Designing Experiences in the New Normal

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In the era of social distancing and quarantining, it can be easy to believe that designing personal experiences for your customers is an impossible task. Since some of the key principles of experience design rely on using of the five senses to create the largest impact possible at each touch point, it would seem that those efforts would be rendered useless in these times of social distancing and virtual meetings. But we believe that these principles have never been more important.

With COVID-19, people are experiencing physical and even mental isolation. They miss even the most mundane aspects of what used to be normal, from reading a book at the coffee shop, to visiting their parents, and even making spontaneous trips to a big city. We believe that experiences with customers and patients can be redesigned to help create a new, healthy normal for these customers looking so hard for what used to be just another day.

What's Different? What's the Same? What can we do?

To design compelling experiences in “the new normal” one must first consider

  1. What is different
  2. What is the same, and
  3. What can we do to adjust and create personal experiences for our customers in these circumstances.

What Is Different

What Is Different?
Designing virtual experiences is more important than ever

What Can We Do?
Enhance your virtual presence

People are far less likely to make the first point of contact with you in-person these days. This mean that it is time to modernize your phone systems, social media, and web elements to create a more intimate and personalized journey for the customer or patient.

What is Different?
Safety is a primary concern in any interaction

What Can We Do?
Create and message your safe in-person environments

Make it clear how you have taken every consideration possible to make a visitor’s experience a safe one. Post pleasant reminders to maintain safe distances and wear face coverings.

What Is Different?
Financial struggles have been exacerbated for both businesses and families

What Can We Do?
Avoid pushy messaging and ensure you are building relationships with your audience

The hard sell is (and always was) a bad approach. Instead of pushing sales and discounts, it is more important than ever to build a relationship with your customers and patients through social media, advertising, and other channels. If they feel that empathy and understanding is genuine, they will be far more likely to return to you when financial burdens have minimized.

What Is Different?
People are yearning for elements of normalcy and socialization

What Can We Do?
Make the visitor the star

With fewer people visiting in-person locations, you have an opportunity to spend extra time tending to those visitors and making them feel heard and appreciated. The benefit of this is two-fold: visitors will feel even more important AND potentially feel like the entire experience is more tailored to them than would have been possible in the old normal.

What Is the Same

What Is the Same?
The experience is the marketing

What Can We Do?
Reexamine every point of contact with your business or practice as part of your marketing

The experience of calling to plan an appointment should be considered as important as the actual experience of visiting or any ad campaign you have running. Creating memorable interactions throughout the customer or patient’s journey will always be the highest priority, no matter the circumstances.

What Is the Same?
Mass customization is still a key to personalized experiences

What Can We Do?
Skillfully tailoring offerings and journeys to an individual’s needs and wants will build a relationship

Think of the experience as more than just a transaction. During that customer or patient’s experience, look for elements that can be personalized just for them with little effort or cost to you. Do this well, and you’ll be well on your way to sustainably establishing a relationship with that audience member.

What Is the Same?
In-person interactions are still largely impacted by considering the five senses

What Can We Do?
Highlight the senses that we still can use to their fullest extent: Sight and Sound

Although masks and extra sanitation requirements limit our ability to appeal to all 5 senses, we still have plenty of room to use them. Warm cookies and coffee may not work right now, but you can still curate the visual and auditory experience of your interactions to make them unforgettable. Now is the time to consider how to make the visual appeal of your facilities match the tone of your brand and determine if there are any ways to personalize the audio experience of a visit to the smaller groups of customers and patients at your physical locations.

While this pandemic has found its ways to separate us, it’s our task to find new ways that experience design principles can connect you with your customers and patients. Though some of the approaches may be outside of our usual tendencies, we think that this shows how agile these principles can truly be for making real, personal connections with your audience.

Reflecting on Recent Experiences

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It’s been said that to craft an excellent experience for your customers, you should think of a specific person and craft the experience with them in mind. The exercise helps identify the sort of things that solve pain points or create delight for real people. As a team, we often recount experiences we’ve had with brands that have been remarkable. The end of the year is a great time to reflect on those good experiences. And learn from them for the year ahead. Below, find a few reflections on experiences that provided value to our team this year.

Kirstie

Terra Shepherd

I have always loved fashion, but the actual experience of clothes shopping? Not so much. For the past 15 years, I’ve been shopping almost exclusively online for all of my clothes. But I decided to brave the IRL shopping experience when I heard about one of Downtown’s Sioux Falls’ latest boutiques: Terra Shepherd. Like me, they have a commitment to sustainable fashion and conscious consumerism, so I thought it was worth a shot. I was the only person in the store, which normally fills me with dread because of hovering salespeople, but the staff was so warm and welcoming and made me feel like I was just trying on clothes with friends. They suggested things I would like and, much to my surprise, I actually did like them! That combined with the shared values make this an experience I will be returning to.

