There is a staggering amount of customer experience work going on in the healthcare industry these days. From providers (the docs), to pharma companies and payers (health insurers), everyone is trying to figure out what to do and how to do it.

One guy who’s figured out a lot is David Shapiro, who wowed members of Forrester’s Customer Experience Council last year with a presentation of how UnitedHealth Group uses journey maps to transform experiences. David is the vice president of member experience for Medicare and retirement at UnitedHealth, and he's one of the speakers at Forrester's Forum For Customer Experience Professionals East on June 25th and 26th in New York.

In advance of his speech, we put some questions to David about the evolution of customer experience at his organization.

Q. When did your company first begin focusing on customer experience? Why?

The nomination period has officially closed for the new Forrester Outside In Awards for customer experience excellence. The companies nominating themselves have done their hard work, and now it’s the judges’ turn to evaluate the submissions and pick the winners.

We’ve been getting some questions about the Outside In Awards and what to expect on stage at our June Forum. First of all, we’ll be handing out the awards the morning of June 25^th at Forrester’s Customer Experience Forum in New York City. If you’ve been on the edge of your seats wondering who will win, the suspense will finally be over.

The awards ceremony itself is so short, though, that you’ll only get a taste of what makes these programs award-winning material. Bummer, right? Not so fast!

What we found with our other award programs — the Voice Of The Customer Awards and the Groundswell Awards — is that companies tell us great stories about what they’re doing. In their nomination forms, we hear about all kinds of interesting practices that these companies have been able to link to business results, which is what we look for in the awards. Rather than keep all of the details to ourselves, we like to get them up on stage so that they can tell their own stories and answer questions from the audience about what they're doing.

The Outside In Awards will be no exception. On the afternoon of June 25^th, I’ll be leading a track session panel with representatives from several of the winning companies. They’ll present more details about their award-winning practices and the results they’re getting, and you’ll get a chance to ask your burning questions and get some practical advice.

A chemical manufacturer with a solid customer listening program noticed an uptick in complaints about pricing. Unlike many firms, which would take the comments at face value and take action accordingly, this company first stepped back and reflected on its strategy:  it sold premium chemical for advanced applications targeted at particular industries, so it surmised that the company shouldn’t see this kind of feedback. It did some root cause analysis, talking to those customers. It learned that some distributors were selling chemicals for applications in markets better served by off-the-shelf, commodity products. As a result, not only were these distributors driving detractors, which were creating a headwind for selling into their target market, but they were wasting time on low-value sales and more importantly, using valuable resources internally that made the company competitive in target markets (e.g. scientists to help innovative clients discover new applications for the chemicals). The company decided that the right course of action was to re-visit its distributor training and communications programs to better ensure sales teams understood the core value proposition and how to find the high value opportunities.

There are at least a few lessons to take away from this story.

Know your customer experience strategy. Firms often have blanket statements such as “we aim to delight our customers.” When these lack a connection to a company strategy, which should clearly articulate value propositions for specific target markets, firms can spend a lot of time and energy jumping through hoops trying to serve customers it never should have acquired in the first place. A situation that the chemical manufacturer avoided by reflecting on its strategy to direct its activities.

Of the six disciplines in Forrester’s customer experience maturity model, design is probably the least understood. It’s is not taught in most business schools (although this is starting to change at institutions like Stanford and the University of Toronto). It’s also not widely practiced in most companies outside of specialized groups that focus on digital touchpoints. And so it remains a mystery to most business people. That’s a shame, because design is an incredibly valuable business tool — and it’s accessible to just about anyone in any organization.

That’s why I wanted to take time this week to answer some of the questions that I’m frequently asked about customer experience design. In fact, all of the following are exact questions that I’ve received from Forrester clients over the past year.

What exactly is this design thing again?

Design is both a process and a mindset. 

Let’s talk about the process part first. Designers typically follow a common set of steps when trying to solve a problem: research that helps them uncover deep emotional insights about people’s wants and needs, analysis that helps them identify the real problems and issues, ideation of dozens (or hundreds) of possible solutions, prototyping that helps them bring those ideas to life in tangible ways, and testing that helps them evaluate the proposed prototypes and solutions. Designers don’t go thought this process once — they iterate this process several times in order to learn from their prototypes and refine their solutions.