Last year, we got a group of Organ Procurement Industry professionals who work in Donor Family Services and Aftercare together to hold a Best Practices Summit related to their roles serving donor families. (We did something similar for the folks on the Hospital Development and Hospital Services roles, and you can read a similar article regarding their unique issues here.)
It was a powerful and electric session that was brimming with passionate discussion and big ideas, and my job was to cap it off talking about one of the most frustrating issues these individuals often encounter:
There’s no good measurement that captures the value of what they do, and their actions are often dismissed as being secondary to the action of recovering organs because it’s so difficult to create performance metrics that reflect how important a donor family’s experience is to the entire donation process.
Fortunately, I’m well-versed in metrics, and years of attending Qualtrics conferences has turned me on to the value of Experience Management (XM) and how vital it is for ensuring that your service goes above and beyond.
But before an XM strategy can be employed, it’s important to understand that experience data are completely different from the operational data many organizations gather daily. Operational data reflect what people do, but experience data reflect how people think and feel, and it can be very difficult for those who are used to hard numbers to accept that these softer numbers may actually be the most important data an organization can gather once it has a good system in place.
Who Is Your Actual Customer? It’s A More Important (and Nuanced) Question Than You Might Realize
One of the issues OPOs struggle with is in defining who their customer is. This is a controversial topic that many OPOs define differently. From a logical point of view, the transplant recipient should be the customer, since he or she is the ultimate beneficiary of donation. And yet the transplant recipient has so little autonomy or influence in the decision to accept a needed organ that the word “customer” fails to describe the entire interaction.
Of course, I’d suggest that the word “customer” is itself a problematic term for organizations because it rarely descriptive of reality. The word “customer” is traditionally used to describe the person who receives a product or service from a seller in a transaction, but the truth is that most transactions are not simple, and most transactions include so many middle parties (including the purchaser, who may not be the ultimate user of the product) that the term is really best-used to define who is ultimately being served by the transaction.
Many of the leaders in the OPO world tend to agree with this sort of logic, and as a result, many OPOs have shifted to viewing their transplant centers, donation centers and donor families as customers because these are the individuals they ultimately serve. Even though all three of these groups play a very different role in shaping the donation process, each is important in ensuring that the process actually happens.
The Evolution of Customer Measurement – From Identification to Experience
Customer measurement has evolved significantly over the last century from merely understanding who the customer is to measuring ideas such as satisfaction and loyalty to their likelihood to recommend to understanding their journey to ultimately thinking about their entire experience.
Measuring customer experience (CX) has led to a broader field of experience management (XM), where organizations attempt to be proactive in how they anticipate customer needs. Most customers experiences fall within an expected range, and deviating from expectations often reflects mediocre service design. The ultimate state to avoid is disappointment, which is where a service provider falls significantly below a customer’s expected standard. The ultimate state to attempt to achieve is delight, which is where a service provider goes far beyond a customer’s expectation.
Delight is a wonderful goal, but it becomes problematic if it’s not baked into an iterative service design. It’s very easy to delight customers when standards are low, but when standards are high, what once was classified as delight becomes standard. Ultimately, the organizations who have the best customer experience are those for whom there is a culture of obsession with delighting customers as often as possible.
Myths About Experience Management (XM)
In talking with organizations about customer experience (CX) and experience management (XM), we’ve heard many myths such as the following:
MYTH: XM is about pampering your customers.
REALITY: XM is about delighting your customers by anticipating and exceeding their expectations every step of the way.
MYTH: XM is only important for customer service interactions.
REALITY: XM relates to every external interaction with your customers and is at the heart of internal process development.
MYTH: XM is about doing everything for your customer with a “white glove” approach.
REALITY: XM is about understanding how your actions can be most valuable for the customer and where your customer would like to participate in the service. (Consider the “Ikea Effect”, where customers express higher levels of satisfaction and lower standards for perfection because they are involved in the construction of their furniture)
MYTH: XM is incredibly expensive and doesn’t generate an effective ROI.
REALITY: XM is expensive, but it’s an investment that will pay off many times over because it will attract and retain customers who become fanatics for your brand.