Brady

Wirecutter

Before becoming a father of two young children, I had much more time to thoughtfully research gift ideas for family and friends. As those margins of time have vanished, I’ve appreciated the methodology that Wirecutter applies to their product reviews. And that they explain their process with each roundup of reviews. Christmas shopping this year would have been much more stressful and incomplete without referencing their Holiday Gift Guide. When I don’t have the time to do the level of research I typically would, it gives me greater confidence to give something as a gift knowing a little about the people who are reviewing the products and what makes them uniquely qualified to do so. And as it turns out, they are usually far more qualified to do the research than I!

Cindy

Amazon Prime Online Shopping

Like many working adults, my time is at a premium. I value being able to shop online from home and not have to get into my car, find a parking place, go into a store, make a selection and then wait in line to check out. However, I think there is a price to pay for this convenience.

I have to confess I do love going onto Amazon Prime, pressing a few buttons, and having an item shipped to me for free (yes, I did pay for the membership so it’s not really free). However, I am cautious about the future of big data, protection of personal information, and changes we can anticipate as a direct result of limited competition. Is it too good to be true?

Courtney

Earthscapes Landscaping

My husband and I decided this would be the year we invested into landscaping for our backyard. We received Earthscapes name as a recommendation from another friend that had used them, and after our awesome experience, I can see why. Shane, our landscape designer, was awesome from the start and put up with all of my questions along the way.

But the one point in the process that really stood out was when we were nearing completion of our project. We had an existing retaining wall, that wasn’t a part of the project scope (other than making small repairs to the existing wall), but it didn’t look amazing. One morning, he called and told me they had some left over materials from the rest of the project and he would like to put those towards replacing the existing wall. He felt it would enhance the look of the backyard, and while it might be a few more hours of labor, it would be something they would like to do for us within our current scope. Of course I said “Heck yeah!” and now we have an even more amazing backyard and I am willing to tell all my family, friends, and co-workers about this awesome company. Such a small gesture made a huge impact on the experience we had with Earthscapes and now I can’t stop bragging about them and their work!

Client Celebration: Staging a ZEISS Formula 1 Racing Event Experience

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At MJM, our team wears many hats while completing the diverse client projects; we fulfill the roles of designers, writers, storytellers, experience makers, account managers, videographers, carpenters, and many more. But last October, our team members took on a hat never worn before: Formula One Race Car Drivers.

Working with our partners at ZEISS, Logan, Abby, and Courtney took the lead for planning and executing an event celebrating the FDA approval of the SMILE astigmatism treatment indication in the United States at the American Academy of Ophthalmologists (AAO). Using a Formula One theme, the MJM team was able to create a wonderful evening of education, conversation, and enjoyment on a beautiful rooftop in Chicago.

In addition to the overall success of the event, here are a couple lessons our team took away from the event:

Logistics are very, very important!

This event celebrated the approval of the SMILE laser in the US for astigmatism treatment, which makes it a more useful technology for practices and more accessible to patients. SMILE is one of the first major innovations in refractive eye surgery in the past 5-10 years, which has brought energy and life to the doctors who are deciding to offer it.

Our partnership with ZEISS started when we helped create the first practice launch kit for SMILE, and the partnership continued as we helped curate and design this event. After moodboards, strategic goal discussions, MJM team brainstorming sessions, and dozens of calls, the event landed on a theme: Formula One Racing.

Perspective chalk racing car

Courtney poses as a driver. The account team found a Chicago chalk artist who created a massive perspective drawing that put attendees behind the wheel of a F1 racing car.

Our team developed all the graphics and layouts based on the theme and curated a three-floor immersive event experience, which included specialty cocktails and an interactive art installation. At the event, doctors attended six “pit stops”, where they interacted with a short presentation from an expert on SMILE, and were eventually lead to Dr. Dan Reinstein, a doctor and professor who wrote the first and preeminent textbook on how to perform SMILE for patients. Attendees who completed all the education pit stops had the opportunity to receive a signed copy of Dr. Reinstein’s textbook to take home to their practice.

The valuable takeaway is this: when your event marketing team is able to be a part of the planning, mockups, mood board, and event execution, it’s more efficient to facilitate coordination with the vendors. It took a full team to perfectly produce the event, which illustrates the importance of coordinated effort, time, and planning.

Experiences are met with experiments

Of course, we admit this event didn’t go off without a hitch (or three). From a change of speaker the night before, all the way to Logan putting his Exacto-knife skills to the test due to a mishap with program printing, the team encountered a number of unplanned hurdles that needed to be overcome.

