athenahealth - Best Customer Feedback Strategy

Company: athenahealth
Company Description: athenahealth partners with healthcare organizations across the care continuum to drive clinical and operational results. Our expert teams build modern technology on an open, connected ecosystem, yielding insights that make a difference for our customers and their patients. Our vision is to create a thriving ecosystem that delivers accessible, high-quality, and sustainable healthcare for all.
Nomination Category: Customer Service & Call Center Awards Achievement Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Best Customer Feedback Strategy

Nomination Title: athenahealth's Voice of the Customer Program

athenahealth sits at the intersection of healthcare-technology and maniacal customer focus! More than 140,000 providers across 50 states depend on our enterprise business solution to serve approximately 20% of the U.S. population per year. Our feature-rich cloud platform and always-on network capabilities are at the center of delivering exceptional care, driving high-quality outcomes, and ensuring providers get paid.

Our Voice of the Customer (VoC) program is as innovative as our company. Our highly sophisticated feedback mechanisms continue to capture more data, through more channels, with greater engagement from our customer base. Our disciplined reporting cadence keeps feedback at the forefront of athenahealth. Our liaison model ensures Product/ Service leaders leverage customer perspectives to inform strategic initiatives. Therefore, our VoC program drives outsized results which increase satisfaction, drives down issues, and changes the trajectory of both product and service experiences.

Don’t take our word for it, ask our customers. They recognize VoC’s capabilities, which is why we have industry-leading response rates, growing engagement in online communities, and ever-increasing levels of customer confidence that their feedback matters.

At athenahealth, and for VoC, it’s personal. We’re not just influencing feature development. We’re enabling the technology and services critical to solving the toughest problems in healthcare.

• Outline the organization’s achievements since the beginning of July 2020 that you wish to bring to the judges’ attention (up to 250 words). Required

• Expanded collection methodology capturing feedback across entire portfolio. We enhanced our Win/Loss survey program resulting in a 16-%-point increase in feedback from Closed-Won deals, over 2020. We launched a Voice-of-the-Patient program collecting >6,000 pieces of feedback on patient-facing functionality/services to inform development. And we launched a Voice-of-the-Vendor program capturing sentiment from multiple decision makers at each of our vendor partners.

• Deepened customer engagement in feedback. Our survey response rates remain far superior to industry standards. Over half of our customer base is active within our online community with 15% of users returning MoM compared to ~13% for typical SaaS companies. Further, we saw a +9-point increase in NPS YTD for users participating in one of our >60 active User Groups.

• Increased percentage of features released that tie back to customer feedback, from 35% in 2019 to 50% YTD. We share goals with our product team and drive continuous input into the roadmap. Our annual goal to ensure all 100 priorities have active work against them, or a perspective on why they aren’t resourced, sits at 85% complete YTD, on track for 100% by YE. Further, we launched a process for engaging product on escalated customer issues, and consistently exceed targets, tracking at 126% of goal YTD.

• Increased user confidence that feedback drives features we develop, from 30% (2019) to 45% (YTD). Those who are confident their feedback matters have an NPS score 73 points higher than those who are not at all confident.

• Explain why the achievements you have highlighted are unique or significant. If possible compare the achievements to the performance of other players in your industry and/or to the organization’s past performance (up to 250 words). Required

• Depth and breadth of analysis. We listen to customers at every key moment of their lifecycle and saw a 77% YoY increase in high-quality feedback collected. We also built an outreach governance solution allowing us to protect the time/experience of our contacts.

• Real-time, consumable analysis. athenahealth monitors NPS closely, synthesizing data in real time and linking Customer Success Manager compensation to response rates. In 2021, we rolled out longitudinal views of NPS beginning at point-of-sale, continuing through onboarding, and eventual maturation. This data, and much more, is available across the organization through a variety of highly customizable, self-service dashboards. Further, we saw athenista-participation grow with ideas submitted up by 11-%-points YoY.

• Expanded Close the Loop Efforts. In our product roadmap and release communications, we notate functionality tied to customer feedback and email customers after each release when their ideas are implemented. We broadened these efforts in 2021 and drove an increase in awareness of our Product Roadmap by 5-%-points. We also instituted a Leadership Engagement framework for NPS Detractors with segment-specific goals that we manage to.

• Impact of feedback. 128 customer ideas were implemented YTD, a 45% increase over 2020. Another 25 are on track for release by EOY. 2021 saw a 45% YoY increase in customer ideas implemented, representing thousands of distinct customer accounts! Further, as velocity of athenaClinicals features released increased in 2021, we saw 15% YoY reduction in negative NPS commentary about the clinician experience.