In this insightful presentation, Kevin shares the story of Athena Health's "100 Accountability Framework," a robust VoC program that has significantly improved their product development and customer engagement. The framework revolves around a Commercial Priorities List (CPL) of 100 items, which serves as a unified source of truth for the company's customer-driven initiatives.

Key points include:

• The CPL is derived from about 20,000 pieces of customer feedback across various channels.

• 44% of Athena's features in 2023 were driven by customer feedback.

• The framework includes multiple data sources: customer community, internal insights, escalations, and user groups.

• The CPL is curated annually through a combination of natural language processing and manual expertise.

• Each priority on the list includes underlying data, impact analysis, and status tracking.

• The company aims for 100% accountability on the list, either through active development or clear communication about resource allocation.

• The framework enables transparent communication with customers about feature development and roadmaps.

• Athena is now evolving the CPL to be more dynamic and to engage product teams more effectively.

• The presentation emphasizes the importance of being transparent with customers, including saying "no" when necessary.

For an in-depth exploration of the panel's insights, you can watch the full video on YouTube.

Speaker:

Kevin Gentry - Director of Product Engagement at AthenaHealth

Where to find Kevin Gentry:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-gentry-37b37222/

To learn more about Monterey AI, check our website and LinkedIn page

Transcripts:

Kevin: 

Hello. I'm on. Okay. Thanks so much. Monterey. I for having me really excited to be here and really privileged to be with you all. I want to meet everyone here. For me, I think this is really cool because it's an opportunity to see V. O. C. Playing out in places outside of health care tech where I spend most of my time.

So when I thought actually after hearing the discussions this morning, there was a part of me that was like, I just want to scrap what I want to, you know, talk about and just kind of zero in on some of the topics that so, but maybe we can float in on a couple of those throughout this. But

I want to tell you the tale of 100 and what that means. And I think we're going to laugh and cry. It's going to be a heck of a lot of purple and I'm excited about that. At Athena, we've, we've, built out a really robust and mature voice. The customer program kind of inside of our kind of experience management division.

We picked up a couple of industry accolades along the way, which we're really, really proud of. And just a quick little background on me. I I have spent about 15 years in healthcare was first kind of running hospital operations and I was running the orthopedic practice at Boston Children's Hospital and then I heard about this company, Athena Health, and it was doing some really cool stuff in tech.

And they were building out a consulting team. And it was an opportunity for me to join a team of folks, travel around the country, meet with a bunch of different customers, and seek care delivery across a variety of different settings, where I was really, really biased in the academic sort of medicine bubble that I was in.

And I did that for a couple of years, and then I ended up kind of doing a little bit of stuff in product and did some stuff in sort of a foot in marketing. And then I was PMing a bunch of high level product escalations, which was wild because they all were going to lead to whether or not customers were going to stay or go.

So the pressure of keeping people from leaving was intense. And and then I found myself kind of on this team of folks, highly talented, passionate people who all, We're bananas about keeping customers front and center of everything that we do. And I kind of found my home. And so I had a chance to kind of nurture a lot of the processes there and kind of grow and kind of develop into a lot of VOC leadership across the business.

And so we're always monitoring our network. So we're a single, single instance, kind of cloud based platform. Pretty massive in the ambulatory market. And we always want to make sure that, you know, we have uptime, performance, everything that's happening. And We're we're constantly kind of monitoring that, but we're also proactively outreaching to customers.

And we're asking kind of how can we make you better? What are the things you're looking for? And in 2023? 44 percent of all of our features that we rolled out were driven by customer feedback and I know some of you might see like why 44 percent but You have to also realize that in healthcare, it's super, super regulated and we have to kind of lop off the first pass of our resource allocation and all of our R& D spend to making sure that we're compliant and, and, and meeting all the regulatory requirements, but we're really, really proud of that.

That's one of the metrics that we continue to reflect on. This year, we're hovering about 48%, which is really cool. Hopefully As we get through the rest of our releases this year, it doesn't balance out too much. We can kind of keep that going. But this is also an example of what we measure and what we are able to capture and we actually reflect this back to customers.

