athenahealth operationalizes customer feedback to drive clinical and financial results

30-second summary:

• Customer feedback surveys, to which athenahealth receives over 6,400 monthly responses, are critical to feedback from multiple groups of users, including doctors, nurses, and managers. These datasets became too large to manually review, yet not large enough for most natural language understanding (NLU) tools.
• Luminoso’s text analytics application automated the tagging of customer survey responses, chaining different types of classification across preexisting and newly-created labels. This preserved internal structure and logic, and made labels both simple and informative.
• Since late 2017, when athenahealth’s VOC team started measuring the company’s Net Promoter Score (NPS) in its current form, it has seen an increase in NPS of over 30 points.
• Much of the improvement aligns with the VOC’s work to influence the company’s decision-making on behalf of the customer, and Luminoso enabled athenahealth to scale that work.

Athenahealth is a leading provider of cloud-based applications for more than 160,000 healthcare providers nationwide in the US, partnering with them to drive clinical and financial results.

Customer feedback surveys, to which athenahealth receives over 6,400 monthly responses, are critical to feedback from multiple groups of users, including doctors, nurses, and managers. These datasets became too large to manually review, yet not large enough for most natural language understanding (NLU) tools.

Attempts to fix this problem included reading all comments and writing summaries, building in-house tools, using open source NLU, and holding two-week “tagging marathons” each quarter.

Athenahealth was looking for a piece of technology that would:

• Quickly categorize customer feedback from limited sets of responses;
• Identify and quantify which issues most affect customers; and
• Uncover deeper insights in data without consuming analyst time on manual work.

Enter Luminoso, a natural language understanding (NLU) company that launched out of the MIT Media Lab 10 years ago. The company has developed a suite of text analytics applications that offer the fastest way for organizations to make sense of unstructured text data in 15 languages.

Unlike other text analytics solutions, Luminoso’s applications are automated and don’t require training, coding, libraries, or ontologies to fully analyze unstructured text data and quantify feedback, allowing customers to start analyzing datasets immediately.

Luminoso helps athenahealth deeply understand intent, wants, and needs of their customers

Implementation was as simple as athenahealth’s Voice of the Customer (VOC) Analytics team loading customer feedback survey data into Luminoso Daylight, Luminoso’s flagship text analytics application.

Luminoso Daylight falls under the “Listen” and “Quantify” sections of the athenahealth’s VOC tech stack.

It automated the tagging of customer feedback survey responses, chaining different types of classification across preexisting and newly-created labels. This preserved internal structure and logic, and made labels both simple and informative.

The process was not only fast and more accurate, but also eliminated the need for quarterly tagging marathons, which enabled the VOC team to spend more time analyzing data and improving the customer experience.

Along with preexisting customer data, the VOC team not only uncovered the issues and topics users were discussing most, but could more deeply understand intent, wants, and needs.

“We quickly realized that Luminoso could help us get a lot of insights out of our data almost immediately. What is unique about Luminoso is that it’s built on top of a lot of knowledge. We have many unique words that we use at our company, and Luminoso was able to pick up on a lot of those unique pairings of words that we only use for our business, and could give us some very unique insights,” reveals Chase Hill, Analytics Manager – Voice of the Customer at athenahealth.

Now, they can more effectively implement fixes, improve functionality, and prioritize product requests.

Customer feedback automation leads to NPS success

Since late 2017, when athenahealth’s VOC team started measuring the company’s Net Promoter Score (NPS) in its current form, it has seen an increase in NPS of over 30 points.

Much of the improvement aligns with the VOC’s work to influence the company’s decision-making on behalf of the customer, and Luminoso enabled athenahealth to scale that work.

For financial impact, we can estimate that every one point increase in NPS equals a 0.143% increase in Revenue, according to this Luminoso whitepaper [table 3]). Therefore, the increase in NPS alone can be said to account for a ~4% increase in revenue.

Athenahealth plan to continue to use Luminoso’s text analytics application to understand customer feedback and requests for products, analyze responses across multiple user segments, incorporate customer insights at all points of the product life cycle, and streamline tagging while preserving structure and process.

source https://www.clickz.com/athenahealth-operationalizes-customer-feedback-to-drive-clinical-and-financial-results/261716/