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Steve:
When you're buying something online or in a physical store, the experience is important, but usually not life changing. But if you require health care, that's a different story.

Kim:
The biggest difference between customer and patient experience is that patients are typically forced to participate in an experience, while customers generally are choosing their interactions.

Steve:
Let's look at the differences between customer experience and patient experience on this episode of The CX Leader Podcast.

Announcer:
The CX Leader Podcast with Steve Walker is produced by Walker, an experience management firm that helps our clients accelerate their XM success. You can find out more at walkerinfo.com.

Steve:
Hello, everyone. I'm Steve Walker, host of The CX Leader Podcast and thank you for listening. As we like to say on this show, it's never been a better time to be a CX leader in this podcast provides the topics and themes to help leaders like you deliver amazing experiences for your customers. I've said it many times on this show when it comes to your health or the health of your loved ones, it gets really personal. That's why it's so important for health care providers to pay attention to the patient experience. It can be different from customer experience, but there are similarities. And just like B2C, experiences are influencing how B2B companies design and execute their programs, there are some things that patient experience pros can learn from the CX world. Well, I'm delighted to have our guest on the program this week. Kim Gerber is a patient experience professional and has worked both on the client and on the advisory side with all a lot of big name organizations. And she truly is an expert in patient experience, and I'm delighted that she's willing to help us understand both the similarities and the differences between PX and CX. This is a topic that's very important to me. And so Kim, thanks for being willing to come into The CX Leader Podcast.

Kim:
My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Steve:
Well, I'm delighted. This is a great topic. You know, there's nothing more personal than your individual health. You take it for granted when you got it and when you don't, nothing else matters. So that kind of sums up how important this particular service and experience is. But as usual, I try to ask our guests to just give us a little bit of context so in understand your own personal journey to becoming a CX Pro. So if you would just give us a brief CV of Kim Gerber and, and how you got to where you're at in your career.

Kim:
Yeah, sure thing. So if you had asked me at the turn of the century when I was going to college, what I wanted to be, I would have told you a professional cake decorator and owned my own bakery. I think of, like, Duff or Carlos.

Steve:
Yeah.

Kim:
But my dad is a wise man, and he encouraged me to first go to college and learn how to run my own business. So I went to to school for business. I thought I was going into management to learn how to be an entrepreneur. But as I got into those four core classes of management, marketing, operations and finance, I quickly realized that management was a little boring and marketing was where it was at. It was super, super exciting. And I was really I was really motivated by the idea of having data driven business decisions. So when I graduated from college, my first job was as an analyst at a market research firm. We were a full service market research firm doing primary market research, both qualitative and quantitative. This was at the time where really it was a big pivot was happening from mail and phone surveys to web based surveys. I'm not dating myself too much there, but I remember like making that case, like building PowerPoint slides that were showing the the advantages of moving some of these surveys from phone or mail to to the Internet or showing the time savings and the cost savings.

Kim:
During my time at that organization, I really I spent 13 years there and helped grow the business from one to about ten people managing every type of market research study kind of under the sun from tracking and market assessments, concept testing, ad testing, conjoint pricing. You know, at that time I didn't realize it, but CX was really those brand health and CSAT and perception tracking studies that I was was doing. And through those studies we were able to really help large organizations a lot in the health care space to inform important business decisions with with customer feedback. Around that 13 year mark, I decided I was ready for a change and wanted to try my hand on the client side. And that's when I became a market research manager for a leading healthcare insurance carrier. My first projects were really the customer side tracking programs, which I thought once I got there I was like, what did I just do like, this is really boring. I feel like I stepped back in time because the surveys were really all mostly phone and mail surveys.

Kim:
And, you know, I told you I started my career trying to get organizations to move away from those. You know, these programs did serve a purpose and they did drive continuous improvements to the customer experience, but there was so much opportunity to optimize and modernize these programs. But you can't because when it's a tracking program that's been in place for ten years, it's untouchable.

Steve:
Yeah.

Kim:
But that didn't stop me from planning for the future. I hope that one day, hopefully one day soon that would change. And it did. But I went to I attended the Qualtrics X4 conference out in Utah. That's where I first met you, Steve. Yeah, when I went there, honestly, I hadn't really heard of the term CX. It's like what is this CX thing? But I was super inspired by people like Ryan Smith and hearing you speak at a breakout session, other CX leaders and real people like Richard Branson and Ashton Kutcher, Magic Johnson and the next year's Oprah and Barack Obama. Yeah. And just really realized the meaning of customer experience and how like there was this cool glossary of terms and better process and it really was driving action.

