Latest / Customer Service Revolution | Customer Experience & Employee Experience for Business Leaders / 220: Transforming the Donor Experience at Gulf Coast Blood

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220: Transforming the Donor Experience at Gulf Coast Blood · Customer Service Revolution | Customer Experience & Employee Experience for Business Leaders

• 0:58
  Welcome, everybody, to the Experience Revolution.
• 1:01
  Whether it's customer experience or employee experience, we talk about it here on this podcast.
• 1:07
  My name is Dave Murray.
• 1:09
  I am the vice president of consulting for The DiJulius Group I am thrilled to be here with you this week on the podcast.
• 1:16
  And I am super excited about my guest today, someone who has taken the Experience Revolution and literally run with it, made some great strides.
• 1:26
  into all of that in just a minute, but also someone I consider a friend as well, a friend that I've made during this process of working together.
• 1:33
  So I'm super excited to have Kevin Shipley join us.
• 1:37
  Kevin, thanks for being here today.
• 1:39
  Thanks for having me, I'm excited to be here.
• 1:40
  So a little bit about Kevin for our audience.
• 1:43
  Kevin, you are with Gulf Coast Blood, which is the primary blood center in Houston, Texas, which is a big market for blood, right?
• 1:50
  You have oh a kind of a medical Mecca down there.
• 1:54
  there's always demand.
• 1:55
  You guys are always busy.
• 1:56
  You are the Associate Vice President of Community Engagement, which is a newer role for you.
• 2:01
  And we'll get into that in some of our conversations because I think the really cool thing is you've done such a wonderful job with the donor experience in your case.
• 2:09
  that your department is growing.
• 2:11
  You're growing as an individual, your title's changing, your department's growing, so there's so many good things going on down there.
• 2:17
  And one other side note about Kevin before we dive into our content today, he's a huge Astros fan and they're having another good season, so we'll see how that shakes out.
• 2:26
  Go Astros.
• 2:28
  All right, so tell me just a little bit, before I dive into my first question, and my first question is kind of recapping all the work that we did together when we were working
• 2:36
  in our partnership, our consulting partnership.
• 2:38
  Can you tell me how you've grown though, right?
• 2:41
  Your department is getting bigger, right?
• 2:43
  The need for the focus on the donor experience is becoming larger across your organization.
• 2:48
  Can you just share a quick overview of how you've grown since we first started working together in 2021?
• 2:52
  In 2021, we reached out and learned about The DiJulius Group and decided we wanted to invest a little bit more in our donors' experience.
• 3:02
  Little did we know how much we would change and how much we would invest in this change in our organization.
• 3:08
  We did not have a customer experience department.
• 3:11
  We had a couple people who were our customer service team who reported up to our marketing team who took the inbound calls.
• 3:18
  I would say they were on our defense.
• 3:20
  People would call up with questions, with potentially complaints, and we took care of them.
• 3:25
  And we did a good job of it.
• 3:27
  And even on our field, our phlebotomy teams who were really good at what they did, we weren't really consistent.
• 3:33
  We had some people who were doing amazing things, but we weren't consistent.
• 3:36
  And then as we went through this process, we moved those two customer service roles and started a customer experience department.
• 3:42
  So put a manager over that department, had those two customer service roles.
• 3:47
  But over time, over these last few years, we've grown that department pretty substantially.
• 3:52
  We first started by adding a couple of what I would consider offense positions where we took them and put them in the most vital places where we have a lot of brand new donors,
• 4:01
  high big blood drives at our high schools, where it's intimidating.
• 4:05
  It's where most people make their first blood donations and we want that experience to be great.
• 4:09
  So we hired positions who went out there and did not draw blood.
• 4:11
  They just helped create an experience.
• 4:13
  And now our latest evolution is our donor concierge program where we're taking what used to be a receptionist type position in the front of all of our fixed sites.
• 4:22
  And we've moved those over to our customer experience department as well.
• 4:25
  So we've kind of gone from not having a department and over the course of a few years, we're going to be growing to almost a team of 20 whose sole focus is making sure that we
• 4:35
  create exceptional experiences every single day that inspire people to save lives.
• 4:40
  Wow, that's amazing.
• 4:40
  Up to 20 folks.
• 4:42
  focused on this as part of their full-time job.
• 4:44
  That's a great story.
• 4:45
  Now just a little background for our listeners who might not be familiar with uh Gulf Coast Blood or the blood donation industry in particular.
• 4:53
  You operate like most blood centers do where you have two types of donations.
• 4:58
  You have, as you refer to, your fixed centers or a donation center where people can come.