The event was spread between three floors of the venue. Custom elevator signage helped theme each step of the way and direct event attendees to food, entertainment and education.

We also know there are peak experiences that are remembered far beyond any mishaps. As the attendees started arriving and moving from experience to experience at the event, they began to discover, enjoy, and be captivated by all of the small details created by our team. Meeting new people, interacting with the art, enjoying the signature cocktails, and learning new things achieved success beyond what our team had planned. These signature moments, and the culmination of all the moments into a signature experience, will be a lasting memory and takeaway for both the ZEISS and MJM teams.Beyond the night of the event, the work our team did to pull off the theme and overall event was extensive. The theming, attention to detail, venue, and overall event flow, and outcome were executed carefully and with high attention to detail. Members from our team also traveled to Chicago before the event to meet with vendors face-to-face because we understand how important it is to create those relationships in case we do need to call on them to overcome challenges on the night of the event. Each experience we curated was met with an experiment on how to accomplish it.

Time spent for each event is worth it

When you work with clients that are excited about their company, it makes throwing an event that much more successful. The time that went into planning with ZEISS was met with excitement and enthusiasm that their product had been approved.

ZEISS challenged us to immerse their audience in something more than just a traditional AAO event or brochure handout, so we designed a custom experience for their guests, including hiring a local street artist to create a race car photo opportunity right in the middle of the building. We wanted to share our love for experiences and make the ophthalmologists feel welcome and feel comfortable learning about the revolutionary procedure in a simple and organized way. It wasn’t just about the centerpieces and the lighting—it was about the guests that left and remembered why they were there and knew there was something worth celebrating that night.

It’s important to celebrate major innovations and milestones in product development. It’s good for the industry and good for patients. Events like this are one of the only times ZEISS can bring doctors together and immerse them in a brand experience. So much of their sales cycle involves going out to the doctor’s office, where they have no real control of the time, space, and environment. This event was a major opportunity to bring doctors together and shape the ZEISS brand experience, with full control of most of the details. MJM was proud to be a lead partner in building the experience.

ZEISS blue racing stripe

A ZEISS blue racing stripe runs through the venue helping to direct traffic and pull the theme together.

As we reflect on our experience through this event, we learned there is a major difference between just hosting an event and designing an event. We design and theme at MJM to use our knowledge of experience design and customer/client psychology. This event reminded us that every company, every product, and every type of customer deserves and loves to be delighted and surprised by a well-executed event. That’s why we love what we do at MJM.

MJM and ZEISS will continue partnering on projects in 2019 and beyond.

How to Give Experiences Instead of Things

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The holiday season has arrived, bringing with it a strong reason for joy, celebration, and gift-giving. While some may curse the cold and snow, we revel in the abundance of the year and what the holiday season means to each of us at Matt Jensen Marketing. For our CEO in particular, Christmas time is about taking gift giving to a whole other level by creating experiences far beyond spending money on an object, and celebrating how these experiences shape how we remember this time of year.

Q: How is giving experiences instead of things more than just a trend?

Matt Jensen (MJ): Inanimate objects tend to lose their luster over time. This time of year, we are always reminded of what it’s like to be a kid wanting a new Atari Video Game System, a shiny new bike, or that illustrious Red Ryder Lever Action BB Gun. If we think back to wanting those gifts as a child, the most prominent memory about the season isn’t the thing itself. It was all of the tension, anxiety, prayer, begging,and reasoning that went into our asking for it. Anticipation in and of itself is an experience.

That’s why, this holiday season, we should imagine how much more meaningful gifts can be. It isn’t just the anticipation of each holiday season but also the emotions. The fear, adrenaline, suspense, surprise, and resolution all coming together to make these different emotions hinge to an experience. Which creates a greater memory: a set of baking sheets, or lessons from a local dessert maker? The beginner guitar, or a one-on-one session with the concert guitar player? Listening to Beethoven’s 5th on a CD, or being able to walk into a theater with a tuxedo and Chuck Taylor converse and raising the baton to lead the symphony as a 16-year-old? These are the things that memories are made of and memories last far longer.

Q: Can you create an experience for everyone in your life?

MJ: The premium we pay for experience is our own time, so you create these peaks for people if you’re willing to invest your time in them. I’m a believer that you can design an experience around anybody if you stop and get to know them well enough.

My wife’s 40th birthday, for example: I took her on a trip to wine country and though we both enjoyed the good food and wine, it was the fact that I had coordinated with all of her friends that flew in and surprised her one night that made the trip so memorable. How much can that bottle of wine really be worth when you’re enjoying the night away with the people that mean the most to you?