Steve:
You know, you've had such an interesting background and I'm just kind of it's taken me on a walk down memory lane. I remember one time when the Internet was first becoming a factor I had some some guy at a conference, it was a heavy research conference and we were talking I think we were on a panel discussion together and and we were early adopters of the Internet as well. But this guy sort of in a kind of, you know, very arrogant way, said that, you know, that they're experts at their firm had looked at it and that only 5% of data collection would move to the Internet. So and as you mentioned, I mean, the costs were compelling and the, you know, the accessibility and the the extra. And then your mention about customer satisfaction tracking, and, you know, you were doing all this custom research and, you know, all things pricing and brands and new product development and now we're just sort of like it's almost like an accounting function, you know, it's like we're just tracking it. But the power in that was creating the experience economy because and all this X data, because they had these big longitudinal studies that they could look at and relate back to other, you know, metrics and things that they had.

Steve:
And that's really the beauty of what the folks at Qualtrics and others in the, you know, they've invented they've taken kind of old line market research and boring, you know, customer satisfaction surveys, and they've turned it into this really exciting growth business they call experience management. So we ought to have you back on the show just to talk about the history of that. I think that could be really interesting. But I you know, as I want to do, I go off on my tangents, but let's bring it back. So now you clearly are a kind of a, you know, a well trained researcher, and a lot of us came up through that track. But you have really honed in now more on the patient experience. And that part of the business is just huge today. So, you know, let's talk a little bit about kind of how PX is different from or similar to CX.

Kim:
Yeah. So as I was reflecting on this earlier this week, I started with looking at the Oxford Dictionary for how they define these words. So customer, an individual or business that buys goods or services from a shop or business. Patient is defined as a person who is receiving medical treatment. You know, in some cases a patient could be a customer but that buying piece really gets muddied by the health insurance component.

Steve:
It does.

Kim:
And then finally, I looked up experience, according to the Oxford Dictionary, it's what it is like for somebody to use a service, do an activity or attend an event. Et cetera. So it's really like the sum of all interactions with something. So that part is really similar. So the biggest difference between customer and patient experience is that patients are typically forced to participate in an experience, while customers generally are choosing their interactions.

Steve:
I'm glad you said that because that's one of my early learnings and I don't really come at it from a patient experience. I've really benefited from people like you and colleagues who are really more experts in this. My experience was much more in the B2B and kind of classic customer SAT, boring stuff that you talked about. But you know, a patient doesn't necessarily want to consume this service always. In fact, it's almost out of desperation. You know, I was just talking the other day, you know, you know, people joke about a root canal, but until you broke a tooth, then you want a root canal. But that doesn't make the experience any more pleasant. But I think that's kind of the case with with individual health care, is that oftentimes you don't really want to consume the service, but you need to consume the service. You really don't have a choice. And so that changes the dynamic, doesn't it?

Kim:
Yeah. And unless you're having a baby or having plastic surgeon. You're not really gaining a reward. You're not better off than…

Steve:
Or Lasik surgery…

Kim:
…like if you're. Yeah. I mean, if you're having a root canal that just bringing you back to kind of status quo where you were, where you should be before that happened.

Steve:
Or, God forbid, you know, you have a heart attack or you get diagnosed with a cancer or something like that. I mean, you know, root canal is pretty routine compared to that.

Kim:
So I think that they have the same underlying principle, though, that you're serving a person to the best of your abilities and hopes that if they're in a similar situation again in the future, that they would come back to you.

Steve:
Yeah. So we've already been talking about the differences between patient and customer and how you receive the service and you've given us the definitions with which I think is a is a really good researcher way of going back to the literature and figuring this out. So obviously the emotions have to be different. So what is that component or how do we sort of take that and and parse that even more?

Kim:
Yeah. So I think if we put ourselves in the shoes of the patient, it becomes quite clear. I'm going to ask you to help me with this part. So to kind of help illustrate the difference in the emotions. Steve, could you tell me about a time that you bought something recently, you know, a car or cell phone or any consumer good.

Steve:
Hmm. Let's see. What did I just. Oh, well, I've been I've been buying a lot of sheet music because I'm trying to learn how to play the piano.

