AX100 interview: How The Joint Chiropractic maps the customer journey
Charles Nelles , CTO at The Joint Chiropractic , has to deliver a customer experience that encompasses multiple moving parts, segments and stakeholders including patients, franchisees and doctors. In some ways, Nelles is building systems to herd cats.
I was interested in the business model of The Joint Chiropractic since it rhymed with businesses such as U.S. Physical Therapy and VCA Antech, which is now owned by Mars. The general idea is that a parent company can roll up independent practitioners and physicians and provide technology platforms and efficiencies.
Many physicians want to focus on giving care instead of the grunt work involved with running a business.
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The catch is that it's hard to provide a consistent customer and employee experience in those models. I caught up with Nelles in an interview at Constellation Research's Ambient Experience in Austin. Here's a recap of our chat.
The business. Nelles said that 75% of The Joint Chiropractic's clinics are not owned by doctors and the majority of them aren't owned by the company. "We focus on people that are looking for regular adjustments to just improve and maintain quality of life range of motion, health and wellness," said Nelles.
The Joint has a business model that's built on efficiency and throughput. The typical patient is not taking a lot of time out of the day for an adjustment.
Providing a trio of experiences. Nelles noted that The Joint is managing the experience of three different players. The patient needs the ultimate experience, but there's the franchisee as well as the doctors, who get more of an employee experience. "The other adventure for me is a lot of franchise owners are either successful franchisees that compare our tech to every other tech and every other franchise across the globe. Or they are successful business people that need another passive source of income," said Nelles.
Who owns the customer journey? The Joint controls the journey for new patients with intake and ongoing relationships. Doctors control more of the experience for existing patients. "We have a wellness coordinator who's up front patient intake new patients coming in existing patients coming through, we have the doctor who is at the core of that experience. And then we also have the franchised seed, who is running that clinic," said Nelles.
The tech stack. The Joint has to deal with electronic health records, compliance as well as a series of business systems supporting franchises.
"You want consistency across all the sites. With The Joint you can go into any site in any state and get adjusted. It needs to be a familiar chiropractic experience. A lot of that comes through those systems and delivering content for training, measuring performance against company standards, and answering questions," said Nelles.
Nelles said The Joint decided to buy a base CRM system, SugarCRM, and then build customizations. "When we started this, we were doing something no one else was doing," said Nelles. "It was challenging but we had to build from scratch. We bought something we're not going to have to maintain and put our secret sauce on top of it," said Nelles. "We added on top of the CRM and built two portions--the back office where we're managing patient visits and the front office for managing the user experience."
Change management. Nelles said he has spent time with the contact center to handle the three flavors of callers--customers, doctors and franchisees. "It is very challenging to mix all of those together," said Nelles.
Generative AI. Nelles said the power of generative AI will be to use the right customer data to personalize experiences. The data will inform you what content needs to be delivered and in what channel. "I think we're headed toward handing over the experience eventually to customers and that's what we're looking for with a lot of different audiences," said Nelles. "How do I get the right information about them, deliver the right content and right channel so customers are getting whatever value they need out of the experience."
Employee and customer experiences. For The Joint, employee and customer experiences are intertwined. "You rarely have one without the other," said Nelles. "We are looking to remove complexity."
Customer journeys. Nelles said The Joint just completed customer journey mapping and going through the experiences for people that new to chiropractic care and ones that are familiar. "With the journey mapped we can start talking about the outcome we want and the brand experience we're expecting," said Nelles.
Most valuable metrics. Nelles said the number one metric is attrition. "We focus on conversion and attrition," said Nelles. "Did we keep you and are you happy? Or did you leave. Some people will come in and join driven by pain and when that goes away they leave."
The goal of the tech stack is to bring customers the value and support the lifecycle with processes that are quick, easy and frictionless.
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Nelles said: "A lot of what we're working on is communicating with you in the middle. We've nailed how you talk about pain and what can do for you, but once you're in the middle and feeling good we need to educate better and maintain relationships longer. It's a mix of education, coaching and maintaining that doctor patient relationship."
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