Clare Muscutt talks with Agnes So about CX in health tech and bringing more ‘art’ to Customer Experience.
Episode #503 Show Notes:
Clare:
Welcome to the 3rd episode of the fifth series of the Women in CX podcast. A series dedicated to real-talk conversations between women in Customer Experience. Listen in as we share our career stories, relive the moments that shaped us and voice our opinions as loudly as we like about all manner of CX subjects. I'll be your host, Clare Muscutt and in today's episode, I’ll be talking to a seriously brilliant community member from Australia. Let me introduce you to today's inspiring guest. She’s the Support, Knowledge and Content Manager at HotDoc, a health tech start-up and, having spent over 10 years working within technical customer service and retail roles, she is a leader in the SaaS space and is happiest when delighting customers with a considered and personalised journey. She’s also a diversity, inclusion and belonging leader working to generate discussions around gender equality and awareness within the workplace. Please welcome to the show, CX sister, Agnes So.
Clare:
Hi Agnes.
Agnes:
Hey, how's it going, Clare?
Clare:
I'm good. Welcome to the Women in CX podcast.
Agnes:
Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.
Clare:
And welcome to everybody who's listening along as well. It's super awesome to have you here. You've been in the community how long now?
Agnes:
I got my one-year birthday email the other day and I was like, oh my goodness, I can't believe it's been one year because it feels much shorter than that.
Clare:
Oh, and it's been amazing to have you with us and I'm just super excited to be having this conversation today because you've got a super interesting perspective on customer experience from a SaaS tech and health tech point of view, which we're really going to get into a little bit later on. But I'm going to ask you the question I ask all of my guests when they first come on the podcast and that is to tell the audience a little bit more about how you got into CX and where you are today.
Agnes:
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks. I would think my journey to CX was probably pretty straightforward. I spent over 13 years working sort of various customer service roles and within retail and tech sort of, retail outlets, five of those years were actually spent within Apple, specifically Apple retail, where I think for me, that was where my passion for CX really started. Because there's something about working for Apple, there's this magic and law that you kind of get inducted into. And you know, for example, there was kind of this moment where I was being onboarded and someone told me about how the iPhone box, for example, takes like seven seconds to complete opening because that was the perfect length of time that built anticipation and frustration and that perfect sort of ta-dah moment. So I don't know, for me, that was kind of like a lightbulb moment.
Agnes:
I sort of thought holy moly, someone gets paid to think about that. Someone gets paid to research, it wasn't five seconds. It wasn't six seconds. It wasn't eight seconds. It was seven. And something about that just felt really exciting to me. And also at the time I was a practicing artist and to me that felt like it really fed into this psychology piece, which I was also exploring within my art practice. So, I didn't know it at the time, but that was customer experience. And then what I did was I kind of side stepped a little bit and found myself at an early stage health tech start-up within Australia. And over the last five years, I've just sort of worked my way up from an entry-level role to where I remain today as a senior leader in the Customer Support, Knowledge and Content team.
Clare:
Amazing! And yet those apple stories, I just loved them because
Clare:
He was...
Agnes:
I have so many!
Clare:
Yeah. Oh, we'll have to get some more out on the podcast then. But yeah, just the remarkable leadership around product, that was, you know, led by design, but in a way that totally appealed to experience. think quite often we see, you know, product-led businesses kind of losing focus on the customer, don't they, in terms of design and innovation and feature releases and stuff. But it was a groundbreaking product in so many ways. But the experience and the retail stores and, you know, the amount of thought that went into, as you say, you know, every kind of moment and touch point of becoming an iPhone user or customer and I can speak from my own experience, how quite uniquely, the tech stack that I now operate, which includes an iPhone 12, an apple watch a MacBook and an iMac. That once you're kind of in, and you are used to using Apple products, I can't, I don't want to leave like ever.
Agnes:
No, everything is designed to keep you in that ecosystem. And I had never seen something so... When you think about customer journey maps, I think they must have the most insane customer journey maps, scribbled away somewhere in their [inaudible] side or whatever, because every single second, every single moment is thought about, the way that you present yourself within that journey too, has been thought about and yeah, all the way down to, what am I going to buy next? You know? For me, there's just such an art to how they've done it. And it really impressed me and made such an impact that I went, this is what I want to do.
