Kevin Gentry: Leading VoC at Athenahealth, 100 Top Customer Priorities Framework, and AI

Activant Capital Research

April 24, 2024

Summary

Kevin Gentry, Director of Product engagement at Athenahealth, continues to lead innovation of an award-winning Voice of the Customer (VoC) Program into it's 10th year. He brings personalization to care experiences for more than 160k providers and 110 million patients, and a framework for collective success to an organization of 6k+.In the first ever Making Waves Podcast episode, Chun and Kevin discuss:

  • The inner workings of the 100 Top Customer Priorities Framework

  • Finding expertise in Voice of the Customer (VoC) experience management (XM)

  • Deploying a closed feedback loop system for internal and external accessibility

  • Navigating common hurdles in the VoC journey

  • Maintaining organizational awareness leveraging integrated tech

  • Establishing cross-functional alignment and accountability

  • The power of personalization and it’s measurable impact on growth

  • Intersection of employee and customer experiences

  • Scaling VoC Programs to transform care at every touchpoint

  • The AI do’s and don’ts of future care and human connection

  • And more!

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Speakers

Where to find Kevin Gentry:

Where to find Chun Jiang:

References


Transcripts

Chun:

Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Making Waves show. We've got Kevin Gentry, Director of Product Engagement at Athenahealth, and really a pioneer in Voice of the Customer and experience management. Why don't you give us a little bit intro about yourself, and your work?

Kevin:

Great. Thanks for having me. Kevin Gentry and I work at Athenahealth. I've been there for a little over nine years now, worn a bunch of hats and have really fallen in love with experience management, CX, VoC, all the things. And, I lead a highly talented team of folks who work directly with our product stakeholders and help inform, what our customers are saying they need.

Chun:

Awesome. Awesome. I love the elevator pitch. I know you've been at Athena for a very long time. And I would love to learn more about like, when you first started doing VoC work, what was that like and how that has been.

Kevin:

So the real answer I sort of stumbled into it, to be honest. You know, when I reflect back on my career, I've always held roles that were customer oriented and a customer centric. And I joined Athena, what was first, an advisory services sort of consulting team that was coming together. And it was an opportunity for me to hit the road, meet with a bunch of customers and really help them optimize their use of our products and services, overcome a lot of challenges, change management issues with the adoption of new technology, and, really trying to make sure that they could continue to derive satisfaction, value, and, and stick with us for a long time and grow with us.

And so I did that and then I had a chance to wear a bunch of different hats, kind of spun around the organization a little bit and learned a ton from some brilliant colleagues, made some mistakes, paid attention to Athena as it went through a very significant transformation. And then I found myself, on this team that was organizing an emerging voice of the customer function.

And, that was when I first was really exposed to the more traditional tenets of experience management, CX concepts and strategies, and VoC as a program.

Chun:

When I first met you, I was just like curious about who is the person behind this like massive program at an enterprise that is like in highly regulated industry. And it seems we like already in this place for a little bit, we understand how complicated like can data can get and at the same time, like how. What's the customer, how the customer themselves and the how cross like collaboration team can be, there's just like a lot, a lot of nuances and challenges and lessons there to one. I would be curious, like, how did you get started? Like when you first, like stamping into this VoC program, what was the first like project look like? What was the first like initiative or how did you get started?

Kevin:

Kind of where did I first really get turned on to it? It was, I did a listening tour. I was working for our chief medical officer at the time. , and I was sort of commissioned to do a little bit of a listening tour. And it was really just to go and engage with some customers, understand how they, how do they actually define success with Athena?

How do they understand. You know, that we're delivering on the value they're looking for. And it was really rewarding. Number one, I love talking to customers, so it was great. I remember there was a moment though, and I was walking into this. Fairly large organization had, a number of practices that extended into a couple of different states and was sort of guided back with the customer success manager to their C suite area in their back office.

And I noticed that they had all of the. They had their mission on the wall and their guiding principles and things that they stood for. And I remember just, I stopped and I asked the CSM. I was like, do you know what those are? And he was looking at them and it just occurred to me in that moment. And I became really fascinated with how can we really know our customers, not just know a lot about them by way of like, Whatever's in CRM and metadata and some different things, but like, how do we really know our customers?

And it was sort of like really prompted this fascination for me around everything that we do should reflect back how that individual customer sees their mission and values, right? Like, can we actually. deliver updates, enhancements, solutions, touch points with them along the entire sort of journey they have with us in a way that translates back to how they see this is actually helping me solve my mission and my guiding principles.

So that's really, it's sort of like when it really started to kind of. Unfold for me. And then as I've, as I've thought about VoC and customer experience, and sort of been in this space, I really think of VoC programs needing to sort of operationalize around kind of three different dimensions.

Needs to be accessible, responsive, and personalized. And that last one is I think one of the hardest things to do. And I spend probably way too much time thinking and bemoaning about it. But I think that that's, that's really kind of three things that need to be in place in order to do that. Right.

And then, you can have a really, really, rewarding program. So, 1 of the 1st things I did officially on the team as I was leading, commercial enablement programs for VoC. And so I was spending a lot of time with customer success operations for their customer facing teams, even sales.

And, that was when I really started to understand and put the pieces together out the transformational power of collecting and acting on the right set of data.

Chun:

Tell me what, what are, what is your definition of this kind of accessibility of VoC.

Kevin:

So I think that one of the things I like to say, and I told this to my team and I told this to everybody, I was like, we're only as good as our data. And I think that like, when you, when you, what I'm really proud of in our program. And this is also hats off to my boss and a lot of the direction that he set forth to really bring together a true omni-channel approach.

And so when we think about connecting across everything that we're hearing entire inside of our entire survey journey work, which includes NPS and sentiment and a bunch of things, we have a really robust platform for customers to engage on, that they're providing a lot of individual pieces of feedback.

And then we have a bunch of internal channels as well that, you know, CSMs can vote for ideas and feedback on behalf of their customers. And we use that to also work with sales for prospect and our training team for the things that they hear and others. And so we're able to then sort of start to, because of that access, both internally and externally to our customers to sort of meet them where they're at, allow them to be able to voice their concerns and, feedback ideas.

And also just generally how they're feeling about doing business with us. And then internally having that same sort of robust approach to being able to collect that data, has given us a really deep, rich sort of ecosystem of data that we can do a lot of things with and get really flexible with.

That's what I think about when it comes to accessibility. Cause I think about like, you know, you put yourself in the shoes of your customer. It doesn't matter what industry. For us, it's healthcare. Think about doctors and nurses and practice administrators and those folks... they're busy running their practice every day.

They're treating patients. Like that's their focus. That's what they want to be doing and that's what they should be doing. So yeah. So how can we make sure that then when they need to communicate a piece of feedback or need to, to, to convey. Sort of some, some impression they're having. We do it in a way that is easy and accessible for them to be able to do that.

Chun:

Data can get overwhelmed. It's really very hard for users or like consumers lock the data. But even, when we figure out that part, the next question is like, okay, Internally, we only have so much our resources every quarter or every year. the voice of a customers is touching so many functions like sales, marketing, product design, user research, customer success, like literally everything. , what are some of my practice that you find that are very efficient to make the internal team accountable on Voice of the Customers?

Kevin:

Yeah, that's a great question.

One of the things that we evaluate all the time is do we maintain sort of a very high level of organizational awareness so that the difference, so we understand what is the data that the individual teams are needing, how do they want to access it? And retrieve that data.

So we have a number of really smart internal self service tools that they can go in. They can direct query if they want to all of our data is in snowflake, but they can also, pull data specifically out of a number of different dashboards that we have ready to go. on my team in particular, I've built out a lot of processes for them to be able to, you know, we, we have, you know, simple JIRA form, fill this form out, it's an issue collector, tells exactly what you're looking for.

We're going to get that. We're going to sign it out. Somebody is going to go on their sprint. They're going to be able to turn around an analysis really, really quickly. So that we can make sure that we have that piece of it covered too. The challenge with that is that we have to make sure that we're always educating the business across the internal teams of, we have all this data.

We can help you here. And that would say that that was a particular challenge that we had early on as we were continuing to sort of form. And, that I felt like some of the biggest challenges with sort of getting Our VoC program to where it is now was, it felt like very much like a push, not a pull in the organization.

And now it's very much a pull. And it's exciting because we have such demand and appetite for our stuff that we have to then think about how this is impacting our capacity, which is a bad, which is not a bad problem to have. but, it's taken, it's taken a lot of relationship building and understanding and, continuing to pressure tests and, and pilot things and experiment with what's the most efficient way that we can get this information to the right team at the right time so that they can actually act on it.

Chun:

What was the trigger there? What was the trigger you feel like, oh my god, the table has flipped. It's now, it's a pull. No longer a push.

Kevin:

Athena had gone, we'd gone through some transformation in a way that really positioned as well to be a lot more customer centric in my mind. And we started to be able to see that there was an expectation for us to then be a part of. Corporate initiatives.

And so we had that sort of hook. And I think it was also in just sort of being able to prove the value. It was just continuing to put in the reps of reflecting back to the business. Here's where we're actually impacting customer experience because of data that we're acting on, whether it's new capabilities, new enhancements, et cetera, and you know, one of the ways that we did that too, was we had constructed what we call our Top 100 Customer Priorities list, and it became a really um, impactful and meaningful sort of recognized artifact

across the business. It definitely was a little bit of an iterative process as it sort of came together. But it really is a representation. When we look across all of our data sources, that is sort of like, what are the most top emerging thematic needs that we're seeing across all of the data that represents our customer base.

And then you can double click into it to then pull out all kinds of, different lenses of that segmentation, specialty, user, different things. And one of the ways that we were able to also sort of stand that up too, was able to effectively get shared accountability metrics, right? So the way that we measure the impact against that list is something that is shared goals that we have with product, with customer success, et cetera.