Q: Where do you find experiences that you can give as a gift? What counts as an experience?

MJ: The most creative business owners and best entrepreneurs create an experience around their product. Wouldn’t we all rather take a tour of the factory of the chocolates that we just bought and smell the caramel being melted, watch the chocolatiers designing the marshmallow top, and see each one of your treats being packaged with care? That’s a chocolate-making experience, not just a sale.

Q: How do you wrap up an experience?

MJ: To make every experience spectacular, you have to extend it past the natural beginning and end. Imagine this: A concert where they put electronic wristbands under each seat which lights up different colors when the band is playing their set. The next morning, that bracelet calculates which song danced to the hardest the night before measured on the activity from the and starts blasting that song to wake us up in the morning. Now that bracelet carried on that amazing experience from the night before, and also leaves concertgoers telling the story of how they woke up that morning over, and over, and over again. We would leave on a peak, and that’s what is to be remembered years down the road instead of all the traffic to the concert or money spent.

Q: So, how do you go about creating an experience for someone?

MJ: Look into their favorite things, their interests, their bucket list, and peg an experience where those all intersect. Sometimes an experience is easier to generate than originally thought.

So as we dive into the holiday season, let us take the time to create these experiences and marinate in those moments. We at Matt Jensen Marketing know it’ll be worth it.

8 Things a Jazz Quartet Can Teach Us About Team Culture

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My wife and I recently had the privilege of attending an intimate performance by a world-renowned jazz quartet. As we enjoyed the music, the environment, and the experience, I realized how the same factors create a powerful jazz performance and a powerful team business culture. Let’s look at eight ways jazz can teach us about team culture.

1. Purpose

We entered the small jazz club—the lights were low, the tables scattered throughout the small venue, the instruments waiting expectantly on the stage. As I reviewed the program for the evening, I marveled at the clarity of purpose of each of the musicians; their education, their passion, their blood, sweat, and tears all coming together in that moment with the sole purpose of creating beautiful music together. Businesses that discuss and emphasize their team purpose and the purposes of each of their staff create a powerful identity that can power their culture.

2. Preparation

As I reviewed the program, two of the musicians walked on stage and began preparing for the show. One at the piano, the other on upright bass, they began to methodically tune the instruments to create the perfect sound. How many times had they done this simple preparation? What seems like a mundane task is actually essential preparation for their performance that night. Team culture that focuses on proper preparation enables the entire team to produce their best work.

3. Inter-Connectedness

After tuning their instruments, the rest of the musicians came on stage and the group began to play. Slowly at first, the group eventually found their rhythm and worked their way into the first song. The most important part of this first song was the inter-connectedness of the quartet — the piano player intently watching the rhythm of the drummer; the bass player watching the energy and flow of the piano; the saxophone player watching all three instruments to join the pace of the music. Without awareness, without this inter-connectedness, the music cannot reach its pinnacle. Team culture built on inter-connectedness is vital to getting projects and great work off the ground and accomplished.

4. Harmony

As the music quickly ramped up, it became apparent immediately how years of preparation and dedication helped create this harmonious, synergized sound. Each of the instruments blending together with the others created perfectly timed, perfectly matched sound. How does your team culture create harmony between the players? Does your preparation and connectedness create the best possible synergy of work?

5. Space to Shine

The beauty of jazz music is not only its synergy, but also its space for improvisation. The tenor saxophone player sits down, eyes closed, soaking in the music. The drummer brings the rhythm down to a steady, subtle backdrop. The bass player joins him, creating a repeating baseline, which allows the piano player to roam. His fingers fly over the keys, exploring new spaces, taking years of training and the support of his fellow players and finding new music. As he concludes his exploration, the bass player tries a new riff, playing faster, then slower, then with more energy. Finally, the drummer has his chance to shine as a solo player, raising the energy of the audience to new heights. There is space in jazz for individuals to shine and to grow. Does your team culture offer individuals a chance to shine and grow?

6. Communication

Suddenly, with barely a noticeable look of the eyes and nod of the head, the drummer brings the entire quartet back into the original song. Over the course of the entire performance, I was in awe of the way a look, a nod, a turn of the head, or a simple hand gesture could communicate in depth the next move of the performance. How does your team communicate? Does each member of your team understand the cues, the signals that you share to move on and produce the next great work?

7. Trust

Within these levels of inter-connectedness and communication, I was struck by yet another core value of the performance—trust. Every member of the quartet must trust their fellow players to keep the rhythm, to stay within the song, to stay on pitch. If one player loses the rhythm, the entire synergy is lost. Likewise, if your team fails to execute consistently, projects will be incomplete and deadlines missed. Your team culture must be one of trust. If your team members do not trust each other to do their jobs, you will not be successful as a business. So, do you have trust within your team?