Clare:
Yeah. A super inspiring moment. And yeah, we need more of that kind of alchemy and art and science blend that businesses like Apple have been able to do, but it is rare isn't it? That's why it's so remarkable because it's not easy to do. So, we're going to come and explore this art and science a little bit more shortly, but, you know, you mentioned being an artist is where you started and, you know, kind of fell into customer experience through getting a job in retail and discovering that this thing existed that actually made you feel as inspired. But, I'd love to hear a little bit more about that and, you know, the challenge of, or barrier that there was to becoming the woman that you are today.
Agnes:
Yeah, absolutely. I think for me, as I said, I sort of found my way into CX through kind of an alignment with my art practice and that piece, that psychology piece that I spoke about. But for me, a really hard decision was actually deprioritizing my art practice in order to focus on CX as a career pathway. And I wouldn't say it was so much that it was incredibly challenging, but it was kind of hard to reconcile with that decision because for me, the idea of creativity or being a creative person was actually very much entrenched in my identity. It was something I had wanted to do since I was young. I think, all the way back to when I was like five, I can pinpoint the moment where I knew I was a creative person and it was so baked into who I was that I didn't really know how to take this new passion and realize creativity through that.
Agnes:
But towards the end, I knew I wasn't as motivated through my art practice. And I didn't feel like I could make as much of an impact through that as I could, if I was to get the CX stuff right. And for me, that just was kind of the, that was the deciding point, right? And for me, I feel like it made me who I am today because I went through a very quick process of understanding how I could take that creativity that I had in my art practice and feed it into my CX practice so that I could essentially reuse the skills. And it wasn't something that was a waste of my time. It was something that was very valuable that I spent, you know, a fair amount of my early twenties doing, but I was able to sort of recycle those skills in a different way and impact more people as a result.
Clare:
So, tell us more about that. How were these skills transferable? Can you give us some examples?
Agnes:
Yeah, absolutely. I always say, I honestly have so much honor for anyone who is an artist, because being an artist is like running a small business, except that business is essentially you, you have to wear so many hats, whether it be, you know, self promotion or whether it's creating your own budgets or how to even project manage something from end to end. Those are all things that you have to do and no one teaches those things to you. You just have to learn them on the fly. So for me, there were a couple of things I think wearing all those different hats really resonated with me, especially working and moving within the tech space because when you're in an early stage start-up, when you're working in tech, there's so many times when you have to do so many different things all at once, and you have to be something that just morphs to what's needed.
Agnes:
You know, I always call that, you're the liquid that morphs into the space that's you, you need to fulfill. So, that's definitely one way in which I sort of see the creative side coming into CX, but the biggest way I see it is actually through problem solving because I think creative people are the best problem solvers because they can see things or problems in a way that others just can't. And that, it's interesting what you were saying before about the whole alchemy piece of art and I think we were talking about this another day, what is CX in some cases, it kind of is an alchemy of art and science, right? The art piece is the creative problem solving for me, but the science is actually the data. So being data driven with your decisions. So, whether that be having really strong Voice of Customer programs or, you know, making sure that you have a way to understand your channels and the people that you service, you just need something to point you towards the direction, and then you solve the problems through creativity instead.
Clare:
I think we need to dig a little bit deeper into this and I apologise. I'm just looking down at my phone because I read an amazing book and I just want to make sure I quote the guy correctly because this whole notion of alchemy was only recently introduced to me. And I read a book called Alchemy by Rory Sutherland. Who was one of the great marketers, and it really inspired me actually to be considering, you know, this aspect of, I guess marketing and customer experience as well, it's the beliefs that people hold about the product to a service and how they experience it dictates their value, their appreciation of it. This element of emotion that we talk about a lot in CX, but it's quite hard to distill and quantify, but, you know, brands spend so much money on creating the beliefs, right? Within the customer's mind.
Clare:
And it's the customer experience that can really shake that if it's not true or enhance that and, you know, reinforce the alchemical stuff that, you know, people far smarter than me know how to do when it comes to building brands, but it also really resonated with me when you were talking about, you know, kind of how adaptable you have to be, you know, this is my first start-up experience, we built our own tech platform and MVP in eight weeks, obviously not proprietary necessarily, but how you have to just become whatever the organisation needs you to be at the time. I don't think that's just restricted to start-ups, actually. And I think it's one of the most common mistakes that customer experience people, people who work in CX, make is rather than being able to be adaptable and figure out and problem solve.
