She’s right, of course; how can I do the job I am supposed to do without visiting our homes and centers and experiencing firsthand what it is like for stakeholders and customers alike?

In the Ancient Chinese book of wisdom, the Tao te Ching, there is a poem that seems to provide an answer, or at least an excuse:

We can understand the world as it is
without leaving our home.
We can understand the world as it might be
without peering dreamily out our window.

The further we go
the less we know.

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Several months ago, during a senior team meeting here at the home office, Mitch Abrams said something has stayed with me ever since.  He was talking about how some of his experiences over the past few years have changed him: his growth as a leader at Signature, his mission trips to Haiti, and of course his wife Jill’s brush with death. 

I was so new that I didn’t really know Mitch; I just assumed he had always been the way he appeared to me then.

So Mitch’s next comment caught me by surprise.  He said that he was frustrated and hurt that some of his colleagues in the room didn’t recognize how much he had changed.  They were so intent on holding onto their old notions about him that they couldn’t see the man he had become.  He wasn’t looking for credit or a pat on the back.  He just wanted to be seen for who he was, rather than who he used to be.

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I am slowly coming around to the view that all things happen for a reason, or rather, that all things happen toward a purpose.  For most of my life, this has been an alien country to me, the realm of fanatics and mystics and quietists.  I would occasionally visit on a kind of mental vacation, but I was a stranger in a strange land.  I didn’t speak the language or undertand the customs.  The food tasted different.  I felt foolish and out of place, and so I would eventually return to where I felt most comfortable and whisper the traveler’s prayer: “Thank God I made it home.”

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Healthcare organizations have gotten pretty good over the years at hiring for competency.  We have a bead on what skills to look for in doctors, nurses, CNAs, and administrators.

Yet we as an industry still struggle with high turnover and absenteeism, low staffing efficiency, and workforce morale.  Despite ever increasing levels of education, specialization, and overall competency, customer satisfaction ratings for the industry continue to languish.  It seems that our customers have come to see clinical excellence as a baseline expectation.  Press-Ganey and other measurement organizations report that it is the so-called “soft” aspects of care–empathy, compassion, attentiveness, positivity, authenticity–that drive customer perceptions and customer loyalty.  And when it comes to these areas, most healthcare organizations remain in the Dark Ages.

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