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Blended Learning: Elevating Customer Service in Healthcare w/ Sam Anderson (Cardinal Health)

• Axonify • Season 5 • Episode 38

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Great customer service in healthcare is essential but includes added expectation thanks in part to the sensitivities and vulnerabilities associated with the industry. People want to be treated with respect and empathy and have easy access to reliable, accurate information. But providing this type of experience can be a challenge when you have thousands of employees across multiple business units. How do you make sure each customer gets the same top-notch experience during every interaction?

Sam Anderson, Director of Customer Experience Learning and Development at Cardinal Health, joins JD Dillon to share his team’s award-winning approach to customer service training. Sam explains why it’s important to start with the end in mind by identifying critical business metrics to measure the impact of your learning strategy. He breaks down the key components of the company's EASEE program and explains how they applied microlearning and coaching to reinforce key customer service skills.

In The Know is brought to you by Axonify, the proven frontline enablement solution that gives employees everything they need to learn, connect and get things done. With an industry-leading 83% engagement rate, Axonify is used by companies to deliver next-level CX, higher sales, improved workplace safety and lower turnover. To learn more about how Axonify enables over 3.5 million frontline workers in 160-plus countries, in over 250 companies including Lowe’s, Kroger, Walmart and Citizens Bank, visit axonify.com.

JD Dillon (00:13):

Hello friends, how are you doing today? It's great to see you and welcome to the 40th episode of In the Know, your 25-minute deep dive into the modern employee experience and what we can do to make it better. I'm JD from Axonify and today's episode is all about customer service. Now, I like to think that I know a thing or two about delivering exceptional customer service. I mean, after all, it's where I spent the first half of my career, whether it was in movie theaters or theme parks, it was always my job to make sure you were having such a good time that you came back time and time again. And while, and my teams I think did an exceptional job of delivering that exceptional service. We always had something going for us because you were always coming to us to have a good time.

(01:00):

Maybe you were taking a first date out to the movies or you were going on vacation to Disney with your extended family, but we were always there starting from kind of a positive place and then it was up to us to maintain that level or maybe when possible, raise the bar and exceed your expectations. But this isn't always the case for every business when it comes to the role that customer service plays. Have you ever called a contact center and had a good time, or are you usually starting from a bit of a negative spot and then it's their job to bring things back up to that positive zone? Because great customer service doesn't always just bring people back to your organization. It can also put people at ease, boost their confidence and help them feel like they can overcome a challenging situation. This is especially true in healthcare.

(01:51):

For example, a few years ago I went to a local outpatient facility for surgery. I'm fine, but I can tell you everything about that day. And it's not because I'm an expert at maintaining my personal health records. It's because I remember the employees from that facility and I especially remember what they were wearing because all of the admin staff of the nurses, even my doctor, were all dressed like elves and reindeer because it was Christmas Eve and they knew how stressful it can be to not just have surgery but to do it during the holidays. So they helped put me at ease and have some fun, to put it bluntly, by bringing that holiday spirit with them on that day. And here I am talking about my outpatient procedure on the internet 10 years later. That's what great customer service can do. So how do you make sure that your workers have the knowledge and skill necessary to deliver that kind of exceptional service during every customer interaction? Well, we're going to ask Sam Anderson, director of Learning and Development at Cardinal Health. Sam is going to walk us through his team's award-winning approach to customer service training, including how they apply micro-learning and coaching to reinforce key customer service skills. But before we welcome our IT K guest, let's do a quick round of “JD’s Five Things”.

(03:16):

Here's a short list of five things that I'm really excited about right now. Starting with the two stops we have left on the 2023 leg of the Ecosystem tour. I've been to Las Vegas, Nashville, NYC and Indianapolis recently, and now I'm going to be streaming my story of the Modern Learning Ecosystem during two upcoming online events. So join me at ATD Core4 from November 28th to the 30th, and then at the ATD Japan Summit from December 5th to the 8th. Get all of the details plus 2024 tour dates at the very real website EcosystemTour.com. Axonify also just released our latest guide for frontline enablement, and this one is tailored to grocery. So be sure to head over to Axonify.com/toolkit to download your copy. It includes an overview of the three pillars of frontline enablement, 16 tactics for putting enablement into action, and a step-by-step guide for building a grocery enablement campaign.