It's on a scorecard. We report out on it. And so that has been really helpful as sort of a unifying framework and sort of a mechanism in the business to be able to then create that appetite and interest to want to address the things on that list. And then that's been putting, you know, puts ourselves in the VoC side in a really, really good position because we own a lot of the closing the loop with our customers.

We want to make sure that we're communicating with them when we're addressing needs that they're saying that they want. So I would say that that was a big sort of tipping point. And I will say it's, it's an artifact that we will continue to evolve. It's not one of those things that like it came together and this is it.

And now you can just rest on your laurels. And that's, that's the thing now it's like, no, the business is continuing to evolving. Our customers continue to evolve. We need to continue to think about how does, this continue to serve our ability to best adVoCate on behalf of our customers? And so it's going to continue to be changed.

Now we're in a position that we can do that in the partnership cross functionally with all of these teams.

Chun:

That's crazy. 100. How did you come up with that number? Or how did it land on that number? Is it like...100, per quarter? Per year?

Kevin:

It's ambitious and audacious. The way that we evaluate the effectiveness, it doesn't necessarily mean that every single thing on that list by the end of the year is going to be delivered. You know, the planning cycles on R and D. It doesn't always meet a nice calendar year, right? But what it does represent is saying, Hey, if we look at this year, these are the most emergent top needs.

There's things that are going to carry over when we do this again for the next list. There's things that we're going to be able to chip away at it and deliver some component pieces, but we're going to have to still maintain awareness of the stuff that we still need to continue to iterate on. And so it's kind of a living thing.

It's, it's, it's kind of a dynamic list that way. In healthcare, it's highly regulated.

Product development, there's like the must do things in order to make sure that we are compliant and meeting what regulatory bodies are saying that we need to do. As an organization who delivers healthcare technology and in the SaaS space. Well that takes up resource allocation for your R and D teams.

I think that in order to make this work, we've also had to rely on just like a very, very tight partnership.

And I think that that's also why my team exists in that, like, my people are, like, I have somebody who's responsible for covering every subdivision.

Chun:

How do you maintain this kind of iteration or feedback loop with the customer and consumers who help you come up with like one of those customer priorities? And do you like conduct interviews? Do you go like field visits? And what are some like, practices that you recommend people to do?

Kevin:

I love closed the loop strategies. You know, it all starts with listening on one end. And then we do our analysis and aggregation and advocacy work. And then there's a, there's a period in the middle also when things are going into development. And we make sure that we're extending all the opportunities to our customers to make sure that they're aware of what's happening with their feedback, how they can get involved in research, testing,

Chun:

Oh, you, you, you led them to choose how they wanted to be involved?

Kevin:

So, well, so the way that we, the way that we do this is that we have, a group that runs, there are a research council, and so they're doing early stage research tests and discovery studies. We have a centralized place in our community platform, as well as communications that go out, as well as information that CSMs can guide their customers to say, hey, here's a bunch of research studies, we're looking for people.

People can sign up to be on the research council and they'll get a continuous feed of available studies to get involved with. when things are further along and we're ready to alpha test, oftentimes my team gets requests from our product operations folks saying, Hey, we're running this alpha. Can we look at the data and identify like, who would be like the right 15 customers to get involved with?

And so. Being able to then look at our data and say, who's been the most vocal about this? Like they have something to say and they would be probably more than willing to test out some functionality. On our community platform where we get a lot of the feedback ideas and it's crowdsourced. So customers can submit an idea, vote up ideas, comment on ideas, et cetera. I have a really lovely community moderator who reads all the feedback that comes in.

And, we've overhauled all of the statuses that we put on ideas. So that we make sure that when something is in exploration or research or development, or there's an alpha offering, or there's a beta offering, Or there's a POV that we can craft from our product teams and why we might not be able to make an investment right now.

We're able to update those statuses in real time and then update that messaging and any customer who's following that idea, who has voted on the idea, they can have their settings to get automatic notifications. So they can go in and check, or they can just actually get flagged when there's change. This is also though in our data.

So I mentioned that I. You know, had worked a lot with CSM. So we've created a lot of tooling for them to be able to then go in, point to the data based on their customer. Here's all the feedback that that customer has provided. Here's the status of all that feedback and where it's at. Here's things. And now it's aligned to our roadmap.

Here's things that might be slated for an upcoming release. And that has been a really, really cool part of my job in sort of the Creating a lot of those resources because, I've, I've witnessed where even for me getting in front of customers, which I do a lot, to be able to pull the data, show them, hey, here's all the data that you've provided us. Here's what's happening in that data.

Here's what you can look forward to. And here's some things that might be further out, or we're not able to make an investment at this time. And just having that conversation, helping them see the process and feel the process, I think is, is a huge, it's a huge piece of why we're really proud of the program we've built out that.

Chun:

Now I wanna ask you more about the personalization part, but I think before jumping to that, , love to dive a little bit deeper into the written of investment. It's a kind of like a hot topic in the VoC view. I'm not sure if you, how you feel about it, but, we as the practitioner, right, like VoC, we understand like, okay, VoC is definitely driving an insane value for like brand loyalty, for like customer certification, for, you know, like conversion, for it's a loyalty just in general. , but I would be curious to hear a little bit more like from your side.

Kevin:

What I would say that really helps inform the value of the program is when we can see an increase of customer engagement and user engagement. I would also say that it's not just feedback ideas and things that customers want us to build new features and functionality for.

Because of our sort of omnichannel approach, we can connect that to significant drivers of satisfaction sentiment as a, you know, measured through NPS and other things. And so, when you look at, when you look at and you're able to inform the business on, here are the top drivers of things that are actually leading to dissatisfaction.

Which could eventually lead to attrition. That becomes a really powerful rationale to help inform the business on like, sort of how customers are feeling. And I think that that's the piece for me of like the marriage between sort of sentiment and then hard feedback data together really helps actually tell that powerful story.

Another piece of this too, that I don't know how often this actually, I've talked to a few other sort of leaders in the industry and just kind of swap stories and some people also connect this back to employee experience.

And I think that that's a huge piece. When we think about like overall experience management, it's, it's, it's your customers and everything, but it's also your employees. Right. You know, people experience burnout, people experience you know, if the CSM feels like they don't have the resources to really serve their customer in the way that they trusted to do, because they're the face of that relationship that can take its toll. And so.

Kevin:

That's where I also see some of the work that we can do on overall CS enablement is really like helping them. Like I can help you change the tone of the relationship with this customer, which hopefully will help provide them some satisfaction and a better experience as just their own employee experience..

Chun:

Another example is If ICs or like engineers, , designers, product managers, they see more and more feedback, like positive feedback coming in, everyone will feel like more and energetic to like serve the

Kevin:

I will say, I've noticed also is as the appetite across the businesses grew for more of our, what we had to offer,

the product managers and the product teams, get really excited when they can rattle off stats of like my features addressing this many ideas with this many user votes and this many internal ideas and that sort of thing. And we enable all that reporting. So we measure, we maintain all of the sort of like release reporting.

And it's a huge boon to them. Something we haven't talked about is that I have a colleague of mine who's a brilliant leader who leads our user engagement strategy. And we have a number of user groups. And direct, formalized and, she's been really growing.

We've been really working to, engage product teams, get them directly in front of customers, talking about features that they're developing or do some additional problem discovery and, our customers love it. And. The product teams get to take away some, some information, do a demo, check the crowd, how did it go?

You know, and we do that. We know that not only through the user groups, but we have our annual customer conference and we have, you know, my team has also helped alongside our, design ops team to be able to organize and coordinate, many workshops where we go and we'll look at the feedback data and we'll say, hey, let's actually pull these customers together.

And see if we can do a little bit of a workshop. I think finding opportunities wherever we can to continue to do that really helped bring the customer along, but also make sure that, you know, that everybody, everybody has that opportunity internally who needs to. Is it just a win win.

Chun:

Personalization. I think, my guess is you're going to start talking about a little bit more technology and AI trend there. But that's why every time when I hear about personalization, it's like, we know close the feedback loop is important. it's also really, really hard to scale this kind of personalization, stack for users or for consumers in general.

So, I would love to hear your thoughts on personalization there. And also what are some like trends or technology trends you've seen in this view to help you like deliver that piece easier.

Kevin:

I guess I haven't completely solved all the mystery to it but, I think that it's one thing to be able to just Send a release notes or release notes out to customers when you've delivered something and hope that they engaged with it know.

We have In our community space we have every time we have a release, we have a release center that comes to get like "Release center's open!" And it's a place where all the information is.

They can see everything, training updates, all that stuff. what I've been working on specifically. , is, and it goes back to some of the CS enablement stuff is how can we make sure that we're equipping those customer facing teams at scale to have all the awareness they need to sort of, you know, what's coming in the upcoming release, you know, how this is impacting your customers so that you can have a very elegant conversation with them and get them ready for it and excited about it and see the value. You know, personalization to me is if you take your whole customer base, you can look at segmentation, you can look at like other sort of factors and how you want to actually kind of carve that up. My goal is that like you get it down finally to the end user, that they can actually see themselves reflected in that update that you, there's, there's really cool ways to do that, that.

At scale, it takes sort of like, locking arm and arm with CSMs or anybody who owns that relationship to really just add that extra personalization on it.

Chun:

We bring stuff a little bit about, like, the change of the, well, basically, large length model, how that is impacting the VoC world. What are the benefits? what are the, the, what could, like, not be done before? And now it's, like, possible. in general, we would love to hear your thoughts and ideas on that front.

Kevin:

Yeah. So we have a LLM, have been going through and done a bunch of all of the tuning work on that. You know, you have your supervised layer and unsupervised layer and you're- and it's. It's great. I think that, I think that that is not uncommon for kind of large programs that are they're working with that kind of a major data set.