8. Energy

Finally, my experience of this jazz performance reminded me of the importance of energy and response in our team cultures. The players feed off of the energy of each other, the audience, and the songs themselves. You can see the players getting lost in the power of the moment and In the emotion of the song. The energy we give each other on our team, along with the energy of the work itself, is vital to doing our best work. Are you responding to the energy of your team? Is the work that you do getting your team the energy it needs to create a powerful, vital culture?

When these team culture conditions exist, jazz shows us that it’s possible to create consistent performance, dynamic improvisation and new innovation. If these are your goals as a company, then take these ideas to heart and invest in your team culture.

Once the Dust Settles: A Post-ASCRS Review

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Recently, a few members of our team made the west coast trek to Los Angeles to participate in the annual spring ASCRS conference. The conference is an opportunity for ophthalmic professionals to learn, grow, and network with peers.

As attendees, we had a lot to take in, from the exhibit floor to the classroom. We had the opportunity to hear excellent doctors present on their life’s work and to see live surgery being performed with the industry’s newest technology.

Exciting new refractive technologies, such as SMILE from ZEISS, were available for education and hands-on learning. Healthcare regulation and reform were hot topics of conversation, as we all wait anxiously to see what emerges regarding MIPS and changes to the ACA. And, as always, we were all learning and hunting for new innovations in patient care, surgical offerings, and best practices in ophthalmology.

The biggest challenge for exhibitors at ASCRS is getting your product or offering to “cut through the noise.”

With hundreds of industry partners present on the convention floor, the biggest challenge for exhibitors at ASCRS is getting your product or offering to “cut through the noise” and reach new potential consumers.

So how do you set yourself up for success? How do you ensure that your product and your booth will stand out above all others?

Do it well

If you’re going to spend the money to be present at the conference, you need to do it well. How do we define “doing it well?” There are four key components:

  1. Focus on cohesive branding and materials.
  2. Offer pointed messaging that clearly outlines your value proposition and ideal customer.
  3. Have something “actionable” at your booth; something for visitors and customers to do immediately to improve their skill, practice, or thinking.
  4. Learn from your successes and mistakes. Audit every conference you attend and determine what worked and didn’t work from a booth presence perspective. Ask your loyal customers what they thought of your booth. Ask what others thought the best parts of ASCRS were this year. Learn, learn, learn.

If you “do it well,” you will shine at meetings like this.

PRN booth at ASCRS

As part of their presence at ASCRS 2017, PRN included a number of materials intended to educate their consumers and to show how their unique offerings stand up against competitors’ products.

Create space for conversation outside the exhibit hall

Some of the best conversations we saw happen at ASCRS happened outside of the exhibit hall and over a shared meal. Relationships and trust are built when real conversation is allowed to happen, and the best place to build relationships and trust is over dinner.

Relationships and trust are built when real conversation is allowed to happen, and the best place to build relationships and trust is over dinner.

Some options for holding these coinciding events include round tables or additional presentations. As you plan your event, create goals of the amount or type of feedback you hope to gain. In this way, you can measure the success of your event. Answers to these questions should affect your materials, your way-finding, your room set-up and your presentations.

Another exciting option at national events like ASCRS is to plan “experiential meetings” where you combine some form of learning or content sharing with a locally sourced experience. The goal of these events is that attendees would become actively immersed in your brand and product. For example, work with a local tour group to book a double-decker tour bus of the city. Before or after the event, offer some exciting new thoughts about your product or company. Because ASCRS has many vendors and meetings competing for the attention of doctors and staff, give people an added incentive to attend your experience.

Visiometrics booth at ASCRS

With these long standing banners, Visiometrics extended the visual impact of their booth’s presence. This modular approach also allows them to reuse those elements separately in other events.

Your booth layout matters

Depending on your product and presentation, the floor plan of your booth matters. In smaller booths, like a 10×10, the options are limited. However, there are still decisions to be made. Some questions you should ask yourself as you design the layout include:

  • What’s the one message you want people to see and understand?
  • Do you want a table separating you from your potential customers?
  • Do you need a private space to meet with interested buyers?
  • How does your floor plan affect your ability to draw in passersby?
  • What will people be able to stop and do at your booth?
  • How can your booth be unique and different from any other?

Answering these questions clearly before you begin working on your booth design will help ensure you create the ideal booth for your meeting goals, at ASCRS and beyond.