(04:12):

It's your go-to playbook for driving next-level service in your store. So be sure to grab your copy right now or after the show or in a different tab either way. But it's not just November. It's also Movember a time to raise awareness for men's health causes around the world. This includes mental health, suicide prevention, prostate cancer and testicular cancer. Now, our Axonify team has been a big supporter of Movember for years, so that means we've got all types of unfortunate mustaches growing right now in our Toronto and Waterloo offices. If you want to learn more and donate to support Men's health, get all the details at ca.movember.com. Now we're just two weeks away from an exciting anniversary. It's the one-year anniversary of The Modern Learning Ecosystem, my book, and I want to once again thank everyone in the L&D community for your support since its release.

(05:01):

To celebrate the one-year anniversary, I'm going to be doing some special giveaways, so be sure to follow me on LinkedIn. Check back here for the final ITK of the year on Wednesday, November 29th for a chance to potentially get a copy of The Modern Learning Ecosystem. Now that's so many awesome things in today's five things, but the fifth thing may be the most awesome thing of all because have you heard about Axonify Content Studio? We actually just announced it at Nashville at our community conference and how off-the-shelf training content can sometimes be kind of meh because it's good, but it doesn't quite match your brand or your process or the languages that you specifically need. Well, we solved these problems with the latest addition to our content marketplace called Content Studio. Powered by Vyond, Content Studio lets you fully customize hundreds of ready-to-go video topics from the Axonify Content Marketplace. Let's say that we have a topic that you like, but it's built for an office-based workforce, and you work in a grocery store. With a few clicks, you can transform that video into a full grocery scenario, complete with your very own company branding content studio accelerates your development time, getting you 90% of the way there instead of forcing you to always start from scratch. That's pretty cool. Get all the details in our new content studio subscription over at Axonify.com/content. And that is the latest edition of “JD’s Five Things”.

Sam Anderson (06:30):

Wow.

JD Dillon (06:31):

Now let's welcome our ITK guest, Sam Anderson. Sam has a long runway of experience through a variety of roles in HR, including learning and development, talent management, and as an HR business partner at companies, including JP Morgan, Chase and L Brands. In his role as Director of Learning and Development at Cardinal Health, Sam leads the Global Learning and Development team and strategically supports 4,500-plus customer service and customer experience professionals across five lines of business and seven corporate service functions. Sam Anderson, you're In The Know.

Sam Anderson (07:01):

JD, good to see you. Thanks for having me.

JD Dillon (07:03):

Our pleasure indeed. I have to ask, how's the weather in South Florida?

Sam Anderson (07:06):

It's very wet today. 


JD Dillon (07:10):

Yes, so Sam and I are both in Florida, but we're in very different parts of Florida, so we're about four hours away from one another. We're having very different weather days, so we're hoping, fingers crossed, that the weather holds for us for the rest of the show, but that means we have to dive in. Let's talk customer service and healthcare. Healthcare is obviously a big complicated space. Can you start by telling us a bit about what Cardinal Health does and what types of work the people you support do every day?

Sam Anderson (07:36):

Yeah, happy to. Cardinal Health is a distributor of pharmaceuticals and a global manufacturer and distributor of medical and lab products. So anything used in a medical setting, chances are we sell it and in some cases we manufacture it. We are headquartered in Dublin, Ohio, just outside of Columbus, have been in operation for 50 years and have locations in 30 countries, and we employ about 48,000 globally. So the people we support are customer service teams, and these groups provide resolutions to customer issues. They review and respond to customer questions, help with returns and check the status of orders, very similar to probably a customer contact service center that you've interacted with in a retail setting. Perhaps one of our customers could be a global 500 pharmacy chain, a regional health system, a family-owned pharmacy in a rural area or even an internal employee who's looking for help with an IT-related question or an HR-related question.