• 5:03
  It's usually in a strip mall, it's convenient.
• 5:06
  I can stop in and do my monthly or my quarterly, however often I donate.
• 5:10
  no, I can go there and do my donation.
• 5:13
  And then also a big piece of your business, as you alluded to, are those mobile units that we all probably remember back from our high school days where the mobile unit pops up and
• 5:21
  you go to the gym and they draw blood or you go out to the van and give blood in the van.
• 5:26
  So those are your two primary sources of meeting with your donors.
• 5:32
  And those were both a big focus, right?
• 5:34
  It was interesting because when we started working together back in 2021,
• 5:38
  Both of those had their positives, but both of those had their negatives.
• 5:42
  And in some cases, they were different, right?
• 5:44
  So wasn't just one experience.
• 5:45
  We were kind of working on multiple experiences as we were going through the process.
• 5:50
  But both were a big focus because that is your donor touch.
• 5:54
  That's your touch point.
• 5:55
  Very much so.
• 5:56
  So when we first started working together back in 2021, Kevin, we did a lot of work.
• 6:00
  We hit the ground running.
• 6:01
  We did an action statement where we create your day in the life video as part of that, the empathy focus video that we talk about a lot on this podcast.
• 6:11
  We got some teams together to focus on the donor experience or our traditional customer experience cycle.
• 6:17
  But in this case, it was really focused on the donor.
• 6:19
  And quite honestly, one of my observations going into this
• 6:24
  uh endeavor with you was that it had become transactional, right?
• 6:27
  If you recall, I did a donation my first trip down there.
• 6:31
  When I came in on my first trip, I landed at the airport in Houston.
• 6:35
  I rented a car and I went right to a donation center and gave a donation.
• 6:39
  I signed up myself.
• 6:40
  I did it on the website so no one knew that I was part of the organization or acting as a consultant.
• 6:45
  And one of my observations was, and it's a natural tendency, it had become a little transactional.
• 6:50
  I felt like I was just another arm.
• 6:52
  going through the process, right?
• 6:53
  And you're done, now go over there next.
• 6:55
  And that was kind of how I felt.
• 6:57
  So to me, that was a big piece of the work we did.
• 7:00
  And then we also spent some time on internal culture.
• 7:03
  So focusing on those departments that support each other and that are working together all in the name of the donor experience.
• 7:09
  Then we did some work on problem resolution, zero risk, dealing with those difficult conversations, dealing with the complaints that pop up.
• 7:18
  So that was a quick overview of all the work that we did.
• 7:20
  My first question for you on that work, Kevin, is what do you think was the most impactful?
• 7:26
  I know that you're still using all of those tools, which is great, but where did you feel that the impact was really maybe a little deeper than some of the other places?
• 7:33
  It was such an amazing experience when we created our service action statement, our pillars, our never and always.
• 7:40
  And for the first time, I've been here almost 20 years at this point, for the first time in almost 20 years, we made a concerted effort to go and spend face time with over 90 % of
• 7:51
  all of our staff.
• 7:51
  And just as a perspective, we have over 800 employees in our organization and we operate 365 days a year.
• 7:59
  and also 24 hours a day.
• 8:00
  So there are staff who are working overnight, making sure when a hospital needs blood, a patient needs blood, we're gonna make sure it's there.
• 8:06
  So the challenge with that is, is getting in front of all those employees, for the ones who would work that third shift.
• 8:13
  And so we thought it was so important, we went and got in front of every single one of those folks to tell them that this is really important for not only what we're gonna do,
• 8:22
  but how we're gonna do it how we're gonna serve.
• 8:24
  And so for me,
• 8:25
  getting in front of all the employees and making that investment to be up here at night, to be here over the weekends.
• 8:31
  And whenever us say we, it's our entire leadership team showed up and said that this is a priority of who we are gonna be as an organization, the way we're gonna lead.
• 8:40
  I absolutely love the day in the life video to this day.
• 8:44
  We still share this with every single person coming on board with our organization.
• 8:48
  It really does an amazing job of demonstrating empathy.
• 8:51
  not just for your customer, but also with your colleagues and our volunteers.
• 8:56
  And so it's just a really beautiful minute and a half video that shows how much it means to just have a little empathy for all those that we come into contact with on a daily
• 9:07
  basis.
• 9:08
  So all of it was really, really important.
• 9:10
  The day, the live video, really just everything else time I see it, it just really kind of connects a lot of the dots for what we're trying to achieve.
• 9:16
  Such a great point.
• 9:17
  It all starts with that empathy.
