What does a Chief Customer Officer actually do? And how is it evolving in the age of AI and digital transformation within the CX world?
We explore the intersection of healthcare, technology, and human connection with WebPT's Chief Customer Officer, Suzanne Cogan. Suzanne discusses the growing importance of the CCO role and how innovation and empathy are combining to enhance member and patient experiences in healthcare.
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TRANSCRIPT
Liz Glagowski: I'm so excited because we are here to discuss the importance of the CCO role and how it's become much more important than ever, and also how innovation and empathy are working together to elevate member and patient experiences in healthcare.
So why don't we just get started from the beginning? I'd love to hear a little bit about what WebPT does. I actually know because I just came from physical therapy an hour ago, but also what WebPT does for the audience and then your role within the company.
Suzanne Cogan: So for the audience, if anyone has ever had any physical therapy or occupational therapy or speech language pathology services, you probably know the types of customers we work with. So WebPT is the leading platform, that being a software system and surrounding services. that serves the rehab therapy industry.
We serve the physical therapists that treat patients and care for patients and get them back to good health. And that involves software that starts even before the patient shows up at the office. So kind of local search, finding the physical therapy practice in the 1st place to scheduling your appointment. registering, AI powered documentation for the physical therapists. And then on the back end of things, billing, making sure the claim gets paid.
And we provide not just software, but also services around that complex task. And we do this for about 150,000 providers across 20,000 clinics all over the US. Everything from a single provider practice to really large multi-state, multi-location practices.
LG: Great. And so you've recently stepped into your role as Chief Customer Officer. Can you tell us a little bit about that role and what you do at WebPT?
SC: My role as Chief Customer Officer is really responsible for ensuring that our customers, who we call members, get the most value possible from our solutions and our services. in terms of keeping them efficient, keeping their revenue coming in, increasing their collections, and making sure that they are documenting in a compliant manner, and that they have the most smooth and seamless, if not delightful, experience possible while working with us. So what that means in terms of my direct accountability is I have directly reporting to me the teams that serve our members after they contract with us. So that's software implementation, client success, and technical support. But ultimately, I'm accountable for everything the member experiences while they work with us, which, you know, ultimately translates into logo retention and net promoter scores and CSAT scores.
So therefore, I have a really close dotted line to all the functional areas that impact our members, which is essentially everything, right? Software development, product management, sales, finance, operations. So very much a collaborative look right, look left type role to ensure that collectively, you know, we serve our members really well.
I like to use the phrase a lot, “member experience is everyone's business” and try to make sure I'm eliminating all those friction points where, you know, in the customer's journey where they move from one department to another and the ball often can get dropped. So trying to make it a smooth and seamless experience.
LG: What did that member experience kind of look like and what's the goal for WebPT of what a good member experience would be?
SC: As WebPT has grown over the years, we started out in 2008, founded by a physical therapist who owned her own practice and realized that the electronic medical record systems that were out at the time were really more geared towards physician practices and not a physical therapy practice in their unique way of seeing patients and documenting. So since 2008, as I said, we've grown to about 150,000 providers. Many of them are in small clinics, you know, with one to five providers.
Over time, the old ways of personalized support where our members knew all of our executives and had a person that they called anytime they had a question or a problem, that can break, pretty early on in that growth journey. And so. It became clear to us through our member feedback that they didn't feel that same level of white glove experience that they used to feel through us. So we needed to really revamp our culture, come up with new principles and standards, as well as new technology to wrap our arms around a much larger client base in more of a one-to-many approach, but do so in a way that felt quite personal.
In our myopic view, member experience, it covers the teams that directly interact with the members. So sales, implementation, support, client success. But as a customer or a member, your experience is impacted by so many other things. How good the software is, how innovative it is, how it works in your environment. For a vendor like us who also collects, you know, we're responsible oftentimes for our members for collecting revenue and collecting on claims from the insurance companies, so how much revenue we're collecting for you. The member's experience is even impacted by how you're invoiced.
At WebPT, we see the term member experience is not just stopping at the doors of implementation and client customer support, but really holistically making sure that all the departments are aligned and the barriers are broken down.
LG: Why is it important to have a CCO role? How does that help your business, things that your team wouldn't be able to do otherwise? And just from a general perspective, where do you see the CCO role in the marketplace right now?
SC: It's definitely become more prevalent, I would say, in the last few years. In fact, I think I saw a Gartner stat that nearly 90% of business-to-business type companies have a chief experience officer or a chief customer officer now, and that's up from about 65% in 2017.