I think it's a worthwhile investment to make sure that you can get that done. Constructed in a way that actually reflects a really useful and flexible taxonomy structure, however you want to organize that. The way that we've approached that is really looking at like, let's incorporate factors for how our product teams are organized.

Also what the customers are saying in the verbatims of the feedback. And then let's try and see like how many layers deep can we go. Right. And it's really exciting. because at the end of the day, then you can actually have like a really efficient data retrieval and go just exactly getting what you want.

And you can also then start to trend things that maybe you couldn't otherwise. when it comes to other AI, I've noticed, so I don't, you know, AI is not new and, I feel like it's new to a lot of people.

Once the chat GPT buzz kind of happened. I know that all of a sudden my LinkedIn inbox blew up with people wanting to show me their new companies and services. The way that I'm looking at it right now is I think that, you know, it's AI, generative AI, all the applications of it.

a lot of people are also trying to figure out like, how do we live with this world? I don't think it's something to be afraid of. I think it's something to actually be embracing of What I would say about it for VoC is that if it can be wielded in a way that offloads friction, automates tasks, provides a bunch of efficiency and confidence in the data that then frees your team up to then spend most of their time working on enriching, like real human connections with your customers. I think that that's the win.

But I don't, I don't think it's something that should be like, Oh, this is going to replace the entire workforce where like, no, you should look at it as replace the things that it should replace maybe, but then use that time that you get back to then like, continue to get to know your customers engage with them.

And one of the things I think is really unique and interesting about your offering to me is, it seems to be, less focused on sort of like prompt engineering, which I think is like superseded a lot of the attention. , and the way that I actually thought about the way that you engage your offering is you're sort of like mentoring the AI.

And I think that that approach is really, really smart and unique because you're not trying to jump through a bunch of mental gymnastics to try and get it to spit out what you hope it will.

Instead, you're actually getting it to actually know you're going to actually understand me and how I want to actually leverage this tool. So definitely hats off to you.

Chun:

I love that. Thank you. Yeah, I think VoC, honestly, I think it's about parenting. You're parenting data, but also you're parenting the organization, parenting user to kind of keep fostering and nurturing this kind of feedback loop. That's how we kind of build our platform. Like at the end of the day, I wanted this platform to be able to automate a lot of data tasks. so, but also give me you this kind of like a really smooth way to educate you about asking the right question, finding the right data, finding the right cohort of users to talk to. So if we can like release everyone who used for this platform from all this task, and then they can have a 10 more like calls with users and consumers and customers every week. That's going to be the biggest win. I think , that's why every time I hear a feature request about like, hey, can you generally like a personas or a lot of deliverable ish task, I'm like, that is what AI is really good, but that's not going to be the biggest, like thing to unlock this kind of customer intuition for the organizations.

Kevin:

I mean, think about it, like, with product teams where they feel like, what's their perception of, how many layers are between them and their customer, whether it's tasks, geography, whatever. Yeah. And how can this sort of like, just really shrink that distance, right?

Chun:

So I'm not sure if you know this. There are a lot of Generative like UI or generally like code platforms like coming up. I think the service or the product itself is also moving to a more and more personalized version. So, for example. Right now, it was Spotify. Everyone has different, recommendation algorithms or mechanisms there. But at the same time, we also want to be a little bit more opinionated, at least, in healthcare about, how consumers, or patients, or users, like, should use the platform or service. How do you view this, kind of, like, two passes there?

Are we going to move towards it? A future that everyone is able to control their own interface, own experience? Are we gonna be find the middle ground? I'm curious how you think about it.

Kevin:

I think it gets tricky, In theory, like AI can automate anything, right? But I think what's appropriate when it comes to actually treating patients, right? And that's where I think that like AI in general, I don't think should ever, I don't, regardless of the application, I don't think it should ever relieve us. of the responsibility to do certain things in our jobs, and I think that in healthcare, it's like, how do we free up doctors to actually just be doctors? That's what they want. Not like completely have like a robotic proxy of that doctor, right?

So, It's, it's, it's like, it's definitely like a lot of challenges. And so then, so then what's that, what, what are those things and sort of what is that level of, useful assistance that AI can provide versus no, this actually goes against the regulation or this actually creates a patient safety issue. So I think that that, and that's something that, Athena is definitely thinking about that.

And our product teams are definitely like thinking about that. And can you, and you can find even out there some, talks that our Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Jessel has, has given and some others around how we think about AI. But we definitely know AI is not going away. It's here to be embraced.

We just have to figure out how do you do it.

Chun:

That's why voice for customer is getting like even more important than ever. Because there are a lot of tasks and iterations need to be done between patients and doctors to see they feel about thousands of iterations or output for AI.

Kevin:

Yeah. We want to do everything that we can to make sure that we're,

freeing up those providers to be able to treat patients and deliver the best optimal outcomes that they can. And so when we think about that customer base and that we serve and what we've seen on VoC continues to reinforce a responsibility to, I'm not going to just dump a data set into an AI engine and say, like, and just say like, yeah, tell me, like, I'm going to just trust you to tell me what it is.

Like, I think that I still have to bear that responsibility, but I can guide AI tools and use them so that I can be more efficient and help the teams that I work with be more efficient. I think that's the, that's the sweet spot.

Chun:

Reasoning is what everyone's focusing on right now. There's also the part of like empathy. That I think like even like more important after we figure out how to like instruct like AI to be reasoning. How do we make sure they are also like carries on the value, right? Like, by the end of the day, to make decisions. Well, we talk a lot today. One question that I usually ask everyone. What is the one book that you've read recently or for the past like five years that will be really valuable for VoC practitioners?

Kevin:

I actually just got a new book. It's not necessarily about VoC at all. But one of the things that I try and approach with VoC is I always try and of like a healthy level of creativity because I think that we should always be trying to think about, like, what are new and interesting and innovative ways that we can engage customers and users and serve them and engage internal teams, that sort of thing.

And so I got this book called The Imagination Muscle that I just heard about. It sounded really, really awesome. And it's really sort of like, helps unlock sort of like where do good ideas come from? And I haven't cracked it yet. It literally just came in this week and I'm getting ready to, read that over the next few weeks and, look where I can apply it to my work and in my life.

Chun:

Awesome. Thank you, Kevin. Is there anything else I would like to add that I haven't asked yet?

Kevin:

I would just say, I'm really glad that I got a chance to meet you. and I was really glad that you all had reached out and wanted to get to know who's this guy and really appreciate the opportunity to come and just share some of my thoughts and my experience and engaging with, experience management and VoC and CX and kind of everything that I find really, really cool about. This experience that I've had.

Chun:

Thank you so much, Kevin. And thank you for all the support and the wisdom. And I'm sure we can do a lot of great work together in the future.

Kevin:

Thank you, Chun. Appreciate it.

Summary

Kevin Gentry, Director of Product engagement at Athenahealth, continues to lead innovation of an award-winning Voice of the Customer (VoC) Program into it's 10th year. He brings personalization to care experiences for more than 160k providers and 110 million patients, and a framework for collective success to an organization of 6k+.In the first ever Making Waves Podcast episode, Chun and Kevin discuss:

  • The inner workings of the 100 Top Customer Priorities Framework

  • Finding expertise in Voice of the Customer (VoC) experience management (XM)

  • Deploying a closed feedback loop system for internal and external accessibility

  • Navigating common hurdles in the VoC journey

  • Maintaining organizational awareness leveraging integrated tech

  • Establishing cross-functional alignment and accountability

  • The power of personalization and it’s measurable impact on growth

  • Intersection of employee and customer experiences

  • Scaling VoC Programs to transform care at every touchpoint

  • The AI do’s and don’ts of future care and human connection

  • And more!

If you enjoy this podcast, don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube, of follow us on Monterey AI.

Speakers

Where to find Kevin Gentry:

Where to find Chun Jiang:

References


Transcripts

Chun:

Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Making Waves show. We've got Kevin Gentry, Director of Product Engagement at Athenahealth, and really a pioneer in Voice of the Customer and experience management. Why don't you give us a little bit intro about yourself, and your work?

Kevin:

Great. Thanks for having me. Kevin Gentry and I work at Athenahealth. I've been there for a little over nine years now, worn a bunch of hats and have really fallen in love with experience management, CX, VoC, all the things. And, I lead a highly talented team of folks who work directly with our product stakeholders and help inform, what our customers are saying they need.

Chun:

Awesome. Awesome. I love the elevator pitch. I know you've been at Athena for a very long time. And I would love to learn more about like, when you first started doing VoC work, what was that like and how that has been.

Kevin:

So the real answer I sort of stumbled into it, to be honest. You know, when I reflect back on my career, I've always held roles that were customer oriented and a customer centric. And I joined Athena, what was first, an advisory services sort of consulting team that was coming together. And it was an opportunity for me to hit the road, meet with a bunch of customers and really help them optimize their use of our products and services, overcome a lot of challenges, change management issues with the adoption of new technology, and, really trying to make sure that they could continue to derive satisfaction, value, and, and stick with us for a long time and grow with us.

And so I did that and then I had a chance to wear a bunch of different hats, kind of spun around the organization a little bit and learned a ton from some brilliant colleagues, made some mistakes, paid attention to Athena as it went through a very significant transformation. And then I found myself, on this team that was organizing an emerging voice of the customer function.

And, that was when I first was really exposed to the more traditional tenets of experience management, CX concepts and strategies, and VoC as a program.

Chun:

When I first met you, I was just like curious about who is the person behind this like massive program at an enterprise that is like in highly regulated industry. And it seems we like already in this place for a little bit, we understand how complicated like can data can get and at the same time, like how. What's the customer, how the customer themselves and the how cross like collaboration team can be, there's just like a lot, a lot of nuances and challenges and lessons there to one. I would be curious, like, how did you get started? Like when you first, like stamping into this VoC program, what was the first like project look like? What was the first like initiative or how did you get started?