Kim:
Yeah. So take me through, like, a little bit of that journey when you started doing it and the emotions that you were feeling.

Steve:
Well, I you know, I really have always loved music, and now I want to try to do a little more of it. So I have been taking piano lessons and I've bought keyboards and all the stuff, and I've gotten to the point where, you know, I can take a piece of music and, you know, it's not very good, but I can figure it out. And so, you know, the, the music that defines my life is, you know, from the late 60 seconds to kind of the early 80 seconds and popular music from the primarily the 70 seconds. And so there's tons of music out there. And you can just go out there and search on it and, you know, pick a book and get it and have fun with it.

Kim:
And others can't see your face right now, But I can tell from the big smile that it's like an excited feeling.

Steve:
Yeah, no, it is. It's fun. It's like learning a whole, you know, a whole new language and a whole new thing that, you know, I've enjoyed my whole life, but I never really knew all this stuff about it, so.

Kim:
So now tell me about a time when you got care when you had a procedure. You visited a doctor recently.

Steve:
Well, if you're doing the math from the music I, like, you could tell that I'm now a Medicare patient. And one of the things that you do when you get to that age is you have to go see the dermatologist regularly, which I do. And so I was just there on Monday and for my every six month checkup and they found another thing, you know, so it's part of the deal.

Kim:
It's yeah. So not as favorable of an emotion.

Steve:
No, no. Because, you know, you don't really think about it that much. But yeah, you do worry about some of this stuff and it's serious. Yeah.

Kim:
So I think that's the biggest emotional difference is, is that as a customer, the majority of the time, while you may have some negative emotions of feeling confused or overwhelmed, ultimately there's something to be gained. There's a feeling of excitement and then you feel good. Whereas with health care, you often start off with that feeling of overwhelmed confusion, but it kind of sticks with you. And that's where I think organizations have an opportunity to really swoop in there early on and help guide the patient, help settle those emotional feelings.

Steve:
You've done a marvelous job of demonstrating for me the difference in the two experiences.

Steve:
Hey, my guest on the podcast this week is Kim Gerber. She's a seasoned CX and classically trained person in our business that really found her calling in the patient experience side of this business. And she's given us a lot of food for thought here, for the ways that patient experience really is different and more important in many ways than customer experience, but also showing us how we can leverage some of our customer experience knowledge to apply to PX. All right. So now as researchers or as CX pros, how do we convert some of that emotion into our metrics and our actions and how we're going to use them?

Kim:
So thinking through some of the listening posts when it comes to CX and PX and in my experience when it's CX, it's traditionally surveys a relationship, surveys, some transactional surveys with KPIs like Net Promoter Score and CSAT or customer effort score. When it comes to patient experience, you can do some of those and some organizations do, but pretty much every organization you talk to is going to be doing CAPS. And for those who aren't familiar, CAPS stands for Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems. This is a very standardized survey tool.

Steve:
And it ties in with reimbursements, doesn't it?

Kim:
So there's it does oftentimes tie in with CMS reimbursement for Medicare. Yeah.

Steve:
So that gets people's attention.

Kim:
It's a big component. It's these standardized surveys. When it comes to CX measurement, there's guidance. I mean, there's the Net promoter system and CX index. There's some survey best practices. But when it comes to patient experience, there is a formatted survey instrument. There's guidance for administering and the benefit of that or the reason for that is it makes it very easy to compare across organizations. You know, when I did Net Promoter Score at one of my past organizations, that big question was always, how do we compare to the other health insurance plans?

Steve:
Right.

Kim:
And it was a really difficult question to answer because nobody is doing it the same exact way.

Steve:
Correct.

Kim:
You know, it would be like, well, Kaiser says that their Net promoter score is making up a number right now. But you know, 50 and you know, when you dig into it, you realize it's a transactional Net Promoter Score survey that's happening after a call interaction, whereas others are doing just more of a relationship net promoter score at a random point in time. Some of the other differences are the scales with CX is typically about perceptions, how the how the customer felt. But these CAP surveys are done. The scale for most of the questions is with regards to how often something happened. So a scale that's never, rarely, sometimes always. So it doesn't really capture that how they felt. It's just like, how often did the doctor do this or how often did the nurse do this? For my experience, I think that the CX surveys are more actionable. They're designed to align with the customer journey with what matters most to them. They're very agile because it's your organization's survey you can change however you want, but these CAP surveys are very standardized. And while you can add some supplemental questions, it's pretty rigid in terms of what you can and can't do. So there's really a limited why behind the scores.