And when you think about some of the key financial metrics that any companies, or certainly publicly traded companies and PE or VC-backed companies are measured by, net revenue retention is one of those key ones. And if you don't have kind of a single owner accountable for net revenue retention, it can kind of get missed or, there isn't one throat to choke there.
So, certainly in my past, I've been in healthcare technology for 30 years now, and probably 10 years ago and prior to that, the companies I've been at didn't have this role, tended to be split up. So you'd have kind of a leader over implementation, a leader over sales, a leader over support. And that customer journey often was really, really choppy. You know, I remember from one of my previous companies, the work we did on the sales side and all of the detailed discovery work kind of almost fell by the wayside when the implementation team took over. And then they'd kind of do a bare bones implementation and kind of toss it over the fence to the technical support team. And there wasn't a smooth and seamless journey with information flowing really well, driving and creating a culture of client excellence.
You need a single leader in place to put programs and initiatives in place that focus on client excellence and then continually reinforce how seriously we're taking serving our clients with excellence.
And that kind of ties in with standards that I mentioned. It's important to create a standard approach to how we work with our clients across an enterprise, especially as that enterprise gets larger and you have a largely remote workforce. They don't observe others in their day-to-day and how other people are interacting with clients.
We've recently created a task force of managers and individual contributor teammates across our member experience departments to come up with what are our core principles for how all of our teammates across the organization engage with our members in order to deliver what really feels like a five-star experience.
And that can be everything from the words we use when we greet a member, whether it be on the trade show floor, or picking up the phone for a customer support call, or doing an executive business review on a quarterly basis. It can be when a member calls in for support, our approach to following up after the case has been closed. Maybe we want to follow up a bit more proactively in a week's time, make sure that member has got their question answered and that they're using the software the way it should be used. Could be owning the issue end to end. Like if you call customer support for any company and they say, oh, that's a different department, let me pass you over. And then you're on hold and then maybe the call drops and you never get through to that other department.
It's such a better experience when that person who picked up the phone pushes you through to the next department and stays on the line with you and does a warm handoff.
So this task force is coming up with our core principles for WebPT, and then we will continue to reinforce and celebrate our teammates that are delivering those principles and creating what I call magic moments for our members, so that it's just continually reinforced and becomes part of our culture.
The other couple of things I mentioned as being super important for the CCO role at WebPT is the connective tissue. That's that whole connecting the dots between the departments and ensuring that whether you are a software developer or an accounts payable person in finance, you know that ultimately your customer is our member and everything you do has a role to play in how smooth and experienced the member has when they're working with us.
And then lastly, a strategic lens. I think it's really important that our customers have a seat at the C-suite table and in front of the board. And that ownership and lens of the customer is at an equal level as finance and software engineering and operations, the other kind of functional areas of the company. And then it becomes very self-fulfilling because customers are the ones who give you all sorts of good ideas for future development.
When you're close to the customer, you also see the earliest possible signs of friction and abrasion. And by being able to elevate that conversation to the C-suite, you can start taking action before it's too late and you can start coming up with good ideas for product improvements.
LG: What are some examples of the work that you've done to try to elevate that member experience?
SC: I started in this role about four months ago. And the very first thing I did, I think in my second week here, was partly for my own learning experience. But also, I knew that this was a new role at WebPT. And so the chances were we had choppiness in the customer journey.
So the first thing I did was I brought together the leaders of all of our member-facing teams, and we did a customer journey mapping exercise -- big wall, lots of post-its, kind of walked through every step of the journey from the customer kind of engaging with us on the sales side to their live, and they're working with support, and they're working with client success. And we identified the friction points across every department.
And from there, we translated, you know, which of these friction points can we fix in the short term? Maybe some of them are longer term. Where can we fix them within our own teams? Where do we need the support of other teams? And so we developed a set of objectives and key results that addressed a lot of the friction points.
One example was we identified a friction point that we were graduating members too soon from implementation. We'd kind of given them training, told them they were live, and then but they're off in support. And they really needed more hands-on. They needed some more training after they'd started using the software with real-life patients. So that was kind of an initiative. We kept them in implementation longer.
And then we came up with a series of 30-day, 60-day post-go-live training sessions where there may be some other members joining those training sessions, but it was really geared to first 30 days. And so it was a lot more proactive.
Four months later, we've got a lot of the friction points out of the way, but within our support department, we've identified a few others related to certain situations that come up, like a member wants to add a new clinic, and there's a few different steps in our process to do that, and a couple of different departments involved. We're going to take that customer journey mapping a level deeper in the next few weeks and do kind of a Lean Six Sigma style approach on kind of more granular levels of workflow and really identify those inefficiencies and iron them out.