Kevin:

Kind of where did I first really get turned on to it? It was, I did a listening tour. I was working for our chief medical officer at the time. , and I was sort of commissioned to do a little bit of a listening tour. And it was really just to go and engage with some customers, understand how they, how do they actually define success with Athena?

How do they understand. You know, that we're delivering on the value they're looking for. And it was really rewarding. Number one, I love talking to customers, so it was great. I remember there was a moment though, and I was walking into this. Fairly large organization had, a number of practices that extended into a couple of different states and was sort of guided back with the customer success manager to their C suite area in their back office.

And I noticed that they had all of the. They had their mission on the wall and their guiding principles and things that they stood for. And I remember just, I stopped and I asked the CSM. I was like, do you know what those are? And he was looking at them and it just occurred to me in that moment. And I became really fascinated with how can we really know our customers, not just know a lot about them by way of like, Whatever's in CRM and metadata and some different things, but like, how do we really know our customers?

And it was sort of like really prompted this fascination for me around everything that we do should reflect back how that individual customer sees their mission and values, right? Like, can we actually. deliver updates, enhancements, solutions, touch points with them along the entire sort of journey they have with us in a way that translates back to how they see this is actually helping me solve my mission and my guiding principles.

So that's really, it's sort of like when it really started to kind of. Unfold for me. And then as I've, as I've thought about VoC and customer experience, and sort of been in this space, I really think of VoC programs needing to sort of operationalize around kind of three different dimensions.

Needs to be accessible, responsive, and personalized. And that last one is I think one of the hardest things to do. And I spend probably way too much time thinking and bemoaning about it. But I think that that's, that's really kind of three things that need to be in place in order to do that. Right.

And then, you can have a really, really, rewarding program. So, 1 of the 1st things I did officially on the team as I was leading, commercial enablement programs for VoC. And so I was spending a lot of time with customer success operations for their customer facing teams, even sales.

And, that was when I really started to understand and put the pieces together out the transformational power of collecting and acting on the right set of data.

Chun:

Tell me what, what are, what is your definition of this kind of accessibility of VoC.

Kevin:

So I think that one of the things I like to say, and I told this to my team and I told this to everybody, I was like, we're only as good as our data. And I think that like, when you, when you, what I'm really proud of in our program. And this is also hats off to my boss and a lot of the direction that he set forth to really bring together a true omni-channel approach.

And so when we think about connecting across everything that we're hearing entire inside of our entire survey journey work, which includes NPS and sentiment and a bunch of things, we have a really robust platform for customers to engage on, that they're providing a lot of individual pieces of feedback.

And then we have a bunch of internal channels as well that, you know, CSMs can vote for ideas and feedback on behalf of their customers. And we use that to also work with sales for prospect and our training team for the things that they hear and others. And so we're able to then sort of start to, because of that access, both internally and externally to our customers to sort of meet them where they're at, allow them to be able to voice their concerns and, feedback ideas.

And also just generally how they're feeling about doing business with us. And then internally having that same sort of robust approach to being able to collect that data, has given us a really deep, rich sort of ecosystem of data that we can do a lot of things with and get really flexible with.

That's what I think about when it comes to accessibility. Cause I think about like, you know, you put yourself in the shoes of your customer. It doesn't matter what industry. For us, it's healthcare. Think about doctors and nurses and practice administrators and those folks... they're busy running their practice every day.

They're treating patients. Like that's their focus. That's what they want to be doing and that's what they should be doing. So yeah. So how can we make sure that then when they need to communicate a piece of feedback or need to, to, to convey. Sort of some, some impression they're having. We do it in a way that is easy and accessible for them to be able to do that.

Chun:

Data can get overwhelmed. It's really very hard for users or like consumers lock the data. But even, when we figure out that part, the next question is like, okay, Internally, we only have so much our resources every quarter or every year. the voice of a customers is touching so many functions like sales, marketing, product design, user research, customer success, like literally everything. , what are some of my practice that you find that are very efficient to make the internal team accountable on Voice of the Customers?

Kevin:

Yeah, that's a great question.

One of the things that we evaluate all the time is do we maintain sort of a very high level of organizational awareness so that the difference, so we understand what is the data that the individual teams are needing, how do they want to access it? And retrieve that data.

So we have a number of really smart internal self service tools that they can go in. They can direct query if they want to all of our data is in snowflake, but they can also, pull data specifically out of a number of different dashboards that we have ready to go. on my team in particular, I've built out a lot of processes for them to be able to, you know, we, we have, you know, simple JIRA form, fill this form out, it's an issue collector, tells exactly what you're looking for.

We're going to get that. We're going to sign it out. Somebody is going to go on their sprint. They're going to be able to turn around an analysis really, really quickly. So that we can make sure that we have that piece of it covered too. The challenge with that is that we have to make sure that we're always educating the business across the internal teams of, we have all this data.

We can help you here. And that would say that that was a particular challenge that we had early on as we were continuing to sort of form. And, that I felt like some of the biggest challenges with sort of getting Our VoC program to where it is now was, it felt like very much like a push, not a pull in the organization.

And now it's very much a pull. And it's exciting because we have such demand and appetite for our stuff that we have to then think about how this is impacting our capacity, which is a bad, which is not a bad problem to have. but, it's taken, it's taken a lot of relationship building and understanding and, continuing to pressure tests and, and pilot things and experiment with what's the most efficient way that we can get this information to the right team at the right time so that they can actually act on it.

Chun:

What was the trigger there? What was the trigger you feel like, oh my god, the table has flipped. It's now, it's a pull. No longer a push.

Kevin:

Athena had gone, we'd gone through some transformation in a way that really positioned as well to be a lot more customer centric in my mind. And we started to be able to see that there was an expectation for us to then be a part of. Corporate initiatives.

And so we had that sort of hook. And I think it was also in just sort of being able to prove the value. It was just continuing to put in the reps of reflecting back to the business. Here's where we're actually impacting customer experience because of data that we're acting on, whether it's new capabilities, new enhancements, et cetera, and you know, one of the ways that we did that too, was we had constructed what we call our Top 100 Customer Priorities list, and it became a really um, impactful and meaningful sort of recognized artifact

across the business. It definitely was a little bit of an iterative process as it sort of came together. But it really is a representation. When we look across all of our data sources, that is sort of like, what are the most top emerging thematic needs that we're seeing across all of the data that represents our customer base.

And then you can double click into it to then pull out all kinds of, different lenses of that segmentation, specialty, user, different things. And one of the ways that we were able to also sort of stand that up too, was able to effectively get shared accountability metrics, right? So the way that we measure the impact against that list is something that is shared goals that we have with product, with customer success, et cetera.

It's on a scorecard. We report out on it. And so that has been really helpful as sort of a unifying framework and sort of a mechanism in the business to be able to then create that appetite and interest to want to address the things on that list. And then that's been putting, you know, puts ourselves in the VoC side in a really, really good position because we own a lot of the closing the loop with our customers.

We want to make sure that we're communicating with them when we're addressing needs that they're saying that they want. So I would say that that was a big sort of tipping point. And I will say it's, it's an artifact that we will continue to evolve. It's not one of those things that like it came together and this is it.

And now you can just rest on your laurels. And that's, that's the thing now it's like, no, the business is continuing to evolving. Our customers continue to evolve. We need to continue to think about how does, this continue to serve our ability to best adVoCate on behalf of our customers? And so it's going to continue to be changed.

Now we're in a position that we can do that in the partnership cross functionally with all of these teams.

Chun:

That's crazy. 100. How did you come up with that number? Or how did it land on that number? Is it like...100, per quarter? Per year?

Kevin:

It's ambitious and audacious. The way that we evaluate the effectiveness, it doesn't necessarily mean that every single thing on that list by the end of the year is going to be delivered. You know, the planning cycles on R and D. It doesn't always meet a nice calendar year, right? But what it does represent is saying, Hey, if we look at this year, these are the most emergent top needs.

There's things that are going to carry over when we do this again for the next list. There's things that we're going to be able to chip away at it and deliver some component pieces, but we're going to have to still maintain awareness of the stuff that we still need to continue to iterate on. And so it's kind of a living thing.

It's, it's, it's kind of a dynamic list that way. In healthcare, it's highly regulated.

Product development, there's like the must do things in order to make sure that we are compliant and meeting what regulatory bodies are saying that we need to do. As an organization who delivers healthcare technology and in the SaaS space. Well that takes up resource allocation for your R and D teams.

I think that in order to make this work, we've also had to rely on just like a very, very tight partnership.

And I think that that's also why my team exists in that, like, my people are, like, I have somebody who's responsible for covering every subdivision.

Chun:

How do you maintain this kind of iteration or feedback loop with the customer and consumers who help you come up with like one of those customer priorities? And do you like conduct interviews? Do you go like field visits? And what are some like, practices that you recommend people to do?

Kevin:

I love closed the loop strategies. You know, it all starts with listening on one end. And then we do our analysis and aggregation and advocacy work. And then there's a, there's a period in the middle also when things are going into development. And we make sure that we're extending all the opportunities to our customers to make sure that they're aware of what's happening with their feedback, how they can get involved in research, testing,

Chun:

Oh, you, you, you led them to choose how they wanted to be involved?

Kevin:

So, well, so the way that we, the way that we do this is that we have, a group that runs, there are a research council, and so they're doing early stage research tests and discovery studies. We have a centralized place in our community platform, as well as communications that go out, as well as information that CSMs can guide their customers to say, hey, here's a bunch of research studies, we're looking for people.

People can sign up to be on the research council and they'll get a continuous feed of available studies to get involved with. when things are further along and we're ready to alpha test, oftentimes my team gets requests from our product operations folks saying, Hey, we're running this alpha. Can we look at the data and identify like, who would be like the right 15 customers to get involved with?

And so. Being able to then look at our data and say, who's been the most vocal about this? Like they have something to say and they would be probably more than willing to test out some functionality. On our community platform where we get a lot of the feedback ideas and it's crowdsourced. So customers can submit an idea, vote up ideas, comment on ideas, et cetera. I have a really lovely community moderator who reads all the feedback that comes in.