Clare:
Where can I add value? They're constantly thinking, how can I get business to do this thing that I think is customer experience and, you know, quite often unsuccessfully, try to boil the ocean and, you know, fix everything within the customer journey and the business just isn't ready to listen to, or they don't get it, you know, and they just feel so ground down by that experience. So, I guess now, having worked in a start-up and seeing my team flourish to be these completely adaptable, incredible problem solvers, it just really reminded me, I guess this was something that was always innate within me as an entrepreneur. I was an entrepreneur when I worked in business side and having your own experience of the artist's career clearly instills something similar really, you need to be able to do that.
Clare:
[inaudible] needs to dig a little bit deeper into this decision though, because art is your craft, isn't it? It's a passion it's purpose. It's something deeply entwined, as you said, it's your identity, what was that actually like for you? You know, you said you became a bit disenchanted by it, but that's hard. Isn't it? To let go of what you think you always wanted to be. And even though you can see, there's another way that you can apply yourself, was that a difficult experience?
Agnes:
I think it was difficult because, you know, there's also a lot of added pressure because people know you as, you know, a practicing artist and even just post the decision, people would be like, how's that going? And you would feel like a failure having to explain, oh, well, you know, I actually decided I'm going to invest more of my time here instead of here. But, I also went through a lot of discovery and it's, I don't think I'm unique. There's a lot of people who have gone through similar pathways where they try and understand what creativity actually means within their day to day life. And for me, I think creativity is so much more than just creating an art piece that sits on a wall or, you know, painting on canvas or whatever it might be that, you know, specific art practices will essentially achieve. For me, it's storytelling, right?
Agnes:
Being able to influence someone through the gift of how I speak to them is something that we do in CX all the time. And even today, we had a sort of presentation that we were doing within our CX department about what was upcoming in H two. And there was such a beautiful moment where I just went, this is all part of the puzzle. This is me being creative. And this is me sort of still having that ability to tell a story and motivate others to do good, to be their best selves. And that to me is kind of what art tries to do in some ways, dependent on the artist. But that was kind of what I felt I was able to achieve through funneling the ideas into a different way of execution really.
Clare:
Love that. What a powerful quote. It really, really resonates, super inspiring. And I guess it's the outcome, the outcome of leadership when it comes to CX as well, isn't it? So, being able to engage people to want to, as you say, you know, be a better human, do good. You know, harness your own power to make a difference to the world. That's, again, something that is rare and beautiful and indeed art. So, just for the audience, really, to understand a little bit more about the space that you occupy as a CX leader, can you kind of explain a bit more about this health tech space and kind of what you do and the role of, I guess, customer support in relation to success and customer experience more broadly. Can you just give us a bit of a download of how it all fits together?
Agnes:
Yeah, for sure. I was thinking about this and for me, the health tech space has really changed a lot over the last decade. I kind of distinctly remember probably about 10 years ago in my early twenties. I was really terribly ill one night. And I remember just being up all night and being so worried because I knew I had to see a doctor, but all you could do back then was actually wait until 8:00 AM in the morning when the clinic would open and hope to God that when you called they would have an appointment for you that day. Right. And I remember just thinking, gosh, you know, I can make appointments to cut my hair, but I can't make an appointment to see a GP. And that's why when I sort of fell into, you know, applying for a job at this company, it just felt like I really resonated with the mission statement and what they were trying to achieve.
Agnes:
It was something that, it was a product that I felt really close to personally. And I think with, in this particular space, you've got to also think about the customer too, right? It's not just about, you know, the customer being a clinic, it's about the customer being a clinic as a small business, because in Australia, while we have a public health system and it gives us sort of like a reimbursed fee or what we call sort of bulk build or fully covered medical care, a lot of our customers are still considered small to medium businesses. So we've had to really consider how we service them from that perspective because their customers are patients, right. It's, you know, if you think about it, our customers are clinics and their customers are patients. So for us, I think we are quite uniquely placed because we are B2B primarily, but I think that changes depending on what the customer actually needs from us on any given day.
