OCTOBER AWE

It has been an Awe-filled thirty days in the evangelization and activation of Customer Experience in Life Sciences. I have covered >16,000 miles and spent time with dozens of customers, collaborators, and colleagues and am on my way home more inspired than tired. Here are some reflections from ~ 30,000 feet above the earth.

 Partnerability as a Capability

Late September took me to the Aktana Innovation Exchange in NYC for an event with industry leaders and numerous life sciences innovators and partners from Veeva Crossix , ConvergeHEALTH by Deloitte , Adobe , and Klick - all leading the way in optimizing customer experiences and journeys in real time. I am grateful to Aktana for the invitation to learn and share!

Aktana - Key Insights and Inspirations #1:

• We are moving beyond omnichannel as a lens on more ways to push our messages to customers to a place where we are intent in understanding and addressing customer and colleague barriers at the speed of need.
• There is clear recognition that channel ubiquity is giving way to channel relevancy.
• Life Sciences leaders are looking at core operational metrics of engagement, and financial metrics linked to prescribing, filling, and adhering, but we are also looking at the connective tissue of experiential metrics and the power of shifts in sentiment when we are relentlessly resolving real issues and barriers.
• Industry’s partners are also locking arms to advance Experience Management – recognizing the African proverb that ‘if we want to go fast, we go alone, but if we want to go far, we go together.’  Customer Experience is an evolution in industry and will require collaborations and amalgamations of skills and resources.

Personal note – on the home front, my two dogs were both diagnosed with different cancers in September, and we had a peaceful and loving farewell to one of them. The experience of health with a creature you love so changes you at the core and I am thankful for the beautiful aspects and weary of the ones lacking in compassion. 

In the Neutral Zone

Early October took me to Zurich Switzerland for the 4th annual NLN CX Management in Life Sciences Forum.

I attended last year and brought back learnings on desires to advance CX, but little evidence of impact. What a difference a year makes!

NLN CX Summit - Key Insights and Inspirations #2:

• This year we moved clearly from hoping to proving with case studies from Qualtrics customers on impact in terms of shifts in actions that create customer sentiment improvements and drive hard business metrics with clear leadership involvement.
• The hallway and dinner discussion were centered more on experience as essential industry skillsets, mindsets, and toolsets. Collaborative sharing to advance the industry was thematic. No doubt – leaders will win on experience, but we share customers in doctors, nurses, patients, and health systems – so weakness anywhere can inhibit experiences everywhere.
•  Connecting back to Partnerability as a Capability, partners on hand from Amazon Web Services (AWS) , Viseven , and @Pen further cemented the growing efforts and elevation of importance and activation of XM and the alchemy of essential skills.

Personal note – I had had a bad experience at one canine oncologist and my son’s intuition demanded we seek a second opinion for our other dog. We took her to PACE in Philadelphia and from the doorway to the bill pay we experienced such kindness and professionalism. It gave us great confidence and comfort in our path forward.

Sometimes when faced with the wicked choice between just a long life or just a good life, a graceful nudge helps us to grasp for the unselfish goodness.

Shouting From the Mountain Top

The next week took me to QHQ in Provo, Utah for customer and leadership working sessions. It is amazing what can be accomplished with deep discovery, openness to learn, and an assemblage of experts, evidence, and clear visions for a better place in the not-too-distant future. 

 Customer Meetings at QHQ - Key Insights and Inspirations #3:

• We did not waste the pandemic and learned how to shorten the digital distance to enhance collaboration but   - - - we can never underestimate the beauty and value of being together in a room or across a table.
• Preparedness is the price of entry but means little without vulnerability taking center stage. I was so grateful how open everyone in the room (customers and colleagues) was to ask for help and understanding.
• Customer’s customers are apt to have challenges that emerge outside our purview but deserve exploration, recognition, and consideration in what we enable and enhance in engagements.
• Leaders are emerging and displaying very specific skill set and mindsets that begin with an understanding, vision, action, and a clear focus on measuring for sentiment not scores.

Personal note: Sitting in my meeting, I received a sympathy card online from our regular (yet extraordinary) vet, Sycamore Veterinary in Newtown, PA, for our pup who passed a few weeks back. I should not have opened it in the meeting, but I did. Every member of the staff wrote a personal note of condolence, and we will save it forever and know where we will go for our fur family care without a question.

 Experiences are sometimes well-considered in retrospect.  Contemplation reminds us that there is value in the actual moment and what we did then, but also in the memories we create when people have some respite to reflect.