And, we've overhauled all of the statuses that we put on ideas. So that we make sure that when something is in exploration or research or development, or there's an alpha offering, or there's a beta offering, Or there's a POV that we can craft from our product teams and why we might not be able to make an investment right now.

We're able to update those statuses in real time and then update that messaging and any customer who's following that idea, who has voted on the idea, they can have their settings to get automatic notifications. So they can go in and check, or they can just actually get flagged when there's change. This is also though in our data.

So I mentioned that I. You know, had worked a lot with CSM. So we've created a lot of tooling for them to be able to then go in, point to the data based on their customer. Here's all the feedback that that customer has provided. Here's the status of all that feedback and where it's at. Here's things. And now it's aligned to our roadmap.

Here's things that might be slated for an upcoming release. And that has been a really, really cool part of my job in sort of the Creating a lot of those resources because, I've, I've witnessed where even for me getting in front of customers, which I do a lot, to be able to pull the data, show them, hey, here's all the data that you've provided us. Here's what's happening in that data.

Here's what you can look forward to. And here's some things that might be further out, or we're not able to make an investment at this time. And just having that conversation, helping them see the process and feel the process, I think is, is a huge, it's a huge piece of why we're really proud of the program we've built out that.

Chun:

Now I wanna ask you more about the personalization part, but I think before jumping to that, , love to dive a little bit deeper into the written of investment. It's a kind of like a hot topic in the VoC view. I'm not sure if you, how you feel about it, but, we as the practitioner, right, like VoC, we understand like, okay, VoC is definitely driving an insane value for like brand loyalty, for like customer certification, for, you know, like conversion, for it's a loyalty just in general. , but I would be curious to hear a little bit more like from your side.

Kevin:

What I would say that really helps inform the value of the program is when we can see an increase of customer engagement and user engagement. I would also say that it's not just feedback ideas and things that customers want us to build new features and functionality for.

Because of our sort of omnichannel approach, we can connect that to significant drivers of satisfaction sentiment as a, you know, measured through NPS and other things. And so, when you look at, when you look at and you're able to inform the business on, here are the top drivers of things that are actually leading to dissatisfaction.

Which could eventually lead to attrition. That becomes a really powerful rationale to help inform the business on like, sort of how customers are feeling. And I think that that's the piece for me of like the marriage between sort of sentiment and then hard feedback data together really helps actually tell that powerful story.

Another piece of this too, that I don't know how often this actually, I've talked to a few other sort of leaders in the industry and just kind of swap stories and some people also connect this back to employee experience.

And I think that that's a huge piece. When we think about like overall experience management, it's, it's, it's your customers and everything, but it's also your employees. Right. You know, people experience burnout, people experience you know, if the CSM feels like they don't have the resources to really serve their customer in the way that they trusted to do, because they're the face of that relationship that can take its toll. And so.

Kevin:

That's where I also see some of the work that we can do on overall CS enablement is really like helping them. Like I can help you change the tone of the relationship with this customer, which hopefully will help provide them some satisfaction and a better experience as just their own employee experience..

Chun:

Another example is If ICs or like engineers, , designers, product managers, they see more and more feedback, like positive feedback coming in, everyone will feel like more and energetic to like serve the

Kevin:

I will say, I've noticed also is as the appetite across the businesses grew for more of our, what we had to offer,

the product managers and the product teams, get really excited when they can rattle off stats of like my features addressing this many ideas with this many user votes and this many internal ideas and that sort of thing. And we enable all that reporting. So we measure, we maintain all of the sort of like release reporting.

And it's a huge boon to them. Something we haven't talked about is that I have a colleague of mine who's a brilliant leader who leads our user engagement strategy. And we have a number of user groups. And direct, formalized and, she's been really growing.

We've been really working to, engage product teams, get them directly in front of customers, talking about features that they're developing or do some additional problem discovery and, our customers love it. And. The product teams get to take away some, some information, do a demo, check the crowd, how did it go?

You know, and we do that. We know that not only through the user groups, but we have our annual customer conference and we have, you know, my team has also helped alongside our, design ops team to be able to organize and coordinate, many workshops where we go and we'll look at the feedback data and we'll say, hey, let's actually pull these customers together.

And see if we can do a little bit of a workshop. I think finding opportunities wherever we can to continue to do that really helped bring the customer along, but also make sure that, you know, that everybody, everybody has that opportunity internally who needs to. Is it just a win win.

Chun:

Personalization. I think, my guess is you're going to start talking about a little bit more technology and AI trend there. But that's why every time when I hear about personalization, it's like, we know close the feedback loop is important. it's also really, really hard to scale this kind of personalization, stack for users or for consumers in general.

So, I would love to hear your thoughts on personalization there. And also what are some like trends or technology trends you've seen in this view to help you like deliver that piece easier.

Kevin:

I guess I haven't completely solved all the mystery to it but, I think that it's one thing to be able to just Send a release notes or release notes out to customers when you've delivered something and hope that they engaged with it know.

We have In our community space we have every time we have a release, we have a release center that comes to get like "Release center's open!" And it's a place where all the information is.

They can see everything, training updates, all that stuff. what I've been working on specifically. , is, and it goes back to some of the CS enablement stuff is how can we make sure that we're equipping those customer facing teams at scale to have all the awareness they need to sort of, you know, what's coming in the upcoming release, you know, how this is impacting your customers so that you can have a very elegant conversation with them and get them ready for it and excited about it and see the value. You know, personalization to me is if you take your whole customer base, you can look at segmentation, you can look at like other sort of factors and how you want to actually kind of carve that up. My goal is that like you get it down finally to the end user, that they can actually see themselves reflected in that update that you, there's, there's really cool ways to do that, that.

At scale, it takes sort of like, locking arm and arm with CSMs or anybody who owns that relationship to really just add that extra personalization on it.

Chun:

We bring stuff a little bit about, like, the change of the, well, basically, large length model, how that is impacting the VoC world. What are the benefits? what are the, the, what could, like, not be done before? And now it's, like, possible. in general, we would love to hear your thoughts and ideas on that front.

Kevin:

Yeah. So we have a LLM, have been going through and done a bunch of all of the tuning work on that. You know, you have your supervised layer and unsupervised layer and you're- and it's. It's great. I think that, I think that that is not uncommon for kind of large programs that are they're working with that kind of a major data set.

I think it's a worthwhile investment to make sure that you can get that done. Constructed in a way that actually reflects a really useful and flexible taxonomy structure, however you want to organize that. The way that we've approached that is really looking at like, let's incorporate factors for how our product teams are organized.

Also what the customers are saying in the verbatims of the feedback. And then let's try and see like how many layers deep can we go. Right. And it's really exciting. because at the end of the day, then you can actually have like a really efficient data retrieval and go just exactly getting what you want.

And you can also then start to trend things that maybe you couldn't otherwise. when it comes to other AI, I've noticed, so I don't, you know, AI is not new and, I feel like it's new to a lot of people.

Once the chat GPT buzz kind of happened. I know that all of a sudden my LinkedIn inbox blew up with people wanting to show me their new companies and services. The way that I'm looking at it right now is I think that, you know, it's AI, generative AI, all the applications of it.

a lot of people are also trying to figure out like, how do we live with this world? I don't think it's something to be afraid of. I think it's something to actually be embracing of What I would say about it for VoC is that if it can be wielded in a way that offloads friction, automates tasks, provides a bunch of efficiency and confidence in the data that then frees your team up to then spend most of their time working on enriching, like real human connections with your customers. I think that that's the win.

But I don't, I don't think it's something that should be like, Oh, this is going to replace the entire workforce where like, no, you should look at it as replace the things that it should replace maybe, but then use that time that you get back to then like, continue to get to know your customers engage with them.

And one of the things I think is really unique and interesting about your offering to me is, it seems to be, less focused on sort of like prompt engineering, which I think is like superseded a lot of the attention. , and the way that I actually thought about the way that you engage your offering is you're sort of like mentoring the AI.

And I think that that approach is really, really smart and unique because you're not trying to jump through a bunch of mental gymnastics to try and get it to spit out what you hope it will.

Instead, you're actually getting it to actually know you're going to actually understand me and how I want to actually leverage this tool. So definitely hats off to you.

Chun:

I love that. Thank you. Yeah, I think VoC, honestly, I think it's about parenting. You're parenting data, but also you're parenting the organization, parenting user to kind of keep fostering and nurturing this kind of feedback loop. That's how we kind of build our platform. Like at the end of the day, I wanted this platform to be able to automate a lot of data tasks. so, but also give me you this kind of like a really smooth way to educate you about asking the right question, finding the right data, finding the right cohort of users to talk to. So if we can like release everyone who used for this platform from all this task, and then they can have a 10 more like calls with users and consumers and customers every week. That's going to be the biggest win. I think , that's why every time I hear a feature request about like, hey, can you generally like a personas or a lot of deliverable ish task, I'm like, that is what AI is really good, but that's not going to be the biggest, like thing to unlock this kind of customer intuition for the organizations.

Kevin:

I mean, think about it, like, with product teams where they feel like, what's their perception of, how many layers are between them and their customer, whether it's tasks, geography, whatever. Yeah. And how can this sort of like, just really shrink that distance, right?

Chun:

So I'm not sure if you know this. There are a lot of Generative like UI or generally like code platforms like coming up. I think the service or the product itself is also moving to a more and more personalized version. So, for example. Right now, it was Spotify. Everyone has different, recommendation algorithms or mechanisms there. But at the same time, we also want to be a little bit more opinionated, at least, in healthcare about, how consumers, or patients, or users, like, should use the platform or service. How do you view this, kind of, like, two passes there?

Are we going to move towards it? A future that everyone is able to control their own interface, own experience? Are we gonna be find the middle ground? I'm curious how you think about it.

