Organizations can adapt to the new digital marketplace—where consumers make split-second business and purchasing decisions—by reducing as much friction as possible.
Doing so “requires the seamless integration of marketing, product, e-commerce, IT, and service into a cohesive, friction-free customer experience―a feat that siloed companies struggle to achieve,” says a book written by AMA Chief Experience Officer (CXO) Todd Unger.
Nowhere does that reality apply more than in organizations such as the AMA that serve physicians who are knee-deep in clerical and regulatory burdens.
The strategy outlined in Unger’s book—The 10-Second Customer Journey: The CXO’s playbook for growing and retaining customers in a digital world—was recently validated by an organization recognizing business excellence, Awards International. The group recognized the AMA’s customer-experience team with two U.S. Customer Experience (CX) awards this year: Best Employee Driven CX, and Best CX Team of the Year.
Last year, the organization recognized the AMA with two other awards, one for best business change and transformation and another for best use of CX design and technology.
As the Awards International recognitions shows, the AMA is also working to ensure that it does not contribute to physician frustrations and that when they seek to renew their membership, claim CME credit, access AMA services or purchase AMA educational materials, the process is seamless. If issues arise, the goal is to resolve them on first contact.
The saga of the sign on
One example of this was how the AMA customer experience team used digital tools such as customer “journey maps and blueprints” that exposed the impact of customer friction and identified opportunities for collaborative improvements.
The team discovered that user navigation and platform errors on the AMA website caused user abandonment and channel switching, outcomes that require physicians to stop their journey, reach out for service, or discontinue their interaction. Additionally, most interactions required authentication for the website’s 2 million unique users, and though necessary, the sign-in process sometimes created a frustrating obstacle to member and customer access to AMA value.
The AMA customer-experience team acquired and configured digital monitoring tools to help expose code errors and navigation issues. These were solved with a new service channel that gave immediate authentication support that reduced channel switching and customer abandonment improving fast access to content to growing the AMA’s digital audience.
The team also worked to enhance data security, reduced transaction closure time and improved the digital platform experience. This included launching customer experience improvement projects involving multiple employees across business units to ensure milestone completion with thorough user testing and consistent measurement of impact.
For example, a “find it, fix it” project helped uncover significant pain points for AMA learning platform users. One of those involved users trying to regain access to their sign-in account, but were blocked if they couldn’t remember which email account was linked to their account, if they no longer had access to that email address or if heightened security measures, such as an institutional firewall, blocked access to that email account.
The solution was to add an account-recovery cellphone number, which eliminated sole reliance on email for account recovery. Doing so provides easy recall, lifetime access to the account as long as the number is active, and the ability to bypass firewalls in order to send username and password reset information to their personal device. In just one month, almost 2,500 members and customers had already added an account recovery number to their account.
The results are in
Measures of the effectiveness of the 700 customer-experience improvements completed by the AMA team resulted in a 30% drop in customer-support calls. Meanwhile, sign-in abandonment was cut in half.
Also, the number of digital content users grew by 140% while AMA membership rose by 12%. Same-day closure of customer problems increased, which led to a 36% drop in the need for repeat contacts. Problems that used to take four days to resolve are now closed in the course of one business day.
Along with Unger, the AMA’s customer-experience team is led by Gloria Gupta, who the Customer Experience Professionals Association named “Emerging Leader of the Year” in 2021, with operational support from Jeff Phillips, the AMA’s director of customer experience and services.
“We’re honored to receive CXOne global recognition,” said Gupta, the AMA’s senior director of customer experience, sales and service.
“But all the glory goes to 400-plus AMA colleagues who are removing customer friction—showing exactly what it means to be fighting for docs,” she added.
In its application for the award, the AMA customer experience team acknowledged that “one and done” projects don’t achieve significant customer experience and business impact. What does, however, is the infrastructure of “organizational collaboration” that is created to complete meaningful initiatives with solid measures.