And so, we drive our advocacy across a number of different experiences kind of at the broadest level. And here's a question. Where are you glorifying singular inputs at the expense of impact? I think Kristen mentioned that. Kind of in her talk about, you know, there's one thing that's coming in and one channel, and we need to just kind of drop everything and develop this thing.

We were in that boat. But now, we really kind of drive our advocacy across the product experience. experience and the release experience. And these are all kind of mutually reinforcing and each one of these has dedicated folks who program manage them. There's ceremonies, there's artifacts that are all associated.

And we feel like this is a really good kind of paradigm for us to, to, to kind of keep a handle on, on the overall experience situation. But because this is the tale of 100, I'd love to talk to you about all three of these in depth. We're going to spend most of our time talking about the commercial priorities list.

So where did the commercial price list come from? In around 2016, Didn't expect there was a build. 2017 Athena went through a lot of kind of significant business transformation. And we had a lot of changing leadership. It was really a time when I felt like Athena finally became truly kind of customer centric that was shared across the organization.

The team that has now kind of become the experience management division that I'm on was kind of coming together. We were storming, forming, norming, all the stuff. And we also, it was the first time that we were able to get our arms around all of the data that was across all the different channels of input across the customer base and prospect base, everything.

And we started to fold that in And we did a lot of significant investments into our overall data infrastructure and our platform kind of started the, what was it, the beginning of a sort of data lake, that we could kind of keep all this in one place. And we started to see that there's kind of some emerging common themes, right?

And it helped us really also understand that our customers and end users are gonna engage in a variety of different ways. You're not gonna always hear everything that comes through in your customer care from tickets or because of responses in your MPS. Or for us, we have a really robust customer community platform that we've built out.

That is probably where the lion's share of most of the product feedback ideas come from. So it's a crowdsource community. Every end user has access to it. We talk about it even in the sales process through onboarding to get them ready to engage there. And then they can go in, submit ideas, vote up ideas, comment on ideas, and it gives us a tremendous amount of data.

And helps us also kind of put ourselves in the shoes of what those users are feeling. I really appreciate all the customers who engage in that because doctors are busy, nurses are busy, so I always like to tell my team, you know, no doctor, like, Wakes up in the morning is like I can't wait to drive to my practice to be able to log into the success community today and log some ideas like Because that's our day to day.

We spend our time in that data So when we do receive those inputs and those engagement kind of feedback Data points that come out of that. I really kind of treat that as gold We also have a channel that is dedicated to every customer facing person or even not customer facing people. If they talk to a customer and they hear an idea, they can log it through it and called an internal insight.

This has allowed us to allow CSMs to be able to capture a lot of key decision maker and buyer level perspectives, right? So if you think about CSM is having a performance conversation with their customer, they're not necessarily going to tell that executive like. We'll go to the success community and log an idea and vote it up.

They're saying, no, we're having a partnership call. I'm telling you right now. So when they logged that feedback, it allows them to capture of robust description, the impact of that organization, a proposed solution that the customer is talking about. So we get a really rich, well rounded view of the feedback that comes in through there.

And it really starts to represent sort of that key decision maker, buyer level persona. We do incorporate data from our escalations. That's important. We hopefully that those are just anomalous. We hopefully that they're just kind of quickly taken care of. But when it's a trend and customers are continuing to escalate over the same thing, that becomes really, really powerful.

And then, something that we've made a lot of investments in the last few years in is our user group program. So, it rides on the chassis of our community space which is built in Salesforce. But, we have probably around 40 to 45 really healthy, thriving user groups. This allows us to be able to engage customers, and they're intended to be customer led and Athena supported.

But around like specialties or modalities or customer types, you know, so we have like an FQHC user group that is crazy active that allows us to really zero in and understand like, what are the things they're talking about? Where do they share best practices? What do we need to get in front of? It's also a really big platform in this that our product teams indirectly engage with.