Kevin:

I think it gets tricky, In theory, like AI can automate anything, right? But I think what's appropriate when it comes to actually treating patients, right? And that's where I think that like AI in general, I don't think should ever, I don't, regardless of the application, I don't think it should ever relieve us. of the responsibility to do certain things in our jobs, and I think that in healthcare, it's like, how do we free up doctors to actually just be doctors? That's what they want. Not like completely have like a robotic proxy of that doctor, right?

So, It's, it's, it's like, it's definitely like a lot of challenges. And so then, so then what's that, what, what are those things and sort of what is that level of, useful assistance that AI can provide versus no, this actually goes against the regulation or this actually creates a patient safety issue. So I think that that, and that's something that, Athena is definitely thinking about that.

And our product teams are definitely like thinking about that. And can you, and you can find even out there some, talks that our Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Jessel has, has given and some others around how we think about AI. But we definitely know AI is not going away. It's here to be embraced.

We just have to figure out how do you do it.

Chun:

That's why voice for customer is getting like even more important than ever. Because there are a lot of tasks and iterations need to be done between patients and doctors to see they feel about thousands of iterations or output for AI.

Kevin:

Yeah. We want to do everything that we can to make sure that we're,

freeing up those providers to be able to treat patients and deliver the best optimal outcomes that they can. And so when we think about that customer base and that we serve and what we've seen on VoC continues to reinforce a responsibility to, I'm not going to just dump a data set into an AI engine and say, like, and just say like, yeah, tell me, like, I'm going to just trust you to tell me what it is.

Like, I think that I still have to bear that responsibility, but I can guide AI tools and use them so that I can be more efficient and help the teams that I work with be more efficient. I think that's the, that's the sweet spot.

Chun:

Reasoning is what everyone's focusing on right now. There's also the part of like empathy. That I think like even like more important after we figure out how to like instruct like AI to be reasoning. How do we make sure they are also like carries on the value, right? Like, by the end of the day, to make decisions. Well, we talk a lot today. One question that I usually ask everyone. What is the one book that you've read recently or for the past like five years that will be really valuable for VoC practitioners?

Kevin:

I actually just got a new book. It's not necessarily about VoC at all. But one of the things that I try and approach with VoC is I always try and of like a healthy level of creativity because I think that we should always be trying to think about, like, what are new and interesting and innovative ways that we can engage customers and users and serve them and engage internal teams, that sort of thing.

And so I got this book called The Imagination Muscle that I just heard about. It sounded really, really awesome. And it's really sort of like, helps unlock sort of like where do good ideas come from? And I haven't cracked it yet. It literally just came in this week and I'm getting ready to, read that over the next few weeks and, look where I can apply it to my work and in my life.

Chun:

Awesome. Thank you, Kevin. Is there anything else I would like to add that I haven't asked yet?

Kevin:

I would just say, I'm really glad that I got a chance to meet you. and I was really glad that you all had reached out and wanted to get to know who's this guy and really appreciate the opportunity to come and just share some of my thoughts and my experience and engaging with, experience management and VoC and CX and kind of everything that I find really, really cool about. This experience that I've had.

Chun:

Thank you so much, Kevin. And thank you for all the support and the wisdom. And I'm sure we can do a lot of great work together in the future.

Kevin:

Thank you, Chun. Appreciate it.

Summary

Kevin Gentry, Director of Product engagement at Athenahealth, continues to lead innovation of an award-winning Voice of the Customer (VoC) Program into it's 10th year. He brings personalization to care experiences for more than 160k providers and 110 million patients, and a framework for collective success to an organization of 6k+.In the first ever Making Waves Podcast episode, Chun and Kevin discuss:

  • The inner workings of the 100 Top Customer Priorities Framework

  • Finding expertise in Voice of the Customer (VoC) experience management (XM)

  • Deploying a closed feedback loop system for internal and external accessibility

  • Navigating common hurdles in the VoC journey

  • Maintaining organizational awareness leveraging integrated tech

  • Establishing cross-functional alignment and accountability

  • The power of personalization and it’s measurable impact on growth

  • Intersection of employee and customer experiences

  • Scaling VoC Programs to transform care at every touchpoint

  • The AI do’s and don’ts of future care and human connection

  • And more!

If you enjoy this podcast, don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube, of follow us on Monterey AI.

Speakers

Where to find Kevin Gentry:

Where to find Chun Jiang:

References


Transcripts

Chun:

Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Making Waves show. We've got Kevin Gentry, Director of Product Engagement at Athenahealth, and really a pioneer in Voice of the Customer and experience management. Why don't you give us a little bit intro about yourself, and your work?

Kevin:

Great. Thanks for having me. Kevin Gentry and I work at Athenahealth. I've been there for a little over nine years now, worn a bunch of hats and have really fallen in love with experience management, CX, VoC, all the things. And, I lead a highly talented team of folks who work directly with our product stakeholders and help inform, what our customers are saying they need.

Chun:

Awesome. Awesome. I love the elevator pitch. I know you've been at Athena for a very long time. And I would love to learn more about like, when you first started doing VoC work, what was that like and how that has been.

Kevin:

So the real answer I sort of stumbled into it, to be honest. You know, when I reflect back on my career, I've always held roles that were customer oriented and a customer centric. And I joined Athena, what was first, an advisory services sort of consulting team that was coming together. And it was an opportunity for me to hit the road, meet with a bunch of customers and really help them optimize their use of our products and services, overcome a lot of challenges, change management issues with the adoption of new technology, and, really trying to make sure that they could continue to derive satisfaction, value, and, and stick with us for a long time and grow with us.

And so I did that and then I had a chance to wear a bunch of different hats, kind of spun around the organization a little bit and learned a ton from some brilliant colleagues, made some mistakes, paid attention to Athena as it went through a very significant transformation. And then I found myself, on this team that was organizing an emerging voice of the customer function.

And, that was when I first was really exposed to the more traditional tenets of experience management, CX concepts and strategies, and VoC as a program.

Chun:

When I first met you, I was just like curious about who is the person behind this like massive program at an enterprise that is like in highly regulated industry. And it seems we like already in this place for a little bit, we understand how complicated like can data can get and at the same time, like how. What's the customer, how the customer themselves and the how cross like collaboration team can be, there's just like a lot, a lot of nuances and challenges and lessons there to one. I would be curious, like, how did you get started? Like when you first, like stamping into this VoC program, what was the first like project look like? What was the first like initiative or how did you get started?

Kevin:

Kind of where did I first really get turned on to it? It was, I did a listening tour. I was working for our chief medical officer at the time. , and I was sort of commissioned to do a little bit of a listening tour. And it was really just to go and engage with some customers, understand how they, how do they actually define success with Athena?

How do they understand. You know, that we're delivering on the value they're looking for. And it was really rewarding. Number one, I love talking to customers, so it was great. I remember there was a moment though, and I was walking into this. Fairly large organization had, a number of practices that extended into a couple of different states and was sort of guided back with the customer success manager to their C suite area in their back office.

And I noticed that they had all of the. They had their mission on the wall and their guiding principles and things that they stood for. And I remember just, I stopped and I asked the CSM. I was like, do you know what those are? And he was looking at them and it just occurred to me in that moment. And I became really fascinated with how can we really know our customers, not just know a lot about them by way of like, Whatever's in CRM and metadata and some different things, but like, how do we really know our customers?

And it was sort of like really prompted this fascination for me around everything that we do should reflect back how that individual customer sees their mission and values, right? Like, can we actually. deliver updates, enhancements, solutions, touch points with them along the entire sort of journey they have with us in a way that translates back to how they see this is actually helping me solve my mission and my guiding principles.

So that's really, it's sort of like when it really started to kind of. Unfold for me. And then as I've, as I've thought about VoC and customer experience, and sort of been in this space, I really think of VoC programs needing to sort of operationalize around kind of three different dimensions.

Needs to be accessible, responsive, and personalized. And that last one is I think one of the hardest things to do. And I spend probably way too much time thinking and bemoaning about it. But I think that that's, that's really kind of three things that need to be in place in order to do that. Right.

And then, you can have a really, really, rewarding program. So, 1 of the 1st things I did officially on the team as I was leading, commercial enablement programs for VoC. And so I was spending a lot of time with customer success operations for their customer facing teams, even sales.

And, that was when I really started to understand and put the pieces together out the transformational power of collecting and acting on the right set of data.

Chun:

Tell me what, what are, what is your definition of this kind of accessibility of VoC.

Kevin:

So I think that one of the things I like to say, and I told this to my team and I told this to everybody, I was like, we're only as good as our data. And I think that like, when you, when you, what I'm really proud of in our program. And this is also hats off to my boss and a lot of the direction that he set forth to really bring together a true omni-channel approach.

And so when we think about connecting across everything that we're hearing entire inside of our entire survey journey work, which includes NPS and sentiment and a bunch of things, we have a really robust platform for customers to engage on, that they're providing a lot of individual pieces of feedback.

And then we have a bunch of internal channels as well that, you know, CSMs can vote for ideas and feedback on behalf of their customers. And we use that to also work with sales for prospect and our training team for the things that they hear and others. And so we're able to then sort of start to, because of that access, both internally and externally to our customers to sort of meet them where they're at, allow them to be able to voice their concerns and, feedback ideas.

And also just generally how they're feeling about doing business with us. And then internally having that same sort of robust approach to being able to collect that data, has given us a really deep, rich sort of ecosystem of data that we can do a lot of things with and get really flexible with.

That's what I think about when it comes to accessibility. Cause I think about like, you know, you put yourself in the shoes of your customer. It doesn't matter what industry. For us, it's healthcare. Think about doctors and nurses and practice administrators and those folks... they're busy running their practice every day.