• 9:19
  We're not going to drive loyalty.
• 9:21
  We're not going to drive donor retention if we're not empathetic.
• 9:25
  It's got to start there and focused in the moment.
• 9:28
  So that's a great point.
• 9:29
  Now, I know, Kevin, I want to talk about this a little bit too.
• 9:31
  You had a couple of goals as an organization coming into this, but I believe that donor retention was the biggest, especially in your industry these days.
• 9:40
  You can make the argument that there were a lot of people
• 9:42
  who kind of grew up donating blood and it was just what they did and maybe some of that population is shrinking and that habit may not have been created with some of the younger
• 9:51
  generations at least yet.
• 9:53
  So retaining those donors was really one of the primary focuses of this engagement we did.
• 10:01
  How's that going?
• 10:01
  How has that progressed since 2021?
• 10:04
  As a perspective, like we as an industry have seen the shift of the baby boomers were very generous civic duty minded you donate because it's the right thing to do.
• 10:14
  And as that population starts getting older, some of them are not able to donate.
• 10:19
  But we have not found a new generation of people to step up and donate the same level that the baby boomers did.
• 10:25
  And then in came
• 10:27
  COVID and we're all tired of talking about it.
• 10:29
  But the reality is, is that it was in the light of that the places where we historically had always gone to get people to donate blood and expose them to do it were closed down.
• 10:38
  Businesses were told to stay home, work safe.
• 10:40
  half of our blood supply comes from us hosting blood drives at businesses, churches and schools.
• 10:45
  So it wasn't less about us, you know, just hoping to find a solution and us being forced to say,
• 10:52
  if we're gonna go and do this successfully and let's be honest, lives are on the line.
• 10:56
  If we're not successful at this, that's not okay.
• 10:59
  So we're going to be successful.
• 11:00
  We decided the service was the way we're gonna invest in this.
• 11:03
  So that donor retention strategy was saying, if we make this a better experience than anywhere else they go, they're gonna choose of all the things they can do with their time
• 11:12
  and their generosity, they're gonna choose blood donation.
• 11:16
  So over this past four and five years,
• 11:19
  we have slowly watched that tide start to turn again.
• 11:22
  Our donations have increased, our donor frequency has increased, and we've watched our customer experience metrics also rise in line with that.
• 11:31
  So it has definitely helped, and we're having a really strong year this year, making sure that every patient, every day at every hospital, doesn't have to worry about blood being
• 11:40
  readily available for them, because we're going to worry about that for them.
• 11:43
  And we're going to do that by making sure that when you come in, it's a great experience.
• 11:47
  Wow, you know, I never really heard it put that way, but what you just said is basically great donor experience helps save lives.
• 11:54
  It does, especially in our case.
• 11:56
  Yeah, that's great.
• 11:57
  You know, one thing you mentioned, you talked about the importance of getting in front of all of your shifts, all of your team members, all 800 people back when we rolled out the
• 12:05
  action statement.
• 12:06
  I remember I got the great fortune to be part of that and it was a lot of fun to do some of those meetings and get all your staff seven in the morning or 7 p.m.
• 12:15
  at night in some cases as we're trying to hit all those shifts.
• 12:18
  But you talked about the importance of getting leadership in front of them as well.
• 12:22
  I wanted to bring this up because you have gone through something that happens to organizations sometimes, which can be a little scary.
• 12:29
  You've had some leadership change, right?
• 12:32
  So the leadership that was on board with this project, with this initiative back in 2021, they're not all together in leadership as they were back then in 2021.
• 12:41
  So in a lot of organizations, sometimes leadership comes in, priorities shift, some things get kind of left by the wayside.
• 12:49
  That didn't happen with this initiative.
• 12:51
  Can you talk a little bit about that?
• 12:52
  Why this initiative kind of hung on and stayed top of the list?
• 12:56
  I would love to share that we've had a new CEO come in.
• 12:59
  We've had some senior leaders who are huge integral parts of us rolling this out who have retired.
• 13:05
  So there was a risk of us saying, was this gonna become the flavor of the month, right?
• 13:11
  And we strategically invested in building out an apartment to try to do everything we could to make sure that that didn't happen.
• 13:18
  And we're very fortunate that our new CEO came in and
• 13:22
  not just only got behind it, but also got in front of it and made as they're building out the vision of our future of our organization and building out strategic objectives aligned
• 13:32
  very squarely with ensuring that we're not going to just make this a priority.