Agnes:
And, for me, you know, you're talking about how do we sort of structure ourselves within the CX space in order to be able to service these types of customers. And we went through so many iterations to even land on the current iteration of our org structure right now. And I wouldn't be surprised that this would evolve maybe in like two, three months to be something different as well. But just to take you through how we've landed for now, our CX team is actually built up of around three unique functions. So we have customer support, customer success, and also a separate CS division for our key accounts and our enterprise customers. So, I think from a customer support level, I would actually say that we're closer to being B2C, because we actually focus on transactional reactive servicing work. So, we are just sort of asking or answering how to inquiries or troubleshooting issues that people have. And in these instances, while we're still technically touching businesses, it doesn't quite feel the same, whereas our success team. Yeah.
Clare:
Sorry. So, just to clarify, so is that like the patients that you're supporting or is...
Agnes:
No, the clinics. Yeah. We've not even gotten to the patients yet.
Clare:
Oh, okay.
Agnes:
Yeah, so that's the clinics directly that feels more B2C, through our support team, but then we have our success team and that really does feel like that B2B place because they focus on providing value to all of our customers, because they pay us for a system so that they can get close to their patients. Right. That's the whole point of the software that we provide. And, for us, I think that the success team really focuses on that value piece and being sort of a trusted advisor or helping them operate their business in the most impactful way for their patients. So then we throw in the last customer profile, which is the patient, right? The patients who use the app. So, while they're not really always considered our customers directly, they are ones that we support through our support team as well. And then we become sort of like this B2B to C or P as you said it before kind of business and it becomes this sort of like strange, I guess way in which we touch all of them in order to be able to improve everyone's healthcare experience.
Clare:
And just for clarity again, for the audience to understand, so HotDoc is an app and it enables patients to book appointments through telehealth.
Agnes:
It enables a lot of things. So it enables them to do standard consultations in person. That's where we first started. It's kind of our bread and butter, but yeah, more recently with COVID obviously, telehealth became more of a thing. And it's funny because prior to COVID I think a lot of people would just say telehealth wasn't something that they would prefer. But now, I think more than ever, it's actually a really valuable way to connect with a general practitioner because it might suit your lifestyle a lot more, you might deal with social anxiety, you might have all these reasons why, you know, seeing someone face to face isn't as great of an experience for you and having telehealth is just so easy. But, primarily I think, we kind of call ourselves a patient engagement app. So, what we mean by that is we help our clinics just communicate better to their patient base. And we hope that in doing so, it actually allows people to feel more empowered, to take control of their healthcare, get closer to their general practitioners and essentially work on that preventative piece as opposed to reacting to issues as they arise. So, that's kind of the greater scope of what we're trying to achieve, but on a day to day basis, it's yeah. Online bookings, reminders about your appointments, bringing back into the clinic if you need another test or, you know, all those sorts of like little tiny automated things.
Clare:
Yeah. It's super interesting though, isn't it? Because like a lot of the time tech is implemented as a reason to, I don't know, let's say save money. So, particularly things around contact centers, there's a lot of tech being implemented to divert people away from contact with a human because of the cost implicate it involves. But I'm always, you know, celebrating and sharing stories where tech and automation is a win-win for, let's say on this occasion, the patient, the clinic and the business more broadly because, I think kind of the employee experience of trying to shuffle and manage paperwork and reminders and all that kind of thing. Yes, it is expensive, but it's also a really difficult job. So, being able to create automation that also helps employees have a better experience of the working environment is good. Doeswhat you do handle things like payments as well?
Agnes:
Yes. So again, COVID kind of forced this or it, it forced technological advancement really in the space because, number one, a lot of people who work within the space, obviously it's very tightly regulated by the government. So there's a lot of trust that needs to be built in order for people to even want to introduce technology, to automate processes that they would've normally trusted a human for such as something like payments. So, COVID kind of forced a lot of people to adopt, but more than ever, we kind of saw a need to be able to take online payments specifically if a patient wasn't actually going to be physically in the clinic to have their appointment. We wanted to make it easy because at that point, a lot of receptionist specifically, they were spending a lot of their time chasing up appointments that were done by telehealth and then taking credit card details over the phone.
