What a Business Can Learn from Its Customers

Executives from departments that don’t normally have interaction with customers — IT for example, have learned that getting the customer to tell them what the business should do makes it much easier for the business to justify the costs of doing it.

As one member of the health care industry has found, it’s also meant that some long-held assumptions about customers have gone out the window, and that resources can be directed more accurately to where they’re most needed.

Sutter Health is one of the leading not-for-profit health care networks in the U.S. The Northern California-based network’s members include hospitals, doctors, nurses and other health care services. The diverse and dispersed nature of the network creates a demand for IT services of the highest caliber.

John Hummel is Sutter Health’s CIO. Unlike many of his counterparts in other organizations, Hummel believes in spending a large portion of his time with patients and clinicians. The payoff is in being able to provide the network’s members with advanced technology that’s both needed and appreciated, but it wasn’t always that way.

Because Sutter’s “customers” are mostly doctors with an average age of 60, its management had presumed that they didn’t want much in the way of technology and would be put off by high levels of security. A customer survey, however, showed that these doctors were proficient users of technology in their private lives and actually wanted more technology services for their businesses.

Hummel and his IT team developed systems that enabled these doctors to access patients’ medical records and laboratory results from their homes. They worked with the doctors to get through the initial phasing-in period when adopting the new technology caused some delays, and eventually reached the point where both the physicians and patients gained increased satisfaction with Sutter’s IT services.

John Hummel is now an outspoken advocate of getting to know just what’s happening with the members of his network. He regularly tours hospitals and does rounds with doctors, a practice that’s enabled him to spot several opportunities to improve delivery of services to Sutter’s customers.

Sutter also uses surveys and focus groups to acquire and maintain an in-depth knowledge of its customers. This resulted in the discovery that patients weren’t all that interested in going online to pay medical bills, but they did want to use the Internet to refill prescriptions and arrange their doctor’s appointments.

Hummel’s IT team created a patient portal that lets patients pay bills and schedule appointments, leaving online payments to be handled by their medical insurers. A planned system that would enable patients to pay their bills went on the back burner as the company’s resources were able to be directed to areas of greater benefit.

Management consultant and author Tom Haskins tells us why businesses should actively work to learn from their customers: “Most businesses are too smart for their own good. They assume they know what the customers are thinking through their customer feedback surveys and sales figures. Their arrogance imagines that their customers already know what to shop for.

“It’s easy to fly under the radar of these over-confident enterprises. They don’t know themselves (Sun Tzu). They don’t know what they don’t know (Confucius). They function as their own worst enemies when faced with rivals that glean many more insights and innovations from their customers.”

As Sutter Health’s experience has shown, customer contact is a valuable yet often overlooked source of knowledge. Meeting with customers can provide information that will help a business improve its customer relations as well as its operating systems, and create opportunities for new revenue streams that might otherwise have gone unnoticed.

Copyright 2005, RAN ONE Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission from www.ranone.com