JD Dillon (08:41):

I can speak from experience as someone who worked or focused on customer service training at Disney and then focused on customer service and product training in contact center environments this type of work is far from easy, but I understand the concept of “EASEE” is quite important at Cardinal Health. Can you explain to us what EASEE, E-A-S-E-E, means in your organization?

Sam Anderson (09:05):

I'd be happy to. EASEE is the acronym that defines our customer service model, and it stands for Empathy, Acknowledge, Seek, Explain, and Establish. It is the complete basis for our training program. The reason we find it so important is we believe our customer service is a distinction for us and kind of separates us from the competition.

JD Dillon (09:26):

Now hopefully everyone out there wrote that down so they can start borrowing some of these concepts because that's what you do from great customer service organizations you borrow what works in your organization. But I'm curious how, when you take a look at the standards you set around customer service, how did you determine that there was a challenge in this area and that you needed to put more focus on improving customer service skills? Was there a particular metric that you were looking at to both identify the problem and then use similar metrics to measure if you were successful in improving those skills?

Sam Anderson (09:56):

Yeah, so it came from a couple of different places. I think the first is we were looking for a collective program that we could apply to all of our different customer service groups. We had disparate programs that were trying to bring together under one umbrella but still had a bit of uniqueness to them to make them feel real. What led us to EASEE was looking at two things, our after-call survey scores and our quality assurance audits. And when we started looking at those, it kind of pointed us in the direction of where we could improve. That was the genesis of EASEE and what allowed us to build the program. It took us about six months to design and develop it. What we learned rather pleasantly is that those that were trained with EASEE outperformed those that do not.

(10:46):

And so we look back at those two metrics that I shared earlier after quality scores or after-call satisfaction scores and quality scores. What we learned is those trained with EASEE scored 4.33 on an after-call survey compared to those who weren't trained with EASEE who scored 4.25. Then we took a look at the quality audit scores and they kind of amplified what I just shared. Our Q&A scores were 3.5% better for new agents who went through EASEE training than those who did not. Those became kind of our two indicators of success.

JD Dillon (11:23):

It's a bit of a spoiler alert for the story today—it worked. Now let's talk about what you did. Can you break down the training experience itself for both the frontline employees that you support as well as their managers? What did they go through, what did they experience? And then how did you manage to fit this experience alongside their operational demands? Because again, as someone who's worked in learning and development at a contact center, I know rule number one is don't take people off the phone. How do you fit this experience alongside that busy day-to-day workflow?

Sam Anderson (11:57):

Yeah, so the program leveraged what we call our performance-based learning framework, and it relies very heavily on a blended delivery model. If you were going through the program, you'd complete about a 20-minute online module to kind of teach you the concepts and the foundations, then you'd experience some virtual branching scenarios, which I find to be very cool because they're realistic situations where you're playing the role of the customer service agent solving real problems for them. The way that you react in those realistic situations determines how the customer's mood and tone changes. After that, we do have an instructor-led event to augment the online training, and we try to keep these instructor-led events to just a few hours a day versus a whole day or even a half day that tends to fit better into the agent's schedule versus longer events during the instructor-led event, you're going to practice more complex situations that are unique to your business. I think that a big thing we wanted to retain was each business unit has different dimensions and different ways that they're servicing customers. So when you're in class, the examples that you're hearing and the activities that you're practicing are very specific to the business that you support. We would also be engaging in some group discussions all designed to help deepen your comprehension of the concepts that you learn in the online training.

JD Dillon (13:16):

I heard a lot there in the breakdown of the beginning of the experience. I heard a lot about application-based learning, so less talking at people and more about challenging people to solve problems and deal with realistic scenarios. I heard a lot about context. You mentioned in terms of making sure the conversations, the content and the experience are relevant to what they do as opposed to kind of generalized customer service skills, more about how they apply these skills within the work they do every day. The other big thing I heard you mentioned blended learning is the approach is leveraging the room for what the room is good for. I think a lot of organizations are still putting people in a room and telling them things often because it's convenient for us. We can put a lot of people in a room and tell them all the same thing at the same time, whether that room be physical or in a lot of cases that room is digital without recognizing that no, the room is more useful.

