Dialogue

Could you tell us about why Dialogue started an experience management program?

We’re based in Canada, and virtual healthcare is newer here than it is in the US. We were one of the first in the market to pioneer virtual healthcare on a big scale. In the beginning, it was a lot about educating our clients on virtual care. When working with employers and B2B clients, one of the things we noticed is that they all wanted an understanding of the satisfaction and the usage of their members. This is how we started sharing the results of Delighted’s NPS and its feedback solutions.

What metric does Dialogue use to measure satisfaction, and what role does the feedback play?

Since day one, we have used NPS and Delighted to track the satisfaction of our users. We use NPS as a company-wide metric for our quarterly and yearly objectives. The feedback guides our product roadmap while aligning our departments towards the same goal.

For example, our medical operations team tracks NPS across different provinces and languages. If something goes up or down, we can see if it’s due to COVID or due to changes we made, and adjust our operations accordingly, to ensure the ultimate patient experience.

We also share NPS and satisfaction metrics directly with our clients and stakeholders. For example, in our business reviews, we share the client’s NPS score as well as positive and negative verbatim comments (only for larger clients due to patient confidentiality) – we believe it’s important to be transparent about how our product and service is constantly evolving.

Why choose NPS as your core feedback metric?

We’re well aware of NPS as being a very important benchmark of satisfaction and predictor of churn and quality. Our NPS is significantly higher than our comparables in the healthcare industry, so we’ve always been aware of the significance behind NPS as a gold standard metric.

It’s important to note that we use Delighted CES (Customer Effort Score) as well in our support team and all of our customer success interactions. We track the emojis based on someone’s experience – we’ve developed a pretty robust system of reporting and the sharing of satisfaction.

Tell us about how your Delighted program is set up.

Our feedback surveys are triggered via email. A week after a client consults with Dialogue, they receive a Delighted NPS email asking them about their experience. In the past year, we have expanded that survey question to include Additional Questions.

What are some other questions you include in your Additional Questions?

We also ask about proactive care to users. Questions such as: “With Dialogue, are you more likely to seek out medical advice than you were before?” or “Do you feel that the organization that offers you Dialogue cares more about your well-being by providing this service?” We ask questions that speak to both our stakeholders as well as the individual user. Dialogue has over a thousand daily visits and NPS allows us to capture that magnitude of survey volume.

When COVID-19 hit, how did you adjust your experience management program to suit the situation?

We monitored our NPS platform especially closely in the beginning of COVID-19 because we had a higher volume and wanted to make sure that we were responding to all needs and concerns of our stakeholders. Our clients looked to us for what they should do for their own organization from a medical perspective. In response, we implemented a medically-validated COVID-19 resource guide and Delighted played a crucial role in capturing feedback for the new materials.

For example, we published a suite of resources online about returning to work, how to wear a mask, deconfining safely, and webinars from public health experts and other infectious disease experts. We’ve used Delighted website surveys to track how people felt about the usefulness of the online material.

Could you tell us about how you share and act on feedback insights?

Great question. We read and review every single NPS verbatim comment that comes in through our patient channels. Sometimes people leave paragraphs on paragraphs in their open response (e.g. just today I was reading about how Dialogue saved a patient’s life!), and we get feedback in the thousands. So how do you translate that from a verbatim comment to something that’s actionable and quantifiable? That’s why we use Tags.

We then review these on a monthly basis with our customer success, medical operations, and product teams so we can see the top reason why someone loves Dialogue and the top reason why someone might not. This feedback directs our next operational processes and product initiatives that shape the future of Dialogue.

How do you respond to promoters?

Our customer success team responds to all promoters, passives and detractors. Sometimes, if there’s a really great response, we’ll reach out and ask, “Would you be okay sharing this as a testimonial?” We have a bank of testimonials that we can use in marketing materials to share the amazing stories of Dialogue. There are some really heartwarming responses about people whose lives have been saved and it’s super encouraging to see how Dialogue is making an impact in people’s lives.

How do you respond to passives and detractors?

If the respondent is a passive or a detractor, we really want to understand their experience and see if there’s anything we could do to improve. Because we’re a medical service, we guard the privacy of the patient file very closely. If someone had a negative experience, based upon their comment, we may suggest they open a clinical investigation. If so, we, on the customer success team, don’t see that file, but we will work with our clinical quality team who will review the experience and speak directly with the patient.

Could you share some feedback-driven successes? Improvements that were made?

Delighted has been exceptionally useful to uncover insights that we probably wouldn’t have seen otherwise. We monitor NPS in many ways at Dialogue, and there are so many different examples of how we use it to make improvements. One example: We received feedback that our appointment experience with practitioners could be improved – it wasn’t easy for members to find the time that they wanted. As a result, we focused on improving our product and medical operations to have an impact on the whole patient journey. As a result, we rolled out a self-booking appointment feature, which has a slick UX and had a fantastic impact for all.

If Delighted were no longer available to you, what would be the impact on your business?

In general, NPS and Delighted customer feedback is crucial to improving our customer experience – we’d be flying blind without it! I’m aware that there are other NPS providers, but Delighted has been easy to integrate with our existing workflows (e.g. Front, Slack, etc) and has provided great service and support. It would be really challenging for us to have an understanding of how to adjust our operations and continue to improve our patient satisfaction without Delighted.

What has been your favorite part of the Delighted platform?

I think that the best thing about Delighted is that you continue to improve and release features at just the right time. Specifically, Additional Questions has been a real game-changer for us and we’ve been able to understand, at a broader level, deeper insights that would have been much more difficult to do before. Overall, I think that Delighted’s continued innovation and ease of use has been fantastic.

What advice would you give someone who’s starting an experience management program?

Define outcomes and have the right operational support. If you just turn on a program but you don’t have the operations, the executive buy-in, or culture – it’s significantly harder to make success a reality.

One of the strengths of Dialogue is that we’re all aligned around providing an incredible experience for all stakeholders – members, clients, partners, etc. This ties directly to how we view our feedback loop and focus on constant improvement. We receive a constant, high-volume flow of information each day. Implementing the process of review, connecting with other departments, and incorporating improvements into the product roadmap has been key to driving impact.

Some of the greatest delight I’ve had as a consumer is when someone says, “We’ve heard you and we implemented this piece of feedback.” And that’s something that we strive to do at Dialogue as well, with the help of Delighted.