Patient Experience Training

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The amount of time a patient spends with a doctor is a small percentage of the time they actually spend in the office. On average, patients spend about seven minutes with the doctor. If a consult appointment is two hours, what do you do with the rest of that time? Doctors and other team members are central to properly harmonizing the patient experience.

The experience is the marketing and not the advertising.

The importance of hidden systems

It is important to develop hidden systems so you can engage everyone equally. A hidden system will enable you to know who a patient is and what they do without them having to tell you every time they are in front of you.

“50-80% of the information provided by the clinician is instantly forgotten. Of the balance of information that is remembered, only 50% of it is remembered correctly.” –Greg Korneluk, Physician Success Secrets

What a patient remembers

For patients, 25% is remembered at best post-meeting. We go into the office and we throw all of this information at them like driving distance astigmatism, presbyopia, etc. A patient could potentially leave feeling completely overwhelmed. That patient goes home and says all I know is that my insurance only covers part of it. It will cost $2,000 and I have stigma.

We have to remember that our jargon dissuades people from understanding what we are talking about. Over the course of that hour or so conversation, they are burdened with information, then we dilate them and make them sign stuff.

What can we do to make it better?

In his book, Secret Service, John DiJulius III says that Americans have 1/20th the human interactions we had just 20 years ago. Rather than shopping at a store, we are online. Instead of meeting in person, we are doing webinars, video calls, etc. Rather than going to a bank, we do mobile banking.

“We are serving people that are starved for human interactions.”

When people are coming in, they are expecting more than just a great refraction. They want to talk with you. They want you to ask them about their family life, etc.  And they haven’t had a chance to tell anyone that and you may be the only they can talk to. We owe it to people to do a better job of interaction because they want meaningful interactions.

People are paying for experiences—for those interactions. You can drop this into any business model as these are the foundational elements of how businesses have changed over time.

Progression of Economic Value

  • Commodities (Agrarian Economy), which turns into…
  • Goods (Industrial Economy), which turns into…
  • Services (Service Economy), which turns into…
  • Experiences (Experience Economy) — such as Starbucks

As much as you grow, what are you going to try and do at all times? You cannot be standard. You have to be unique.

So, what does this mean for doctors?

From a patient standpoint, they are concerned with the following:

  1. Was I treated well?
  2. Were they trustworthy?
  3. Were they organized?
  4. Did they say thank you?
  5. Was the doctor nice?
  6. Was the office clean?

The patient is saying, I care more about this than technology. Obviously, I care about outcomes as well, but I want these things also.

A patient expects that you will have the best technology and a pristine outcome–these are known commodities. It is the steps above that take you above and beyond and will be the reason a patient chooses one doctor over another.

How should our teams adapt?

John DiJulius nails mass customization in his book What’s the Secret, “With the amount of intel healthcare has on its customers, it should be the best experience on earth.”

By being in healthcare, we have more information on our customers than most organizations and we rarely use it. We need to use it!  “You cannot be experientially excellent until you are operationally excellent,” DiJulius says.

You don’t get credit for having warm cookies in your waiting area if the trash can in your public restroom is overflowing because someone hasn’t been in there for awhile. It’s the overall experience that a patient will remember. The entire experience from the front door to the checkout needs to be worth every penny.

Details are everything: From the minute a patient walks in, your staff members are on stage. Be personal and warm.  You want the experience to be so wonderful that rather than a family member just dropping off the patient, they also want to join in on the experience of having good conversation, eating warm cookies and drinking a customized, Starbucks-like coffee.

A lot of people won’t take the leap if they don’t know where they’ll land. The market already believes that you are the best around at what you do. I just know if you pay attention to these kinds of things it will be even better — it will be world-class.

Mapping the Customer Experience

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We often think of interactions with customers in terms of one key moment (usually the point of sale) rather than a narrative. In reality there are many moments, or touchpoints, that customers experience in anticipation of that interaction, during the interaction, and in recalling it afterwards. These moments reflect positively and negatively on your brand, and each moment is an opportunity to design more intentional experiences. We’ve created a worksheet that you can use to think through this process for your own company or organization. Download the worksheet here:

Graphic to download MJM Customer Experience Mapping exercise

How to use the Customer Experience Mapping worksheet

  • For each stage (Anticipate, Enter, Engage, Exit and Extend), brainstorm the touchpoints your customers experience.
  • Write these touchpoints on the cards below, and indicate whether the impression is positive or negative.
  • Cut out the cards along the dotted lines.
  • Assemble the cards in chronological order, and then move them up or down to indicate how positive or negative the experience was.
  • Identify key touchpoints that can be improved, and note touchpoints that have not been intentionally designed.

Let us know how it goes!