Emotional Triggers in Experience Management
Human beings are emotional creatures who respond to environmental stimuli in deeply personal (and often probabilistic rather than predictable) ways. Our ability to consider new ideas and think through alternatives is at its best when we are relaxed and comfortable with what is going on around us.
When we grow uncomfortable, defensive or fearful, our brain shifts into a different state where we desire relief or escape from our unfortunate situation. This is illustrated in diagrams such as Robert Plutchick’s famous Wheel of Emotions, which suggests that emotions tend to interact in predictable ways which can impact our general mood and response to environmental stimuli.
Understanding how a customer’s experience can trigger different emotions can be a powerful tool for shaping positive experience management, and avoiding negative triggers that begin with emotions like annoyance, boredom or apprehension can help to ensure customers are more highly focused on the positive aspects of service design.
How to Measure Experience Data
If I spill a cup of coffee, what do I need to measure in order to know what to do next?
- Should I try to calculate how much coffee I’ve spilled?
- Should I try to predict the pattern it will produce?
- Should I try to determine the likelihood of causing a stain on the floor?
- Should I research how much my spill will cost to clean up?
- Or should I simply recognize that there’s a spill and make an effort to clean it up?
Focusing too much on metrics (and not enough on understanding how customers think and feel at every step of your interaction) leads to very poor service design. The examples of this are all around us.
- Consider cable providers and telecommunications companies, who respond to customer complaints by trying to sell more service.
- Consider retailers with agonizing return policies designed to keep a few customers from abusing a service many customers need.
- Consider car dealerships, where high-pressure tactics for expensive add-ons can make the experience of buying a car fraught with wearying compromises.
- Consider commercial airlines, where stretching customers to their breaking point in terms of low-frills service to preserve low-cost fares has taken much of the joy out of flying.
Fortunately, there is a method to ensuring that service design is constructed well from an experience management point of view:
- Outline the customer journey and identify key points where interactions occur or the course shifts.
- Validate your internal understanding of this journey with external feedback from your customers.
- Identify the most prominent areas where customer experiences are most likely to deviate.
- Build metrics around measuring those areas (some internal, some external) and focus on reducing variation
- Once those areas have been improved and gaps have been minimized, return to step 1.
Applying XM to Donor Families
The first three steps outlined above can largely be addressed through good experience research with donor families. Our own Donor Family Study is designed for this purpose, but if an OPO already conducts research to gather good data, we recommend utilizing that instead.
The most prominent areas that show up in our own survey tend to be:
- The DRAI, which is often administered well, but which can become a major problem if it is administered poorly, with minimal preparation for the time constraints or sensitivity of questions or if it’s simply administered during a bad time (such as the middle of the night)
- The hospital debrief, which is a key time to help donor families know what to expect next from the OPO, but where donor families are probably having the hardest time listening because they are processing the loss of a loved one and the many preparations that need to occur for a funeral. At this point, instructions need to be simple and accompanied with written reference materials (as well as a ton of empathy!)
- The epilogue, which is when donor families find out how their loved one’s gifts were utilized and they are able to fully grasp their loved one’s living legacy. If specific information cannot be shared (as is often the case with tissue donation), it’s important for the OPO to share something general about how donations are typically used that can help the donor family to have a story tell and find closure in their loved one’s story.
Once that is complete, step four can be addressed by developing metrics to measure those areas (some from internal data, some from continued gathering of external data) to focus on reducing variation. These metrics need to be built into your processes and recorded for every case.
- Internal metrics generally come from case documentation.
- External metrics generally come from obtaining feedback from donor families.
Once those areas have been improved and gaps have been minimized, it’s important to begin the process over and begin looking for new ways to iteratively improve the donor family experience. But don’t discard your metrics! Your goal should always be to maintain your high performance in areas you’re already measuring while looking for new opportunities to grow and improve service.
Remember as well that XM is not about temporary boosts to metrics – it’s about institutional change. Donor family needs will change over time, but the more proactive you can be in identifying them, the easier it is to adjust your service model to account for them.
We hope this article has been helpful to you, and we want you to know that we’re here to be a resource however we can be on anything you’d like to know about marketing research!
There are many other videos from our Best Practices Summit for Donor Family Services and Aftercare roles – you can find them here!
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