Service Relationship Management

…extremely critical! A year or so ago, I was doing a little work with a company that leads the healthcare industry in clinical interoperability technologies. That company, Medicity, was founded by a super-smart doc by the name of Kipp Lassetter. Long story –short, Kipp asks me what I’m up to and says he has an idea which he described as sort of ‘fastpass’ for healthcare. But along with that he talked about it needing to be backed up by a technology that was like the reverse of a CRM (customer relationship management) platform.

So, I’m not an inventor by any stretch, but I do have a rep as somebody who can take an idea to market. With Kipp’s two concepts in mind I did a little poking around and found that there really was a need for what he was talking about. Mint.com was doing something like it after all. When healthcare was thrown into the mix, the recognition that it is a customer experience wasteland became immediately apparent. More than that, there isn’t even a concept of customer relationship management there. And while the dynamics in healthcare reform drive responsibility for healthcare…decision-making, payment, and interaction further and further into the hands of the folks who actually use it, the void in just how to navigate the healthcare ‘system’ and do the simple stuff like getting an appointment, finding out what your benefits are, knowing if a lab result has gone back to your physician, or just remembering to go back for that dreaded annual mammogram (or prostate exam for your guys), you and I don’t have the time, energy or inclination to engage in the process. The lack of consumer expectations, or consistency in healthcare seemed to me to be a blue ocean of opportunity for a new technology solution so I jumped in with both feet.

I and the founding team began to work out the market, product requirement, technology requirements, and so on, we continued to be challenged with exactly how to talk about…what it was in less than two hours. It was some of this, and little like that, and similar to something else. We knew we were about the service experience, and had in fact joined the Center for Services Leadership at Arizona State University to ensure we stayed current with the latest science and best practices around service. I reached out to industry analysts for help. They were excited by what we were doing but agreed that there wasn’t a specific category in which to neatly place us.

One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that if nobody else is doing what you are there may be a reason for that. So finding a category that makes sense is really important – even if that doesn’t happen to be in the same industry. Trends are trends and regardless of the point of origin we are mostly all working to solve same or similar problems.