We hope you find this customer experience mapping exercise helpful, and we’d love to hear how you use it to create compelling experiences for your customers or clients. Contact us to tell us about your own experience design.

4 Things Fatherhood Taught Me About Healthcare Experiences

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At MJM, we work with many healthcare practices and vendors and one of our primary roles in this work is researching, understanding and improving the patient experience. For a vast majority of patients, the quality of their overall experience is just as important to their satisfaction as the quality of the medical care provided. It’s remarkable that at the end of 2015, most healthcare practices still focus so little on creating the best possible patient experience. Practices that want to grow in 2016 will be wise to deeply understand the experience their patients are having with their staff, building, and processes.

Being a father for two young children has taught me many valuable lessons that translate to great experiences in healthcare. Here are four of those lessons, which any healthcare practice can use to consider new staff training, tactics and patient touchpoints:

1. Build and honor trust

Children have an intrinsic trust in their parents, that they will do what’s best, provide safety, and offer comfort. As a father, I’ve learned that such trust is a fragile thing and that building and honoring this trust requires daily work. Maintaining trust with children creates space for them to grow, make decisions and be honest about their feelings and concerns.

Patients often enter a healthcare practice fearful of what they may find out. They can be scared, unsure, and anxious about learning bad news or making big decisions around their health. Doctors and staff that focus on building and honoring the trust of their patients create invaluable space for healthy patient experiences. And patients who have their trust honored become lifelong fans and champions of the practice.

Much like parenting, the skills required to build and honor trust are time and listening. Honor the time of your patients, be present with them and listen to what they are communicating both verbally and non-verbally.

2. Create space for asking questions

One thing every parent craves is the discovery of the right environment for their kids to open up and discuss the thoughts, questions and concerns deep in their minds and hearts. It can be a different environment for each child—a long car ride, laying in bed at night, going for a walk or playing with stuffed animals. A key to finding that space for conversation is awareness and openness to your child, leaving time and opportunity for them to share, ask and talk.

Too many times in healthcare, the urgency of getting a patient through the clinic schedule reduces or eliminates any chance of our staff members creating space to truly listen to the patient. Beyond the occasional (and obligatory) “Any questions?” the process is actually structured to reduce the time each patient spends in each room. Without the space for conversation, practices lose much of their opportunity to really connect with patients, understand their fears and goals and best meet their needs.

As a father, I’ve found that I need to create specific times and cues to slow down, make space and listen deeply. Healthcare staff members likewise need to create cues during patient visits to slow down, connect, and listen.

3. Use language that the listener understands

We don’t expect young children to understand the exact language explanations of politics, sports, car repairs or why they can’t eat candy for every meal. Yet, healthcare staff often forget that their patients don’t have the knowledge or training to understand much of the language used during consultations.

Studies have shown that when patients feel overwhelmed by or don’t understand what they’re being told, they simply shut down and quit engaging the conversation. That’s unhealthy and dangerous for both the practice and the patient.

Much like being a parent, practices should constantly be aware of the language they are using and prepared to explain in more general terms what is happening with the patient. Practices should role play this often and create a list of phrases and language they use that will be challenging for patients to understand.

4. Know when to make a personal recommendation

As a parent, you know that you will need to make decisions and rules for your kids, especially when they are young. Yet, you also try to create space for them to make their own decisions and live with the results. This is an important part of growing up and functioning as an adult.

When people come to their doctor, they are looking for guidance in making big health decisions. More than ever before, doctors need to be prepared to offer a personal recommendation for a care plan for each patient. This plan should take into consideration all that they’ve learned about each patient.

On this point, the worlds of parenting and healthcare come together—doctors and staff should be doing their best to make recommendations to each patient as if they were part of their family. What would you recommend if it were your son? Your sister? Your father or mother? This kind of personalized, deeply committed care makes a world of difference in providing the patient with an experience to share with others.

Parenting has much to teach us about growing in our skills of listening, creating space, and personalizing care for healthcare patients. Let’s make this the year we truly focus on improving the patient experience across all of healthcare.

Patient Pay, Patient Wait and the Customer Experience

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As the cost of health care from the patient perspective increases, so will patients’ expectations of their providers. Out-of-pocket expenses have always been a point of contention in the health care industry, and this tension only increases as the field of health care takes a more dominant stance in what we talk about each and every day. Patients are very aware of how they are treated at every step of their journey through the doctor’s office, and they are expecting more from their experience as their personal costs continue to rise.1

Waiting is inevitable in eye care. Efforts should be made to turn “wait times” into something else entirely.