Agnes:
So not super secure, not a great experience for the patient. And we thought there's probably a better way in which we could do this and so was born our online payments, our online payments product, which is still in iteration today, two years, two and a half years later, I reckon. But it's kind of like, it's something that's really exciting for me, I think because you kind of think of it like the Uber for healthcare, right. You know, something where you think end to end a patient could make an online booking, go to see their practitioner and walk out the door and they don't even have to think about, you know, what it costs because they already know ahead of time when they booked. And that gets automatically deducted, like how great for me as a patient, that would've been incredible experience. So yeah, we're focusing on all those little tiny bits and pieces that we think we could automate and just make it a lot easier for a patient to get involved in healthcare, specifically their own.
Clare:
My little geeky senses just sprung up then because I'm currently researching for a keynote that I'm going to be doing in the USA, around customer or humanising healthcare experiences. So it'd be really great actually to share a little bit more about what HotDoc are doing, maybe in my presentation about that. But then it sounds quite similar in terms of the multitude of stakeholder relationships that contribute to a patient experience and I'm looking at this from a health insurance provider angle. So, looking at the journey, the processes, assistance, assistance technology, the customer, the end user typically gets their insurance through their company. So, when they join a company, they get it as a benefit and kind, so kind of the start of the journey is onboarding via their HR department and then the health insurance provider then has their own kind of systems and processes that sit behind that, which is dealing with the payroll is paying deductions out like a B2B experience.
Clare:
And then, like you said, that kind of within the clinics or the health providers and then this extra dimension on recharges and you know, bookkeeping, I guess you'd say patient record keeping and one of the stats that I've come across is that people would rather go to the DMV than deal with the health insurer which is, you know, a challenge, right? So, this is super interesting to hear, you know, the mission that you guys are on to actually, you know, create the ultimate healthcare experience, that Uber of healthcare, is really inspiring. But, I was going to ask, do you have that component in Australia? Is it a health insurance or a national health, or is there an aspect,
Agnes:
...like automated sort of health insurance policies or ways in...
Clare:
Well, no, I just meant how does the health care system work? Is it like in the UK, we have national health service and everything's pretty much free at point of delivery. We pay for our prescriptions, but we do that kind of directly, but in America, there's no, well, there's a limited health service, which is only accessible to certain groups of people. So, most people have to go through health insurance and therefore it's actually a business of health rather than a service that's provided. I just wondered what it was like in Australia is that...
Agnes:
Yeah. In Australia, I guess it's similar, we have, what's called Medicare. So Medicare is the government funded or sort of like the public health system and yeah. Specifically for our customers, they will benefit from Medicare because the appointments that they do through their general practitioners at their clinic site, they'll actually be reimbursed by this Medicare program. So, most of our clinics actually, it is a pretty topical question that you ask because a lot of our clinics are actually experiencing, what everyone's experiencing right now, which is the cost of living is rising. And so is cost of yeah. Cost of operations. And what used to happen was a lot of these clinics would be what we call bulk build. So a hundred percent of your appointment fee was essentially reimbursed by the government, but because the government can only give X amount of money.
Agnes:
What they're finding now is the, that amount of money doesn't actually cover their operating costs. So a lot of them have to now move or make a decision to move to either what we call mixed billing, where they sort of do a half and half system or private billing where they essentially do a very large sort of out of pocket or what we call a gap fee. So, yeah, it's quite topical because all of that comes into the idea of running a business, right. And while we do have this really great public healthcare system, has all these reimbursements, our customers are really still feeling it at the end of the day when it comes to all of the world events that are causing, you know, severe inflation and all those offering costs to rise.
Clare:
Yeah. And it's a real problem in the UK at the moment that nobody can get GP appointments. I know my mom and her partner, they're on the waiting list of like six months to just have general appointments and I recognise what you were saying a little bit earlier about the shift of patient behavior, during the pandemic to, you know, something they previously might have just been like, I'll never do that. I'll never see a doctor via telehealth. And actually you have to, because there was no choice and people got used to it. And a lot of people are, oh, actually this is okay. And a lot of UK general practitioners now have kind of introduced technology for bookings, for telehealth appointments, being the first point of contact rather than the GP appointment, I assume for similar reasons. But the volume and capacity management is more efficient with clear bookings, digital systems and processing, because yeah, you physically can't get an appointment to see someone in person now, but I don't know how much those two things are actually interrelated, the shift to digital versus, you know, just the over capacity challenge.