“Memory is a strange thing. It does not work like I thought it did. We are so bound by time. By its order.” - Arrival

More Caffeine Please

One simply does not leave Utah; you take a piece with you in exchange for leaving a piece behind. The close of the week found me in a little office in the Salt lake City Delta Air Lines Sky Lounge (amazing space) co-hosting Coffee With Qualtrics with my esteemed and inspiring colleagues Adrienne Boissy , Melissa Hensley, CPXP , and the formidable Sydney C. from Cencora and a few hundred guests from across healthcare.

Syndey’s generosity, sharing how she and her team are leveraging customer and colleague insights to create an operating system was the perfect wrap-up to a great week.

Coffee with Qualtrics - Key Insights and Inspirations #4: 

• Bring leaders a business need, customer need, and a hypothesis. People love aspirations with a plan and “what If” is way more inspiring than retreating to tenacious approaches that have incremental impact.
•  Involve the front lines in experience efforts. People believe in what they help build and the frontlines have a unique lens on realities. So, never underestimate the importance of co-creation.
•  Like any great road trip, we make unplanned stops on the path to our destination. Sometimes our most wonderous learnings are not the ones we went looking for, but those that emerged through serendipity and listening deeply to the voices surrounding us.

Personal note:

My remaining pup greeted me at the door with a near meltdown of howling and kissing and we spent the next two days on the couch together watching football. I am not sure how long she has, but the moments that comprised that experience are best captured in the words of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. “If that isn’t wonderful, I don’t know what is.

Welcome to A Hotel in California.

My Qualtrics healthcare and life sciences colleagues and I organized a gathering of Payers, Providers, Pharma, Device, and change makers from our ecosystem of sages and friends.

danielle krettek cobb , Founder of Google Empathy Lab and now the AI Fairy Godmother, joined us and over dinner urged me to read Awe by Dacher Keltner, which I am tearing through now on this long trip home.

Insights and Inspiration:

• Awe is one of the most powerful and shaping experiences we have. It shows up everywhere and we can find and receive it with practice and openess.
•  In the book, Dacher shares that “we are most likely to feel awe when moved by moral beauty: exceptional virtue, character, and ability, marked by a purity and goodness of intention and action.”   
• I was in awe of the evidence and insights shared as mch as the aspiration and dedication to health experiences.
• Joining Aida Habtezion , SVP, Chief Medical Officer at Pfizer for a fireside chat, will stay with me for a long time.  Dr. Aida Habetzion shared how Pfizer’s Institute of Translational Equitable Medicine (ITEM) is closing disparity gaps and how this is core across the organization as an approach to the business as a whole.
• Dr. Habetzion and I also discussed my favorite current Voice of Patient effort. Qualtrics and Pfizer recently co-created a VoC effort to better understand patients' priorities and preferences for treatment options. This effort will inform many   decisions during drug development and in time - could help lead to new therapies and new evidence for regulatory bodies.   
• Experience, empathy, compassion, inclusion, equitability are not riding alongside the clinical equation, they are to the left of the equal sign – an essential aspect part of the equation.
• This may have been my favorite event of the year. Gathering payers, providers, manufacturers, who are all deeply invested in the experiences that surround healthcare is simply magical.
• Coming full-circle on partnerships, I got to meet the commonFont team ITRW and discuss collaboration on behalf of customers!

A personal note:

Last night my dog laid across the threshold of our bedroom. She was in protection mode. As a bloodhound, it is in her breeding to sense, protect, and keep bad things from the door. It is not unlike the role of XM, where we use special senses for early detection and fierce mitigation.

Bringing it Home

In healthcare we stand witness to awe daily. It helps us realize that maybe we, the makers, providers, and gatekeepers to care aren’t always the heroes.

Maybe when we are in the presence of an awe-inspiring moment created by a patient or colleague or researcher it is because we they are the hero in the unfolding narrative. What if, as experience optimizers and designers, we are cape-makers and our job is to put those capes on others and stand by to feel awe.   

For the Qualtrics Life Sciences team and the work we do with clients AWE is about helping everyone receiving and providing care abilities to (Accelerate Wondrous Experiences).

The quote in Dacher Keltner’s book, Awe continues stating that, “Over 95% of the moral beauty that stirred awe worldwide was in actions people took on behalf of others.”  

My travels were worth every mile, but it is so good to be home.