One of the key measures of patient satisfaction in the health care sphere is how long a patient’s wait time is before seeing his or her provider. Patients often cite their wait time as a measure of the quality of care and overall satisfaction they feel while in the doctor’s office. A recent study by Michael McMullen, MD, and Peter Netland, MD, PhD,2 correlation between the amount of wait time and patient satisfaction. In fact, the study authors found that satisfaction with the amount of time spent waiting was the strongest driver of overall satisfaction. This is keen insight into the minds of our changing consumer.

Patients are now paying more than ever for even simple things such as X-rays, routine exams, and follow-up care. Even if the visit is not associated in any way with an elective offering, they are paying more. Therefore, their consumer-like preferences will be even more acute. In addition, patient customers report that their strongest consumer-like preference is to “not wait.” With this in mind, it is helpful to look at your clinic environment through the lens of the patient and create for them an experience that can satisfy this key driver.

Setting Standards for a Better Customer Experience

Waiting is inevitable in eye care. Efforts should be made to turn “wait times” into something else entirely.

You can begin this review the same way a patient might come in contact with your health care system. First, evaluate your phone standards:

  • How long does it take before someone picks up when you call your own office?
  • How many dropped calls or calls where the patient hangs up before you answer do you have?
  • How many total calls do you receive a day?
  • Is there a call center you rollover to when the heightened call volumes occur?
  • What is your standard number of rings?

Many practices use a phone prompting, or a phone tree, system that can frustrate the patient customer. Although having one of these systems may allow for more modest staffing expense, it typically starts the relationship on a bad note. These systems are difficult to navigate, programmed too quickly, not revisited, and often lead to dead ends, where the caller is placed in the back of the queue or disconnected altogether.

After you have reviewed the standards of your phone team during the call, it is important to review the standards your team has before and after the call. Many practices believe that when the phone is hung up, the responsibility of the phone team is finished. Not so. Days and weeks before the patient customer appears in your office, it is nice to make a reminder call, pre-visit contact, to reiterate what was discussed on the phone, review any questions that may have arisen during the patient’s exploration of your offerings, and/or review any remaining materials or doctors’ instructions in preparation for his or her upcoming exam. It is also important to ask patients about their concerns regarding the exam.

This reminder call also serves as an opportunity to remind folks to bring a loved one or family member along to their visit. This can help the patient-customer to not only have a good experience but also properly make their educated decision while with the provider in your office.

The Day of the Examination

Now, it’s the day of the examination. Everything needs to be thought through, from how patients arrive at your center to how they’re escorted back into the diagnostic area after the check-in process. Let’s begin with how patients arrive. Every effort should be made to make this process as smooth as possible. Maps, GPS, radio signals, call-ahead reminders, and texts should be used to help patients feel like they’re on the right track when traveling to your practice. In the northern states, one of the number-one patient concerns during the winter months is road conditions. Patients worry about the drive to the center, if the sidewalks will be icy, and whether they can find a parking spot close to the front doors of your practice. While designing for the optimal customer experience in health care, heated sidewalks might be something worth considering if you live in a region that has inclement weather.

Customer experience: the welcome area

Words are important: use “atrium,” “welcome area,” or “lobby” instead of “waiting area.”

There is nothing more powerful than the first impression. The first time the patient-customer walks into your office or clinic will leave a lasting impression as to how he or she feels about your offering. Be very, very picky about what you allow on your walls and how you design your atrium space. (Notice I did not say waiting room. Words are important, so the terms atrium, welcome area, or lobby should be used instead of waiting area.)

Explain the process

Once it is time to have measurements taken of the inside and outside of your eye, the clinical team or technicians should be mindful not to use jargon that might leave patients wondering what is going on. Rather than simply doing advanced diagnostics, it is important to explain to patients what is happening at each stage of the process. We use a simple method of laminated sheets to articulate the three major points of any advanced diagnostic. With these sheets, whenever we’re doing a test, team members can explain the highlights of the technology being used, and this ensures that everything is explained in roughly the same way to each patient.

These first few stages and ideas only cover the first few areas of the customer experience in ophthalmology. We all know that there is a lot more to be done after the diagnostic work is complete. We still need to take the patient to the exam room, explain his or her surgery options, counsel the patient, and discuss different payment options. Finally, we need to cover what happens between when the patient leaves the office and later returns for surgery.

1. Bouchard S. Patient payment responsibility increases. Healthcare Finance News. June 11, 2013. Available at: http://www.healthcarefinancenews.com/news/patient-payment-responsiblity-increases. Accessed March 21, 2013.

2. McMullen M, Netland P. Wait time as a driver of overall patient satisfaction. Clin Ophthalmol. 2013;7:1655-1660.

This article originally appeared on millennialeye.com.