Clare:
But anyway, so there's lots going on, but what's the future going to look like? You know, we've dealt with this unprecedented demand for healthcare, you know, you guys were huge part of the vaccination program. You've clearly learned a lot, these products iterated and developed as a result of changes in needs. What do you think the future of healthcare tech looks like?
Agnes:
Yeah. If you had asked me maybe a week before, I would've probably said it slightly differently, but for me right now, it's actually quite hard to think about post pandemic because all the advice in Australia is actually we're heading into the wave of re infections, you know, we've reinstated our pandemic payments. So, I think in some cases, probably not ending anytime soon, which means that there's probably a lot more of that lingering tech assistance that we can still do. Even just today, we had a change in sort of the, I guess the recommendations of what can be delivered to children. And, I was already on a slack being like, Hey, there was a exchange, let's get that sorted for our customers and get that rolled out as soon as possible. So that continues to still be a focus, I think for us.
Agnes:
But as I said, the silver lining kind of is that all of this COVID stuff really fast tracked the adoption tech in one of those really highly regulated industries. And now more than ever, they're actually asking for more features and how we can solve all these little tiny problems for them. And I think it, as you said, it's also helped patients discover how tech can make things easier for them with managing their own healthcare. So for me, I think the future really is understanding how we can be more holistic around some of that. So, one thing that we are looking at is the GP, for example, is only one slice of the pie when it comes to managing your healthcare. Most people will have, you know, a regular dentist that they go to, or a regular optometrist or a psychologist or any of the mix of the above.
Agnes:
If they need need surgery, they'll go to a specialist, for example. And for me, I definitely see that there's a lot of potential for us to bring a lot of these sort of different specialties together. Yeah. And disparate specialties together and make things easier for them too, because you know, they need to work on things like referrals. For example, a GP will refer you to a surgeon, but what happens with that referral? Is it on paper? Is that, you know, how can we digitize some of that? A lot of stuff still gets faxed, for example, you'll, I'm sure you probably can't believe how much stuff still gets faxed nowadays when it comes to the medical space. So, I think there's a lot of potential there but the biggest thing is also just, we were able to be successful within the GP space because we really truly trust...
Agnes:
...we really truly understood the GP market when we are looking at all of these other specialties, they're all different and they operate differently. So from a customer experience perspective, we have to go down the same route of trying to figure out what makes them tick and what will actually solve their problems. Because what will solve the problem of an optometrist might not be the same as a psychologist, for example. So yeah, I think there's one thing is getting that holistic view. And then also now that we have sort of the foundation of payments, how can we, I guess amplify that to make it even easier for a patient, you know, can we automate things like script renewals or can we do other things such as, you know, being able to, as you said, take away more social anxiety from people and give them a really seamless experience with the online payment process where we can go all the way from end to end, whether that be online bookings, see the practitioner through telehealth and or telehealth video, pay for that online and then have something delivered to your door to help you with your healthcare.
Agnes:
I think all of those things would just be like, you know, taking away the stress of what it means to look after yourself. And if we can prioritise that, then I think we're doing something right.
Clare:
Yeah. And again, because I've just been researching in this space at the moment, I think there's a really interesting overlap with medical, sorry, not medical, health tech, that is your own staff. So the reason I have an Apple watch was because, a while back, just before the pandemic, I signed up with a private medical insurance group called Vitality Health, and what really appealed to me was the holistic way in which they wanted to help you prevent illness in the future. So, one of the things that really attracted me to, you know, giving this a try was, you know, not only did they give you like 50% off gym subscriptions and that you can get 50% off trainers, so you can start exercising and running, you know, they try to give you benefits as a member of this healthcare.
Clare:
Which really, I guess it's just health insurance, the front end experience of membership to this community where you connect your app or watch to their app. And if you hit your steps goals, for example, you get a free Starbucks, cinema tickets, if you've been doing all the things that you're supposed to do and tracking, and there's a lot of integrations with different apps that, I just keep saying customer, I don't know what it would be in this instance... the humna who is trying to be healthy, and for me, I think there's a real kind of potential future opportunity to bring some of these, what are currently more disparate propositions that are offered in silos. So companies who have health and wellbeing initiatives versus the health insurers versus the tech providers that can help to bring these things together.