They're treating patients. Like that's their focus. That's what they want to be doing and that's what they should be doing. So yeah. So how can we make sure that then when they need to communicate a piece of feedback or need to, to, to convey. Sort of some, some impression they're having. We do it in a way that is easy and accessible for them to be able to do that.

Chun:

Data can get overwhelmed. It's really very hard for users or like consumers lock the data. But even, when we figure out that part, the next question is like, okay, Internally, we only have so much our resources every quarter or every year. the voice of a customers is touching so many functions like sales, marketing, product design, user research, customer success, like literally everything. , what are some of my practice that you find that are very efficient to make the internal team accountable on Voice of the Customers?

Kevin:

Yeah, that's a great question.

One of the things that we evaluate all the time is do we maintain sort of a very high level of organizational awareness so that the difference, so we understand what is the data that the individual teams are needing, how do they want to access it? And retrieve that data.

So we have a number of really smart internal self service tools that they can go in. They can direct query if they want to all of our data is in snowflake, but they can also, pull data specifically out of a number of different dashboards that we have ready to go. on my team in particular, I've built out a lot of processes for them to be able to, you know, we, we have, you know, simple JIRA form, fill this form out, it's an issue collector, tells exactly what you're looking for.

We're going to get that. We're going to sign it out. Somebody is going to go on their sprint. They're going to be able to turn around an analysis really, really quickly. So that we can make sure that we have that piece of it covered too. The challenge with that is that we have to make sure that we're always educating the business across the internal teams of, we have all this data.

We can help you here. And that would say that that was a particular challenge that we had early on as we were continuing to sort of form. And, that I felt like some of the biggest challenges with sort of getting Our VoC program to where it is now was, it felt like very much like a push, not a pull in the organization.

And now it's very much a pull. And it's exciting because we have such demand and appetite for our stuff that we have to then think about how this is impacting our capacity, which is a bad, which is not a bad problem to have. but, it's taken, it's taken a lot of relationship building and understanding and, continuing to pressure tests and, and pilot things and experiment with what's the most efficient way that we can get this information to the right team at the right time so that they can actually act on it.

Chun:

What was the trigger there? What was the trigger you feel like, oh my god, the table has flipped. It's now, it's a pull. No longer a push.

Kevin:

Athena had gone, we'd gone through some transformation in a way that really positioned as well to be a lot more customer centric in my mind. And we started to be able to see that there was an expectation for us to then be a part of. Corporate initiatives.

And so we had that sort of hook. And I think it was also in just sort of being able to prove the value. It was just continuing to put in the reps of reflecting back to the business. Here's where we're actually impacting customer experience because of data that we're acting on, whether it's new capabilities, new enhancements, et cetera, and you know, one of the ways that we did that too, was we had constructed what we call our Top 100 Customer Priorities list, and it became a really um, impactful and meaningful sort of recognized artifact

across the business. It definitely was a little bit of an iterative process as it sort of came together. But it really is a representation. When we look across all of our data sources, that is sort of like, what are the most top emerging thematic needs that we're seeing across all of the data that represents our customer base.

And then you can double click into it to then pull out all kinds of, different lenses of that segmentation, specialty, user, different things. And one of the ways that we were able to also sort of stand that up too, was able to effectively get shared accountability metrics, right? So the way that we measure the impact against that list is something that is shared goals that we have with product, with customer success, et cetera.

It's on a scorecard. We report out on it. And so that has been really helpful as sort of a unifying framework and sort of a mechanism in the business to be able to then create that appetite and interest to want to address the things on that list. And then that's been putting, you know, puts ourselves in the VoC side in a really, really good position because we own a lot of the closing the loop with our customers.

We want to make sure that we're communicating with them when we're addressing needs that they're saying that they want. So I would say that that was a big sort of tipping point. And I will say it's, it's an artifact that we will continue to evolve. It's not one of those things that like it came together and this is it.

And now you can just rest on your laurels. And that's, that's the thing now it's like, no, the business is continuing to evolving. Our customers continue to evolve. We need to continue to think about how does, this continue to serve our ability to best adVoCate on behalf of our customers? And so it's going to continue to be changed.

Now we're in a position that we can do that in the partnership cross functionally with all of these teams.

Chun:

That's crazy. 100. How did you come up with that number? Or how did it land on that number? Is it like...100, per quarter? Per year?

Kevin:

It's ambitious and audacious. The way that we evaluate the effectiveness, it doesn't necessarily mean that every single thing on that list by the end of the year is going to be delivered. You know, the planning cycles on R and D. It doesn't always meet a nice calendar year, right? But what it does represent is saying, Hey, if we look at this year, these are the most emergent top needs.

There's things that are going to carry over when we do this again for the next list. There's things that we're going to be able to chip away at it and deliver some component pieces, but we're going to have to still maintain awareness of the stuff that we still need to continue to iterate on. And so it's kind of a living thing.

It's, it's, it's kind of a dynamic list that way. In healthcare, it's highly regulated.

Product development, there's like the must do things in order to make sure that we are compliant and meeting what regulatory bodies are saying that we need to do. As an organization who delivers healthcare technology and in the SaaS space. Well that takes up resource allocation for your R and D teams.

I think that in order to make this work, we've also had to rely on just like a very, very tight partnership.

And I think that that's also why my team exists in that, like, my people are, like, I have somebody who's responsible for covering every subdivision.

Chun:

How do you maintain this kind of iteration or feedback loop with the customer and consumers who help you come up with like one of those customer priorities? And do you like conduct interviews? Do you go like field visits? And what are some like, practices that you recommend people to do?

Kevin:

I love closed the loop strategies. You know, it all starts with listening on one end. And then we do our analysis and aggregation and advocacy work. And then there's a, there's a period in the middle also when things are going into development. And we make sure that we're extending all the opportunities to our customers to make sure that they're aware of what's happening with their feedback, how they can get involved in research, testing,

Chun:

Oh, you, you, you led them to choose how they wanted to be involved?

Kevin:

So, well, so the way that we, the way that we do this is that we have, a group that runs, there are a research council, and so they're doing early stage research tests and discovery studies. We have a centralized place in our community platform, as well as communications that go out, as well as information that CSMs can guide their customers to say, hey, here's a bunch of research studies, we're looking for people.

People can sign up to be on the research council and they'll get a continuous feed of available studies to get involved with. when things are further along and we're ready to alpha test, oftentimes my team gets requests from our product operations folks saying, Hey, we're running this alpha. Can we look at the data and identify like, who would be like the right 15 customers to get involved with?

And so. Being able to then look at our data and say, who's been the most vocal about this? Like they have something to say and they would be probably more than willing to test out some functionality. On our community platform where we get a lot of the feedback ideas and it's crowdsourced. So customers can submit an idea, vote up ideas, comment on ideas, et cetera. I have a really lovely community moderator who reads all the feedback that comes in.

And, we've overhauled all of the statuses that we put on ideas. So that we make sure that when something is in exploration or research or development, or there's an alpha offering, or there's a beta offering, Or there's a POV that we can craft from our product teams and why we might not be able to make an investment right now.

We're able to update those statuses in real time and then update that messaging and any customer who's following that idea, who has voted on the idea, they can have their settings to get automatic notifications. So they can go in and check, or they can just actually get flagged when there's change. This is also though in our data.

So I mentioned that I. You know, had worked a lot with CSM. So we've created a lot of tooling for them to be able to then go in, point to the data based on their customer. Here's all the feedback that that customer has provided. Here's the status of all that feedback and where it's at. Here's things. And now it's aligned to our roadmap.

Here's things that might be slated for an upcoming release. And that has been a really, really cool part of my job in sort of the Creating a lot of those resources because, I've, I've witnessed where even for me getting in front of customers, which I do a lot, to be able to pull the data, show them, hey, here's all the data that you've provided us. Here's what's happening in that data.

Here's what you can look forward to. And here's some things that might be further out, or we're not able to make an investment at this time. And just having that conversation, helping them see the process and feel the process, I think is, is a huge, it's a huge piece of why we're really proud of the program we've built out that.

Chun:

Now I wanna ask you more about the personalization part, but I think before jumping to that, , love to dive a little bit deeper into the written of investment. It's a kind of like a hot topic in the VoC view. I'm not sure if you, how you feel about it, but, we as the practitioner, right, like VoC, we understand like, okay, VoC is definitely driving an insane value for like brand loyalty, for like customer certification, for, you know, like conversion, for it's a loyalty just in general. , but I would be curious to hear a little bit more like from your side.

Kevin:

What I would say that really helps inform the value of the program is when we can see an increase of customer engagement and user engagement. I would also say that it's not just feedback ideas and things that customers want us to build new features and functionality for.

Because of our sort of omnichannel approach, we can connect that to significant drivers of satisfaction sentiment as a, you know, measured through NPS and other things. And so, when you look at, when you look at and you're able to inform the business on, here are the top drivers of things that are actually leading to dissatisfaction.

Which could eventually lead to attrition. That becomes a really powerful rationale to help inform the business on like, sort of how customers are feeling. And I think that that's the piece for me of like the marriage between sort of sentiment and then hard feedback data together really helps actually tell that powerful story.

Another piece of this too, that I don't know how often this actually, I've talked to a few other sort of leaders in the industry and just kind of swap stories and some people also connect this back to employee experience.

And I think that that's a huge piece. When we think about like overall experience management, it's, it's, it's your customers and everything, but it's also your employees. Right. You know, people experience burnout, people experience you know, if the CSM feels like they don't have the resources to really serve their customer in the way that they trusted to do, because they're the face of that relationship that can take its toll. And so.

Kevin:

That's where I also see some of the work that we can do on overall CS enablement is really like helping them. Like I can help you change the tone of the relationship with this customer, which hopefully will help provide them some satisfaction and a better experience as just their own employee experience..