Another big initiative of mine is just being much more proactive with our client success. Certainly in my past I've always done a lot of work around executive business reviews and making sure we are showing up to our clients with really valuable insights, letting them know kind of what their trends are compared to the baseline when we started working with them, but also compared to other customers and really benchmarking and that kind of thing.
But in a company like ours, where we also have an awful lot, thousands and thousands of small business clients, you can't, you know, do these personalized EBRs for everyone. In thinking about how can we use technology to do that proactive work, we've built some tools that are looking at utilization of our software. We identified 20 different aspects of the software that if you use the feature in a certain way or run a certain report on a daily basis or a weekly basis, these are kind of best practices to get the most out of the software to drive your business forward.
We have dashboards now that show us where we have members that aren't using or adopting the software to its kind of best capacity. And then that enables our client success teammates to proactively reach out to those members and suggest training programs or office hours sessions that they can join to get better value out of the software.
And then I think the other thing is just really driving the organization as a whole to innovation. When you are in a customer facing role, you're kind of the tip of the sphere. You're hearing from the market every day, not just current customers, but customers that are leaving us and why they're leaving us.
What I've brought into WebPT and what I've always tried to do in previous roles is partner really closely with the leaders of other functional areas, product management, operations, to make sure that we're planning solutions that our customers are asking for, but also things that they may not have thought to ask us for. But the reading between the lines of what they're saying or why they're leaving us are things that we could add and provide a lot more value.
An example of that is benchmarks. When you're fortunate to be the size that WebPT is, you have an awful lot of data. You have a lot of data about insurance payers and collections and denied claims, and you have it on a state-by-state basis. So we do a lot of work to share with our clients how they're performing compared to regional and national benchmarks.
LG: I wanted to dig a little more deeper into the innovation discussion. You guys are at the forefront, a healthcare technology firm, really close to customers, talking to clients and providers all over the country. So what kind of role are you seeing driving innovation that your company's playing? What are customers and members looking for? What are you delivering? I know you've mentioned being proactive a lot, which is wonderful. So what kind of stuff are you kind of bringing to them, and where does technology play a role, and even maybe internally AI and other technologies? Just would love to get your take on just what's going on technology-wise.
SC: You know, there's two aspects, right? There's... technology and innovation that we make available to our customers and then what we use internally to your point. So our customers, you know, obviously that there's a variety on the bell curve of kind of innovation adoption, but many of them are really intrigued about AI and how it can be used to make them more efficient and be able to do more with less and reimbursement for physical therapy has been under pressure, especially on the Medicare side. So they're trying to become more efficient with declining reimbursement.
So there's a lot of interest in AI for documentation, for ambient listening when the therapist is working with a patient and being able to do the documentation. that they have to do for compliance reasons on the side for them, so that they're not taking time in between patients or at the end of the day to do that. There's also some trepidation too, because it is a newer technology and it's not for everyone yet, but it's making really good strides and we have some really interesting, we have a really interesting technology that can do that.
On an internal perspective, leveraged quite a lot of technology, we still are planning on leveraging more to really, as I said at the beginning, in a one-to-many type approach where we're serving many small clients, how can we do so in a way that feels more personal and is more scalable than picking up the phone and speaking to every one of them every day.
One of the things that we've recently rolled out, I had mentioned we've rolled out dashboards to understand which customers are using which features of our software and enabling us to proactively approach those that might not be using them to the best kind of according to best practices.
But we've also rolled out some predictive health sentiment dashboards that we built ourselves using a wide variety of variables that indicate a client's sentiment, everything from the features they're using in the software to what their accounts receivable are looking like when we manage that aspect of their business, to NPS scores, to support tickets that they log with us.
And then our teams are able to leverage this to engage more proactively, especially with those members that are red or have recently gone from green to yellow, and really lean into those members and understand what's, you know, what are some of your challenges? How can we help?
And then in our technical support side, we are not yet at the point of using AI bots for chat. You know, when you want technical support and you go to a website and there's a chat window, we have the chat window, but it's powered by humans at this point. And our members are, one of the things they love about us is being able to talk to a real life human.
So we're not yet there, but we do leverage an AI tool to support our support agents. So when they're answering questions for their members, they can ask this tool, it's called Einstein, for help, and it will serve up all of the pertinent information from our knowledge base. So I could ask a question, you know, a member has a question about how to run this particular report on their collections, and Einstein will surface up appropriate responses from our knowledge base articles.
The next thing we're rolling out is the ability for, based on the call, whether it was a voice call or an e-mail or a chat response to the member's technical support, the AI will summarize the case, summarize what happened in the call and document it in our CRM. And that's something that takes an agent, you know, maybe five to 10 minutes after a case. So that will save them time and enable them to move on to the next call much more quickly.