(14:10):

Putting people together in a space is more useful for, as you said, that conversation, that practice, that sharing activity that maybe doesn't happen as naturally in the flow of work as it does in this type of experience. Instead of just telling people information, which we can do with a variety of other tools outside of that space, maximize that time that we have together because it is so hard to get, and it is both tangibly and metaphorically expensive for an organization to do that type of thing or deploy that type of instructor-led tactic. But that's the delivery side of the story. That's the beginning. I want to dig into the retention and the transfer side. We know that's where the real value comes from, people applying what they've learned through this experience, how did you reinforce the key concepts so that when it came time to have those conversations with customers, they were ready to apply the standards you set forth with the EASEE program?

Sam Anderson (15:04):

The first thing we did was put together a learning curriculum for the people leaders. When we designed the learning curriculum for people leaders, we wanted to accomplish two things. One, teach them the concepts that they should be reinforcing, reinforcing back on the job with their team. Two, readdress what coaching conversations need to sound like. Oftentimes we cover the first part, but then we forget to go back to, “Hey, let's talk about the basic tenets of coaching and giving feedback because chances are you're going to need to embrace those behaviors as folks are still learning.” That covers the people leader side of it. For the learner’s reinforcement, we have ongoing EASEE campaigns, and these campaigns consist of micro-learning modules and some gamification. Our gamification is very thoughtfully planned out around questions that have increasing complexity.

(15:56):

We tend to be a very competitive type of company and there's a lot of internal back and forth to see who can be the better of the customer service teams. It seems to work for us. And then lastly, we have communities of practice with job aids and resources to use on the job. From a learner perspective and a people leader perspective, I think the most significant thing that we've done for reinforcement is embed it into our business units’ performance strategy. Our quality assurance teams are looking for the use of the concepts in actual calls, and then the quality assurance team is sharing the results of those audits back to the people leaders who have been able to coach and give feedback. It kind of just all works together.

JD Dillon (16:39):

It sounds like you haven't delivered a training program as much as you've embedded an enablement strategy within the working experience for all the key players along the journey who are going to influence that customer experience. And not to say that you shouldn't… maybe still read the book… but it seems like you don't need to read my book. You’ve been implementing the framework that I set forth in terms of all these different components. My favorite one is that, I think a lot of organizations and training teams still make the frontline management team go through the training, but it's usually because this is what your people are going to be doing, isn't this good? You should allow them the time and prioritize this. And you now are aware of what we're teaching your team members to do, but it's not delivering value to them.

(17:27):

As the manager who's held accountable to the key performance indicators, you talked about at the very beginning of the story, they're the ones held accountable for delivering that level of customer service. So the question for them is, how's this going to help me reach that goal? By enabling them as not just an observer of the story as part of the story, I think that plays a critical role. I always say frontline managers are the most important people in workplace learning because they have so much influence over how people do their jobs every day, what's prioritized, what's not and what people are allowed to get off the phone to do in some particular contact center example. Making sure that they're part of the story and enabling a part of their work experience as opposed to delivering a program that might be seen as an obstacle or a distraction from what they're trying to achieve. You're helping them solve a problem that they already know is a meaningful problem to solve. I love that part of the story. When we talk about learning, we talk about how you're enabling the managers, how you're enabling the customer service representatives. What did your team learn through the experience of developing and implementing this type of program?

Sam Anderson (18:34):

Yeah, it's a great question. We learned a lot. The first thing we learned is that you have to wrap the training solution around a business need or a strategic imperative that the business is going after. I think oftentimes learning professionals show up with their array of solutions and learning possibilities without taking time to understand what the business is trying to do and then connect a solution to that. I would say challenge yourself to find business metrics that matter most in a call center environment or a customer service environment. We were fortunate enough to have access to different performance metrics that are being looked at daily, time to resolve escalations. The list goes on and on. The more you can anchor the solutions to those metrics, the better off you're going to be. I know some learning professionals do get caught up in the training just didn't cause the numbers to move.