Clare:
But actually the world becomes a healthier nation. Or even if you just think of the UK, because we've managed to join the dots between different kinds of technologies occupying different spaces, but with the intention of, you know, right back to your point at the beginning, making a difference, making a difference to people's health, obviously the healthier the population, the less cost to the government for medical programs, the healthier the nation obviously as individuals, the happier we'll be to stay healthier for longer. When it comes to insurers, the less money they were paying out. So there's this kind of global benefit, right. To helping people at the front end become more healthy. And I think technology is really a super helpful way of doing that. I'm probably not, you can't really call me an early doctor anymore, but I'm like a super user of my own health tech and tracking my Apple watch and me, we do our steps together.
Clare:
I record my workouts, it's connected to my Peloton bike. Everything that I do is recorded. I journal on a weekly basis, work with a PT, only on notion actually, but yeah, I'm sure there's a way that he could have an app that could interface with all of this stuff. But I think kind of the, I use all of those services that you mentioned, you know, I have a dentist, I have a doctor, I have a psychologist. I have like the whole suite and a personal trainer. I have a chiropractor, I have holistic practitioners that I also work with around my health. I think that would just be amazing if there was a way that that could, um, all be brought into a, a singular bookings, payment tracking experience for me, that would help me get healthier and access that. But obviously I'm probably a bit of an edge case because I don't think that many people are as obsessed about their Apple watch as I am. So, that conversation brought us all the way back to Apple again. We started Apple, we ended with Apple. I promise this podcast is not sponsored by Apple. But it's been amazing to have you on the show. What one piece of advice or takeaway would you like women in CX out there to have from our conversation today?
Agnes:
Mm, this, I think we covered a lot of things, but the truth of the matter is a lot of what we're able to achieve, it comes back down to that psychology piece that we talked about at the beginning, right. And there's a reason we love Apple. There's a reason we trust in it. And there's a reason you are happy to do all the steps to get your cinema tickets. And I think it comes down to the idea of trust in the business and whether you can maintain that trust as a CX team as well. When you are thinking about, you know, your relationships with your customers and even like tenuous relationships, like our customers, P customers, our customers, patients, right? So for me, I think it's about focusing on, you can do all the right things, but if you don't have that trust piece of people, on a, you know, on that level, don't actually want to buy in, then they're not going to right.
Agnes:
So the way you kind of build trust is by being consistent, I think, and listening to your customers and getting as close to being their trusted advisor as possible. And I think that's how we were able to get the market share in the GP space here in Australia is by being that trusted advisor and really listening to the pain points and the needs of that GP space and solving for them, you know, individually. So yeah, I would say work on being a trusted advisor for your customers and that psychology piece, because I think that's when you are really truly customer obsessed.
Clare:
I love that and amen to all of that. I just thought it was wonderful. Thank you so much for giving us an insight into the health tech space, the healthcare space, the future of health tech. Thank you for sharing your story about how you learned to harness your creativity and apply it in our fields. Um, I can feel it in your voice that you are so passionate about customer experience, doing, you know, better for the humans at the end of your service, whether it's, you know, the client or it's the end customer. Yeah, I'm feeling super buzzed, ready to go into my day and deliver great service myself now. So, thank you so much, Agnes and yeah, looking forward to continuing to collaborate with you in the Women in CX community.
Agnes:
Wonderful. Thank you so much, Clare.
Clare:
Thank you to everyone for listening along as well, and we'll see you all next time. Bye for now.
Clare:
Thanks for listening to the Women in CX podcast with me, Clare Muscutt. If you enjoyed the show, please drop us a like, subscribe and leave a review on whichever platform you're listening or watching on. And if you want to know more about becoming a member of the world's first online community for women in Customer Experience, please check out www.womenincx.community and follow the Women in CX page on LinkedIn. Join us again next time when I’ll be talking to one of our community members from Ireland, about frontline customer service and dealing with bullying in the workplace. See you all next time!