And then we also are planning on implementing sentiment analysis so that kind of in real time, especially on those phone calls, the managers can kind of gauge what is happening on this call, what's the sentiment like, is it turning red? And use it as kind of a near real time coaching and reinforcement tool for our support agents.
LG: What are some of the biggest benefits, what's an example of something that's made you smile in your work in there just over the last four months?
SC: Probably the biggest benefit has been shining a really bright light across our organization, which is pretty large, and we're based all over the country. So really shining a bright light on how important how we serve our members is across the org, across our C-suite. And just having a role like this in place sends a very strong message across the organization and makes sure that at the C-suite and the board level, you We get funding and we get resources and attention as we're rolling out important new initiatives. And I think things that make me smile.
I have a couple of catchphrases. I mentioned member experience is everyone's business. My other one is minutes matter. So I'm always kind of saying, imagine if you were the member on the other hand end of the phone, and you're being passed from one department to the other, and each person thinks that they're solving your question quickly, but maybe there were two days went past or an hour went past from moving it from one department to another, that all adds up. So always remember, you're serving the member as quickly as possible, even between those friction points.
But the third catchphrase I use is magic moments. And I talk to our team a lot about, there's a lot of past faults or challenges with the software you can overcome by providing that kind of magical moment or moment of joy to a member. There may be the calling in with a support question and you ask them, you know, how their day is going. How can we help better support your business?
Maybe they have a milestone like they've been using the software for three months, send them a handwritten note if you were their implementation specialist, and hope everything's going well. And little things like that make things feel really, really personal.
And, you know, it brings a smile to my face of how well our teams have adopted that. And they're really, in quite a short amount of time, thinking about how can we make our members feel better? How can I treat them the way I would want to be treated if I was using software? And, you know, I thought this company was really big and impersonal, but actually, no, they're showing that they really care about me.
So, and with the creation of our task force for our principles for member excellence, we're going to make sure that we have standards about how we talk to and treat our members and how quickly we follow up with them after a case is finished, but also how we celebrate those creating those great moments for our members. How do we raise up our teammates who've gone above and beyond in little ways to create those magic moments?
LG: Now, how about a challenge?
SC: Well, anytime there's new role in an organization that hasn't existed before, you have to do some work to carve out the areas of responsibility, what tasks now fall under this particular role. Because usually, some people somewhere in the org have been doing bits of the role, and some bits were never done.
It’s coming up with a clear job description and roles and responsibilities, but partnering really closely and having creating good relationships with your peers across other departments so that you're not seen as a threat, but as kind of an addition that will perhaps take some work off their plate, but ultimately grow the business and improve logo retention and improve member sentiment.
And I'd say the other challenge, which really you have everywhere, is of all the great things we could do, how do we prioritize the many initiatives? And so I'm a pretty analytical person, so I like to use objectives and key results framework to focus us in on what can we achieve this quarter that really is directly tied to our ultimate KPIs of logo retention and net promoter score and CSAT. What will we need to shift off to next quarter or next year? And then making those OKRs transparent and visible throughout the organization so everyone understands, these are the initiatives we're working on.
This is why we're working on them. These are the results we expect to achieve from them. And we kind of row in the same direction. And then at the end of the quarter, we can review, did we achieve them? Did we not? How did they affect our KPIs?
LG: You've been here four months. What are you looking forward to most over the next four months, four years? What are you most excited about being able to do in the future?
SC: I really thrive on transformation and growth. And I love coming into an organization and seeing like maybe where there have been some problems in the past and fixing them. And I get great joy out of doing that, especially when it's something that's visible to our customers or our members, which in my case have always been healthcare providers.
So I get a lot of joy and I'm really excited about creating value for those front line healthcare providers in our world that are treating patients and delivering care. And I also, you know, I'm super excited about when you start to solve problems in an organization and start to like really be very deliberate with a culture of excellence, how that kind of raises all boats. So you just get this sense of excitement from across the teammates.
We end up opening, you know, all these things, typically there's like a bit of reorg that goes hand in hand with transformation that creates new opportunities for teammates to rise into different roles or to in some cases we create new roles and you just get a lot of excitement and energy throughout the organization when you are transforming it can be messy at times it can be stressful at times and it's not for everyone but for people who like change and growth. I just think it creates a lot of fun times and a lot of positive momentum.
LG: Well, Suzanne, thank you again for your time today. Wonderful transformation that's on its way and in your new role as a Chief Customer Officer. I really do appreciate you sharing your story with us. Good luck with your transformation and all the work that you're doing.
SC: Thank you, Liz.