So we also facilitate requests for speakers all the time from a product team. So if you think about They've worked really hard to roll out a new feature and they want to make sure that they're really driving adoption or getting the perspective from a certain user type. We can say like, why don't you come to the next user group meeting and talk about it?

It's been a really rich experience, but we also source a ton of data out of that. I think I've hammered at home. We have a lot. So Once we started to kind of get all this, we were like, we need a mechanism. We need an artifact. How do we, it was still frustrating to know sort of like, what's the biggest bet we can make or how do we really understand what's driving the most impact in terms of investments that's going to meet customers what they need that serves the majority or all of our customer base.

And so we developed this commercial priorities list and it starts with The widest cut on an annual basis of probably around 20, 000, that's probably more now like rows of feedback through a mixture of natural language processing and manual curation and SME kind of expertise that we have on the team.

We're able to kind of look for the common themes and sub themes and map themes to jobs to be done. So that we can go from this wide cut of disparate data into what are the things that are emerging. Once we get there, we create a bunch of candidates. These are all things that could potentially make the commercial priorities list.

And it allows us to go and evaluate, okay, so where is that impact? How many customers are associated? What's the revenue associated? What's the user types associated? Is this a good mix? Is it a true reflection? Should it make the cut over something else because of Some initiative or some, some focus on product investment.

And then we have this really important ceremony before we move forward with defining what the final list of 100 is. We specifically engage all of our commercial leadership across CS marketing, some professional services and others to basically show them, Hey, here's what the data is saying. Here's our perspective.

How does this square with conversations you're having or things that you're getting involved with? Out of that ceremony, we've had things that have changed position on the list. Some things made it over the line. Some things got deprecated. It also helped us identify if you're hearing this from your customers, but we're not having the data to support it.

Your CSMs need to be logging those internal insights or you need to be directing those users to engage in the success community. Where do we have those gaps where we're just blind? I like to say, like, we're only as good as our data. So if we don't know, and it's continuing to just kind of escalate, and that CSM is trying to, like, nurse that relationship, we're not going to be able to do something about it.

So that's a huge ceremony. And then we finally publish the list. Yay, we did it. Okay, it's an annualized list. Over the last few years, we've sort of experimented with, Do we publish it on Jan 1 and it runs for the whole calendar year? Is it something that we do later in the summer? Because that's kind of when R& D is thinking about OK Arts for the following year.

What sort of, we haven't totally sort of cracked the sweet spot on that. And I'll talk a little bit more about where we're going now. But we publish that. And what we end up with, is a really nice list of ranked 100 items. That's a unified source of truth. Carries a lot of brand equity across the business.

It's available to anybody and everybody across the business. And it's the thing that product can point to, and service teams can point to, and leaders can point to, and say like, this is the thing we need to do. It's going to have impact. And it really is a way to represent sort of across the needs of our customer base and prospects.

that we're hearing in market, but also it's really trying to be oriented around what's going to drive retention, satisfaction, growth, right? Like we, we spend a lot of time in those, those process steps, having a lot of healthy debate and arguments with each other, with ourselves, but we want to make sure we get it right.

So I wanted to share with you sort of like what's behind a priority and what does that look like? So it's like the anatomy of a priority. So when we curate that, each priority has all of the underlying data that's informing that. And what's the impact of that data. And so, this priority could have like, tens and dozens of feedback inputs across all of those different channels.

And we can summarize sort of like, what's the overall revenue, what's the distinct accounts, where are the most of the feedback coming in, and We synthesize a description. So, if you imagine a priority is probably chocked with maybe six to eight use cases, all rolling up to a common theme. We want to summarize that so that it's easily consumable.

Then we can track the status. When these things start to get resourced, we can, at a real time, go through and update the status. We have a really healthy hygiene and discipline where all of this data can be used. Is connected to the feature itself in JIRA. We have a bunch of dedicated fields, which is where we can put everything.

And so that allows us now for a bunch of work we did this last couple of years to have a lot of automated reporting, which is really, really exciting. We also include where we publish POVs. So we feel it's really important to be really transparent with our customers. We publish our roadmap to our customers.