(19:21):

And I try to reframe that and say, look for correlations. It's not always a cause in and of itself, but you can correlate the training event or the training solution to business performance KPIs. When you're unsure, do a control or sample group like we did and test your theory before you go broad and wide. Lastly, I would say meet learners where they are. You brought this up earlier, it's hard to pull customer service agents off the phones because then they're not responding to customers' needs. So trying to meet them where they're at was a good lesson that we learned as we were designing the program.

JD Dillon (19:59):

I'd say a lot of your points also land in the category where my last question lives, which is the relationship, trust and influence side of learning and development, especially in a busy operationally-focused workplace. A lot of times we talk about buy-in, we talk about seats at the table. We have these conversations that come down to our stakeholders, the people we're supporting, the people we're working with and the people who are sponsoring our initiatives. Do they trust us to do the right thing and that we are aligned with the problems that they're trying to solve? Versus acting as you mentioned and a bit more of a silo where we're talking about learning and development, but we're not connecting the dots to things that our stakeholders are thinking about. I'm curious to get your thoughts or extended thoughts on how you build those relationships with your stakeholders so that they understand the value that you can deliver as a learning and development function so that you don't have to keep convincing people and keep trying to get buy-in over and over again for every program. How do you build that relationship and that trust so people know that you're going to help them solve meaningful problems?

Sam Anderson (21:06):

Yeah, it's a great question. A leader once told me, and it's forever resonated, that we should be business people who just happen to specialize in HR and learning and development. Put your business foot forward first, and then you can wrap your profession around that. We do that by getting obsessed with our client's business and their metrics. We are very curious by nature and want to understand what the business is focused on and how they are tracking against what they’re trying to do. We try to reframe conversations to make sure we're talking about business challenges versus learning solutions. Oftentimes we have to politely back our clients up when they come to us with the learning solution first, and we have to kind of unring that bell a little bit and figure out what's leading them to believe that that learning solution that they're thinking about is going to solve the problem that they're having. Lastly, we try to be easy to do business with. We're here to support those who are on the frontline. It's just as important or equally important for us to be easy to work with and easy to do business with.

JD Dillon (22:08):

If you walk in with that understanding of what the day-to-day reality is like for your stakeholders, what problems they're trying to solve, what they ultimately care about and how they're held accountable, it ultimately makes you that much easier to work with as a key partner within your organization. Great point to wrap up on. Sam Anderson, thank you so much for joining us today on ITK. How can people connect with you and follow the awesome work you and your team are doing at Cardinal Health?

Sam Anderson (22:32):

The easiest way is going to be through LinkedIn. I would just ask that you put ITK in the subject line to allow me to sort through pretty quickly and hone in on your message. Thanks, JD.

JD Dillon (22:42):

Great tip. We should provide that to all of our guests. Again, thanks so much to Sam Anderson for breaking down Cardinal Health's award-winning approach to customer service training in healthcare. Be sure to check out the full case study over at Training Magazine, we’ll drop a link in the show description. Hope you had a good time today. Be sure to subscribe to ITK Head over to Axonify.com/ITK to sign up for show announcements and reminders. You can also check out the entire IK collection on the Axonify YouTube channel or listen to In The Know on your favorite podcast app. I'll see you back here in two weeks for the final ITK of 2023. Make sure to hold Wednesday, November 29th at 11:30 AM ET in your calendar for another insightful conversation with a member of our amazing employee experience community. We'll also be celebrating the one-year anniversary of The Modern Learning Ecosystem, so might be able to grab a copy of the book, keep an eye out for those special giveaways. Until then, I'm jd now you're in the know. And always remember to ask yourself the important questions like, why are pediatricians always so agitated? It's because they have very *little patients*.

(23:49):

I'll see you next time. In The Know is produced by Sam Trieu and visually designed by Mark Anderson. Additional production support by Richia McCutcheon, Andrea Miller, Maliyah Bernard, Tuong La and Meaghan Kay. The show is written and hosted by JD Dillon. ITK is an Axonify production. For more information on how Axonify helps frontline workers learn, connect and get things done, visit Axonify.com.



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