healthcare
Repairing a broken delivery channel to improve access
Canada’s aging population is changing the contexts in which patients expect to receive care, and meeting those expectations is an opportunity for healthcare organizations to meet their needs better. Despite this opportunity, this home healthcare service was hampered by a disjointed patient experience, driving low NPS and a money-losing balance sheet. Furthermore, the cross-functional team was frustrated with both the service outcomes and the working model for delivery.
Key Details
- User research, collaborative design, and iterative prototyping created a shared vision for customer success
- Working openly, humbly, and inclusively helped reset a siloed and distrustful working team
- We shifted a broken, money-losing experience into a service that beat revenue goals and increased NPS for three years in a row
Our Approach
1
Before we could rebuild the service, we had to rebuild the team. We took time to re-establish the cross-functional core team, making explict the values we intended to demonstrate through our work together, and modelling a new way of collaborating virtually that was well-structured, inclusive, and integrative across silos.
2
Getting the team to row together took more than a slide deck and pre-meeting warm-ups. The team needed a shared understanding of the problems to solve. We conducted rapid research with customers and road along with frontline teams in order to understand what was working well, what wasn’t, and what their expectations of the service were, before translating that back to the relevant teams.
3
With the team bought in on the need to change and the problems to tackle, we led a series of large-scale cross-functional workshops to map out the current and future service journey, identifying what would need to change in the underlying systems and processes as we went (with the side benefit that we rebuilt relationships and buy-in as we demonstrated a willingness to listen and learn!).
4
With a shared picture of the future-state journey established, we collaborated with the digital design team to develop, refine, and test prototypes for a new discovery, purchase, and appointment management experience, leading to a service replatform within the year that would lay the groundwork for year-over-year improvements in both customer satisfaction and commercial success.
Key Insights
Aligning the value delivery with value proposition was vital: patients saw the value proposition of this service as something that reduced effort and offered convenience; but its practical implementation created more problems than it solved
Key questions about the service, its availability, and its total cost weren’t being effectively answered early in their purchase journey, and in some cases created nasty cost surprises downstream in the journey
No one had full visibility into the end-to-end journey across channels and functions, and deep service blueprinting and stakeholder engagement helped to create shared context, soothing frustrations, providing a common view of the service going forward, and reducing broken hand-offs and frustrated delivery
Our Impact
3+
years in a row of exceeded growth targets after a relaunched patient experience drove a dramatic increase in NPS, shifting the service into profitability for the first time