We have conversations around what's on, what's on plan, what's not on plan. Why. When we have a priority, and we'll talk about this when we get into statuses, that we're not going to be able to do, we feel it's important to make sure that we can explain to customers, in customer facing language, which we craft, because we get a lot of acronyms back from product teams why?

What's our rationale? Or we may be investing in an area that is going to solve this problem ultimately, but we're going to do it in a different way. So we really feel that that's important. So where do we go from here? Are you instilling confidence and operating with accountability? Are you telling your customers no?

A couple of questions to think about. Once we had the CPL, it really allowed us to kind of follow this path in a confident way. We had everything, we had all the channels and all the plumbing pointed. We had the processes and the buy in across the business to have the confidence in our analyzing and advocating by way of the commercial priority.

We're able to track and follow things along and partner effectively with product operations, research teams to be able to make sure that we're identifying customers to get involved and feature build. Part of it for me is like, can we actually bring customers along for that entire journey and connect it?

Even if it takes a long time to develop a feature, the perception around the momentum, if you bring them along, is, is really powerful. And then we own communication. Close the loop. And I won't say so much about Closeloop because they're a panel. And I don't want to steal thunder. But, hugely powerful. And so, we need to track it.

How do we know if we're effective? And so when we publish the CPL, we have brokered shared ownership with VOC, CS and operations leadership our chief product officer, so everybody on R& D, To make sure that we, by the time we get to the end of that 12 month cycle, before we refresh the list again, we hit a hundred percent.

That doesn't mean that we're going to be able to deliver a hundred percent of the things on that list, but what it does mean is that there's going to be a set of those things that are in an active status, meaning that maybe there's some research happening. Maybe there's some things in development.

Maybe we're ready to do some testing. Maybe we've rolled out components. Hopefully a lot of stuff gets there. But the things that we're not going to be able to do, we still want to make sure that we're responsible for those. So the not currently resourced items, we include a status that's not currently resourced, but it's on our roadmap, right?

We want to be able to tell customers that like, yes, but not now. But it's coming. And we're going to continue to track it. Or, this is where the POVs come into place. It's not currently resourced, POV. Okay. I don't know how I'm doing on time.

The, the ones that we need to get by the end of that year is we don't want to have anything and not currently resource without anything with it. So by the end of the day, we want to make sure that we can communicate something or share an update with customers across everything.

It's really, really helpful because in addition to being an internal tool, This data and information can be rolled into customer conversations. So this is an example of a slide. I've tweaked some things to de identify, but it's pretty, pretty true. And I developed a lot of like CS enablement resources and that we rolled out to CSM so that they can tell the conversation with their customers that like, Hey, last year, 24 of the features that we released addressed this many of the ideas that came from your organization.

You can slice that even further. You can say, like, this came from feedback ideas that came from physicians at your organization. That becomes really powerful. Nurses at your organization. Front desk staff at your organization. Oh, and by the way, if we look to the next upcoming release, we know that we're going to be rolling out nine features that you care about because you've given us feedback about it.

Here's a list of features that you really, really wanted. And this is really important because if we look and see that they're not actually adopting those features, we can have that conversation and say, You told us you wanted this. We developed this thing. We know it matters to you. Why aren't you using it?

What did we miss that becomes really powerful? And then we can show them because we talked to the customers about the priority list. Here's your alignment by way of your feedback to the overall list. So out of 100, you have feedback that's actually informing 97 percent of those. That's really good. So it helps set the expectation and helps drive transparency.

And it really helps the CSMs. If I was a CSM, I always thought I want to be the person who's audible ready with this for my customer because that really reinforces my trusted relationship.

Not currently resourced on product roadmap, not currently resourced POVs available. It's important to sometimes tell customers no. When I was doing a lot of the commercial enablement in the earlier stages of VOC, I would do a lot of strategic client engagement work. We'd pull together a partnership meeting with R& D, their executives, whatever.