Chun:

Another example is If ICs or like engineers, , designers, product managers, they see more and more feedback, like positive feedback coming in, everyone will feel like more and energetic to like serve the

Kevin:

I will say, I've noticed also is as the appetite across the businesses grew for more of our, what we had to offer,

the product managers and the product teams, get really excited when they can rattle off stats of like my features addressing this many ideas with this many user votes and this many internal ideas and that sort of thing. And we enable all that reporting. So we measure, we maintain all of the sort of like release reporting.

And it's a huge boon to them. Something we haven't talked about is that I have a colleague of mine who's a brilliant leader who leads our user engagement strategy. And we have a number of user groups. And direct, formalized and, she's been really growing.

We've been really working to, engage product teams, get them directly in front of customers, talking about features that they're developing or do some additional problem discovery and, our customers love it. And. The product teams get to take away some, some information, do a demo, check the crowd, how did it go?

You know, and we do that. We know that not only through the user groups, but we have our annual customer conference and we have, you know, my team has also helped alongside our, design ops team to be able to organize and coordinate, many workshops where we go and we'll look at the feedback data and we'll say, hey, let's actually pull these customers together.

And see if we can do a little bit of a workshop. I think finding opportunities wherever we can to continue to do that really helped bring the customer along, but also make sure that, you know, that everybody, everybody has that opportunity internally who needs to. Is it just a win win.

Chun:

Personalization. I think, my guess is you're going to start talking about a little bit more technology and AI trend there. But that's why every time when I hear about personalization, it's like, we know close the feedback loop is important. it's also really, really hard to scale this kind of personalization, stack for users or for consumers in general.

So, I would love to hear your thoughts on personalization there. And also what are some like trends or technology trends you've seen in this view to help you like deliver that piece easier.

Kevin:

I guess I haven't completely solved all the mystery to it but, I think that it's one thing to be able to just Send a release notes or release notes out to customers when you've delivered something and hope that they engaged with it know.

We have In our community space we have every time we have a release, we have a release center that comes to get like "Release center's open!" And it's a place where all the information is.

They can see everything, training updates, all that stuff. what I've been working on specifically. , is, and it goes back to some of the CS enablement stuff is how can we make sure that we're equipping those customer facing teams at scale to have all the awareness they need to sort of, you know, what's coming in the upcoming release, you know, how this is impacting your customers so that you can have a very elegant conversation with them and get them ready for it and excited about it and see the value. You know, personalization to me is if you take your whole customer base, you can look at segmentation, you can look at like other sort of factors and how you want to actually kind of carve that up. My goal is that like you get it down finally to the end user, that they can actually see themselves reflected in that update that you, there's, there's really cool ways to do that, that.

At scale, it takes sort of like, locking arm and arm with CSMs or anybody who owns that relationship to really just add that extra personalization on it.

Chun:

We bring stuff a little bit about, like, the change of the, well, basically, large length model, how that is impacting the VoC world. What are the benefits? what are the, the, what could, like, not be done before? And now it's, like, possible. in general, we would love to hear your thoughts and ideas on that front.

Kevin:

Yeah. So we have a LLM, have been going through and done a bunch of all of the tuning work on that. You know, you have your supervised layer and unsupervised layer and you're- and it's. It's great. I think that, I think that that is not uncommon for kind of large programs that are they're working with that kind of a major data set.

I think it's a worthwhile investment to make sure that you can get that done. Constructed in a way that actually reflects a really useful and flexible taxonomy structure, however you want to organize that. The way that we've approached that is really looking at like, let's incorporate factors for how our product teams are organized.

Also what the customers are saying in the verbatims of the feedback. And then let's try and see like how many layers deep can we go. Right. And it's really exciting. because at the end of the day, then you can actually have like a really efficient data retrieval and go just exactly getting what you want.

And you can also then start to trend things that maybe you couldn't otherwise. when it comes to other AI, I've noticed, so I don't, you know, AI is not new and, I feel like it's new to a lot of people.

Once the chat GPT buzz kind of happened. I know that all of a sudden my LinkedIn inbox blew up with people wanting to show me their new companies and services. The way that I'm looking at it right now is I think that, you know, it's AI, generative AI, all the applications of it.

a lot of people are also trying to figure out like, how do we live with this world? I don't think it's something to be afraid of. I think it's something to actually be embracing of What I would say about it for VoC is that if it can be wielded in a way that offloads friction, automates tasks, provides a bunch of efficiency and confidence in the data that then frees your team up to then spend most of their time working on enriching, like real human connections with your customers. I think that that's the win.

But I don't, I don't think it's something that should be like, Oh, this is going to replace the entire workforce where like, no, you should look at it as replace the things that it should replace maybe, but then use that time that you get back to then like, continue to get to know your customers engage with them.

And one of the things I think is really unique and interesting about your offering to me is, it seems to be, less focused on sort of like prompt engineering, which I think is like superseded a lot of the attention. , and the way that I actually thought about the way that you engage your offering is you're sort of like mentoring the AI.

And I think that that approach is really, really smart and unique because you're not trying to jump through a bunch of mental gymnastics to try and get it to spit out what you hope it will.

Instead, you're actually getting it to actually know you're going to actually understand me and how I want to actually leverage this tool. So definitely hats off to you.

Chun:

I love that. Thank you. Yeah, I think VoC, honestly, I think it's about parenting. You're parenting data, but also you're parenting the organization, parenting user to kind of keep fostering and nurturing this kind of feedback loop. That's how we kind of build our platform. Like at the end of the day, I wanted this platform to be able to automate a lot of data tasks. so, but also give me you this kind of like a really smooth way to educate you about asking the right question, finding the right data, finding the right cohort of users to talk to. So if we can like release everyone who used for this platform from all this task, and then they can have a 10 more like calls with users and consumers and customers every week. That's going to be the biggest win. I think , that's why every time I hear a feature request about like, hey, can you generally like a personas or a lot of deliverable ish task, I'm like, that is what AI is really good, but that's not going to be the biggest, like thing to unlock this kind of customer intuition for the organizations.

Kevin:

I mean, think about it, like, with product teams where they feel like, what's their perception of, how many layers are between them and their customer, whether it's tasks, geography, whatever. Yeah. And how can this sort of like, just really shrink that distance, right?

Chun:

So I'm not sure if you know this. There are a lot of Generative like UI or generally like code platforms like coming up. I think the service or the product itself is also moving to a more and more personalized version. So, for example. Right now, it was Spotify. Everyone has different, recommendation algorithms or mechanisms there. But at the same time, we also want to be a little bit more opinionated, at least, in healthcare about, how consumers, or patients, or users, like, should use the platform or service. How do you view this, kind of, like, two passes there?

Are we going to move towards it? A future that everyone is able to control their own interface, own experience? Are we gonna be find the middle ground? I'm curious how you think about it.

Kevin:

I think it gets tricky, In theory, like AI can automate anything, right? But I think what's appropriate when it comes to actually treating patients, right? And that's where I think that like AI in general, I don't think should ever, I don't, regardless of the application, I don't think it should ever relieve us. of the responsibility to do certain things in our jobs, and I think that in healthcare, it's like, how do we free up doctors to actually just be doctors? That's what they want. Not like completely have like a robotic proxy of that doctor, right?

So, It's, it's, it's like, it's definitely like a lot of challenges. And so then, so then what's that, what, what are those things and sort of what is that level of, useful assistance that AI can provide versus no, this actually goes against the regulation or this actually creates a patient safety issue. So I think that that, and that's something that, Athena is definitely thinking about that.

And our product teams are definitely like thinking about that. And can you, and you can find even out there some, talks that our Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Jessel has, has given and some others around how we think about AI. But we definitely know AI is not going away. It's here to be embraced.

We just have to figure out how do you do it.

Chun:

That's why voice for customer is getting like even more important than ever. Because there are a lot of tasks and iterations need to be done between patients and doctors to see they feel about thousands of iterations or output for AI.

Kevin:

Yeah. We want to do everything that we can to make sure that we're,

freeing up those providers to be able to treat patients and deliver the best optimal outcomes that they can. And so when we think about that customer base and that we serve and what we've seen on VoC continues to reinforce a responsibility to, I'm not going to just dump a data set into an AI engine and say, like, and just say like, yeah, tell me, like, I'm going to just trust you to tell me what it is.

Like, I think that I still have to bear that responsibility, but I can guide AI tools and use them so that I can be more efficient and help the teams that I work with be more efficient. I think that's the, that's the sweet spot.

Chun:

Reasoning is what everyone's focusing on right now. There's also the part of like empathy. That I think like even like more important after we figure out how to like instruct like AI to be reasoning. How do we make sure they are also like carries on the value, right? Like, by the end of the day, to make decisions. Well, we talk a lot today. One question that I usually ask everyone. What is the one book that you've read recently or for the past like five years that will be really valuable for VoC practitioners?

Kevin:

I actually just got a new book. It's not necessarily about VoC at all. But one of the things that I try and approach with VoC is I always try and of like a healthy level of creativity because I think that we should always be trying to think about, like, what are new and interesting and innovative ways that we can engage customers and users and serve them and engage internal teams, that sort of thing.

And so I got this book called The Imagination Muscle that I just heard about. It sounded really, really awesome. And it's really sort of like, helps unlock sort of like where do good ideas come from? And I haven't cracked it yet. It literally just came in this week and I'm getting ready to, read that over the next few weeks and, look where I can apply it to my work and in my life.

Chun:

Awesome. Thank you, Kevin. Is there anything else I would like to add that I haven't asked yet?

Kevin:

I would just say, I'm really glad that I got a chance to meet you. and I was really glad that you all had reached out and wanted to get to know who's this guy and really appreciate the opportunity to come and just share some of my thoughts and my experience and engaging with, experience management and VoC and CX and kind of everything that I find really, really cool about. This experience that I've had.

Chun:

Thank you so much, Kevin. And thank you for all the support and the wisdom. And I'm sure we can do a lot of great work together in the future.

Kevin:

Thank you, Chun. Appreciate it.

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