There’s a new darling in the office who is turning heads and making hearts palpitate with their impressive customer experience ROI metrics. They aim to improve your office quality-of-life and enhance customer experience and loyalty, nurturing a positive culture while improving your bottom line. What could be better than that? Meet your new Chief Experience Officer.
Just as luxury brands pamper their customers, health care providers and insurers should be looking to cater to their individual customers, customizing the experience and making complex ideas and choices more digestible. Hiring a CXO is the way to nurture a consistently more positive relationship between service provider and customer. With ACA, consumers can choose to walk away from your plan easier than ever if it doesn’t meet their needs, your CXO can make all the difference in them staying or going and creating a climate that feels more like advocacy than adversary.
So, what does a Chief Experience Officer do? In a nutshell, he or she manages the internal and external customer experience. “This can often be external, in terms of making sure the UI works for the customer, or internal, such as making changes that reflect company values in a way from which employees can maximize their own personal benefit,” says Forbes contributing writer Steve Olenski. (Does Your Brand Need a Chief Experience Officer?)
The concept of creating the optimal user or customer experience isn’t new (ask anyone in sales or who develops interactive media) but more and more companies are seeing the value, culture-wise and on their bottom-line, of having a delegated Chief Experience Officer being pivotal to their organizational success. Just like developing a website with an intuitive, user-friendly, disappearing interface that invites interaction is critical to engagement, explicitly constructing the values of the physical and virtual health marketplace relationship requires similar care. Just having this position signals that a business is in tune with creating a positive, relationship-based culture and understands that creating a consistent, positive, user-friendly, human experience is not optional, or something only to be done as part of crisis management, but should be an integral and integrated part of your strategic plan from the beginning. It says we really care about you and your experience and we know if you enjoy your time with us, you will be back. “Great consumer engagement and great customer service are increasingly critical to organizational sustainability,” says Monica E. Oss from Open Minds in reference to CXOs in the healthcare market. (Who is Your Chief Experience Officer?)
According to Oss, a recent survey of CXOs working in the health care market (CXO Responsibilities & Strategic Priorities: 11 Things To Know), the following are the top five strategic priorities for CXOs:
- Relationship-based culture (including staff and physician awareness, engagement and communication)
- Experience improvement initiatives (including programs focused on access, rounding and physician communication)
- Strategy, leadership, and governance (including alignment and strategy)
- Measurement and analytics (including improving data sources and transparency)
- Patient and family voice (including patient and family engagement and advisory councils)
So, who is nurturing relationships and customer experience at your business? Isn’t it time to consider hiring a CXO and giving them some xoxos?