The thing that I heard the most was get to the no's faster. If it's a no, it's a no. For the longest time, Athena didn't do such a hot job. We'd kick the can down the road, doesn't feel good, say no. But it's actually kinder because then those organizations can say, okay, let's make some changes or let's maybe go look for a marketplace partner.

Or maybe let's think about ways that we can actually solve this a little bit differently. And it's just honest and I think it actually goes a long way to reinforce trust. So the last couple minutes, I don't know if I took way too much time. Sorry, Sean. We've made a lot of progress. We've gone back to the drawing board.

Who loves a whiteboard? I know, I know you do. You said yes. This was an argument I had with my boss and some others around like we need to evolve this. The CPL has served us well, but it's time to evolve it. You know, our customers have evolved, our businesses have evolved. The inputs are getting different.

The CPL can't really at this stage be all things to everyone anymore. We need to think about it a little bit differently. So Now, where I'm focused right now, literally this year, is how do I take a lot of the elements and the principles that we've learned from the CPL, maybe not think of it in terms of a singular artifact that's annualized, but think about engaging our product teams in a more dynamic way.

And I'm building out a new process in full partnership with product because we've built that trust over years. And it's really great where we can still see that like, let's actually show you these lenses of data of like, what's the user driven perspective? What's the market driven perspective? Because we have a ton of prospect data.

What's the, as a platform company, we have billions of API transactions every year. There's a ton of needs coming in. We need to isolate that. Minor enhancements, the little death by a thousand cuts stuff, right? Huge customer satisfier if we can address those. We were able to get a commitment that 50 percent of all minor enhancements this year are coming from customer feedback.

Huge. But at the same time you're still going to find times when they overlap and that becomes really powerful too to show. So we need to be able to do both. So what does the tale of a hundred teach us? The stakes are high in VOC. I tell my team all the time behind every data point is a human and a heartbeat.

In healthcare, does, those opportunities to be able to develop new capabilities makes the difference between how that care transaction goes. Everybody in this room, your customers are just as important. So I'm not saying healthcare is any more important or not. But, I like to think that the work that we're all doing is important.

So, where are you glorifying seniorial inputs? Are you instilling confidence in operating accountability? Are you telling your customers no?

I think we probably have time for one question. Yes, okay. If anybody in the audience wants to

Q&A: 

Amazing work. I, you have crazy work ethic and really thick skin. I cannot imagine the amount of hours and blood and sweat and tears to, to even get to where you're at. Question about the list. Whenever I created a list, I feel like the list was the lead in and the value was actually what the list created.

Kevin: 

Yeah.

Q&A: 

Can you tell me your perspective on that? Was, is that true in this case as well? Meaning

Kevin: 

that whatever capabilities you develop don't necessarily mean that they're building the exact thing that's on that list.

Q&A: 

Yeah. For me, the list was like a placemat for the good conversations to happen. But it wasn't like, here's a list, do 1 through 6, tell us when you're ready for 7, you know.

Kevin: 

Yeah. So, this is where we've learned a lot through kind of a couple of different iterations where we, at one point when we made these, were way too thematic. And it was like a blunt instrument that was just clobbering product. And like, they were like, I don't even know where to start. So we would like, eat the elephant.

But then you end up with a bunch of stuff that carries over, list over list, because you've got a lot of GA component instead of GA. The way that we're, that's kind of where we're evolved now and way I'm thinking about it is that we want to be discreet where we can, but we also want to make sure that we're assessing, okay, especially if product is thinking about solving it in a different way, how do we make sure that the data that's provided is informative and useful and helpful?

But sometimes it even needs to be like, okay, let's actually do a research study. And we've. In addition to kind of our maturity of engaging with product teams, I think about it's been the same with across all of R and D. So our product operations division has, they run all of the R and D hygiene, but then they also have research ops, design ops and alpha beta all rolled into one, which is really, really great.

So now we can actually just speak the same language and partner with them on a bunch of different things. And I get requests all the time, like, hey, who are the customers we should engage with to ask about this concept that we're thinking about.

Q&A: 

Awesome. Thank you so much, Kevin. Impressive how rigorous and thorough your program is.