Steve:
Yeah, you mentioned that there's really no emotion in there. And so, yeah, you don't really know how they feel about it, you know, how often it, you know, it occurred, but was that too much or not enough? And then I you know, another thing you just said about actionability, I think that closed loop follow up has been something that on the CX side we've really focused on, particularly in complex B2B type stuff. You know, it's just there's no replacement for getting some feedback from a customer and then actually making something positive happen. You know, I had one guest on the podcast say, you know, when somebody calls into a call center, they either have a question and they want an answer or they have a problem and they want a solution. And I think both of those things are true in PKs, but we haven't always had that ability to really go all the way to closing the loop. And some of that was for good reason, you know, privacy, confidentiality and stuff. But, you know, particularly as we're getting to more outcome based care, yeah, I think the idea of follow up is something that is really relevant for PX.

Kim:
Absolutely. And one thing that I think PX is doing well in some organizations is the moving beyond surveys. Some you know, many of the CX leaders are doing that. Surveys play a role and they always will play a role. But there's a lot of other unsolicited feedback that customers or patients are providing to organizations via calls, via emails, via complaints. And from what I've seen, a lot of the organizations, hospitals, providers, health plans are actually looking at and analyzing what those calls and complaints are.

Steve:
Yeah, and that's where the beauty of the platforms and people like Qualtrics, they can really go omnichannel and grab all this data.

Kim:
And I say they're doing it in some cases better. I think the fact that they're doing it is the better part. I think there's a lot of opportunity in terms of how they do it to leverage the new technologies that make that so much easier.

Steve:
Yeah, absolutely. And in health care, it's particularly tricky with regulations and and privacy and all those things that we want to make sure we protect. But, you know, to get to the bigger point is to to really create better outcomes for patients. You have to talk to the person who's receiving the care and find out how they're feeling and try to be empathetic and and responsive to that. Kim, we've reached that point in the program where I ask all of our guests for their take home value. I think this is an interesting one because a lot of our listeners, while they may not be in the patient experience side of the business, they all are probably consumers of health care, and I think they probably learn some stuff on this podcast. But this is your opportunity to kind of give them a charge, give them one idea. We call it take home value that they can take from this podcast and actually go improve what they're doing with their programs. So Kim Gerber, what's your take home value today for the podcast?

Kim:
Yeah, so the strongest brands in the world establish emotional connections with their customers. It can be quite challenging to strike an emotional chord with customers, but it's actually easier with patients because patients can and often do experience the gamut of emotions across the continuum of care. So if you haven't already, I'd strongly encourage journey mapping, capture what your patients think, feel and do at each stage of their journey. For PX I believe it's extra important to highlight emotions and look for opportunities to alleviate anxiety, not just to strengthen your brand and increase ROI because it's just the right thing to do.

Steve:
Very well thought and depending on what business you're in, that could even apply to to all customers, we need to be really concerned about what they're thinking, what they're feeling and how that makes them act. And hopefully we can help create better experiences for all of our stakeholders. Kim, Thanks for being a guest on the podcast. If anybody would like to continue the conversation, I think they could find you on LinkedIn, correct?

Kim:
That's right.

Steve:
Yeah. And I would encourage you, Kim's delightful and and has a lot of knowledge in this space and obviously is very passionate about it. So thanks again for being on the podcast.

Kim:
Yeah, thank you for having me.

Steve:
And if you want to talk about anything you heard on this podcast or about how Walker can help your businesses customer experience, feel free to email me at podcast@walkerinfo.com. Remember to give The CX Leader Podcast a rating through your podcast service and give us a review. Your feedback will help us improve the show and deliver the best possible value to you our listener. Check out our website cxleaderpodcast.com. To subscribe to the show, find all of our previous episodes. They're organized by series and information. You can search our database. It's an incredible reservoir of information and knowledge about CX and you also have our contact information. You can drop us a note, let us know how we're doing. The CX Leader Podcast is a production of Walker. We're an experience management firm that helps companies accelerate their XM success. You can read more about us at walkerinfo.com. And remember, it's a great time to be a CX leader so go out there and make sure you're listening and being receptive to your customers and patients feelings and emotions. Thanks for being here and we'll see you again next time.

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