• 13:39
  It's one of our strategic objectives as an organization to build out what we now are like leaning into as our donor concierge program, which is what has kind of really
• 13:49
  exponentially grown
• 13:50
  this department, the initiatives, the influence that we get to have to make sure that it's part of the DNA of this organization.
• 13:56
  So I'm very fortunate that our entire senior leadership team has gotten behind this, is behind investing and making sure that we expose to new leaders, new employees, and we
• 14:07
  build this into all of our training programs.
• 14:10
  So we're very fortunate that this is a priority and a standard that we're gonna make sure established for many years beyond when we're even here.
• 14:17
  You brought something up in our uh pre-conversation, Kevin, that I want to share with the audience, because it's really, really interesting to me.
• 14:23
  One of the things about training that you have done, which I love, is that your donor experience training is now just kind of woven in with your SOP training.
• 14:33
  So many organizations have kind of the hard skill training on day one, two, three, and four, and then on day six, we'll cover customer experience.
• 14:41
  But you were taking it to a next level where it's kind of like, here's what it is.
• 14:44
  You do this and this is the experience you deliver.
• 14:47
  It's kind of hand in hand as you go through training now.
• 14:49
  That has been a very recent development.
• 14:52
  One of our probably missteps in us trying to get everything going is we've developed a very, our SOP for service, our customer experience cycle for us, our donor experience
• 15:03
  cycle.
• 15:03
  So every stage that a donor goes through, what are the standards we're going to have them go through and how can we go and just go above and beyond in those areas?
• 15:12
  So we developed all these things.
• 15:14
  We rolled it out to our leaders, our supervisors, our donor center managers.
• 15:18
  And we had a nice little blip of where we went up right out the gate, but there was no sustainability.
• 15:23
  There was no practice for us to say, once there's toner with that level, once someone gets promoted, who then carries that torch?
• 15:31
  And who's gonna make sure that that new hire that gets brought on kind of adopts these standards?
• 15:36
  So in a more recent fashion, did, we took it, we were probably more like some organizations where we trained SOPs and then we went and showed them all the service
• 15:43
  stuff.
• 15:44
  And so in a more recent fashion, we went and got our person who's our manager over our customer experience department.
• 15:50
  We took our person who was our manager over our training department and kind of gave them the charge to say, here's what we want to do.
• 15:56
  We want to make sure that SOPs are concurrent with service so that when someone's learning how to screen a donor,
• 16:03
  what experiences do we want that donor to have at the exact same moment so that as new hires get trained, they're trained on all the things at the same time, as well as making
• 16:13
  sure that we go through all of our current staff and retrain them on all these things so that everyone knows what the expectations are and how, you're gonna work for Gulf Coast
• 16:20
  Blood, this is what it's gonna look like, this is what it's gonna feel like for both us as employees and as a guest that comes in to donate.
• 16:28
  You know, and to take that a step further, I know that one of the things that you have done really well with, kind of to use a cliche, took the ball and ran with, was FORD,
• 16:36
  F-O-R-D.
• 16:37
  In our world, FORD is an acronym for Family Occupation Recreation and Dreams.
• 16:41
  And if anyone's new to the podcast, know many of you listening right now probably know FORD backwards and forwards.
• 16:47
  But FORD is important in the customer experience, or in this case, the donor experience, because...
• 16:52
  those four types of information, family, occupation, recreation, and dreams are the things that are most important to us, right?
• 16:59
  They're the things that we value the most.
• 17:01
  So if we as a service provider are actively listening and hearing those types of four pieces of information and able to strike a conversation, build some rapport using that
• 17:11
  information, we can build a better relationship.
• 17:14
  We can build that relationship faster.
• 17:16
  And so obviously then it equates to...
• 17:18
  the donor loyalty you're talking about or the donor retention that has been your focus.
• 17:23
  But I'm going down this path because I think you've done some wonderful things when it comes to Ford and as it relates to your donors.
• 17:31
  Can you just share a little bit about the milestone mugs that you were sharing with me earlier?
• 17:35
  So one of the programs that we have is using donor intelligence.
• 17:38
  We have a lot of information about donors.
• 17:40
  Some of it's kept in different places.
• 17:43
  And so one of them is we know when you come and donate, we know how many times you've donated.
• 17:47
  And one of the things that we do to celebrate a donor who's reached a milestone is like we say gallons.
• 17:53
  So you've made eight donations.
• 17:55
  Historically donations were about a pint each.
• 17:57
  So after eight pints, that equals a gallon.
• 17:59
  We would surprise the donor.
• 18:01
  You would see that Dave's made his appointment.
• 18:03
  He's been able to make his eighth donation.
• 18:05
  So when he comes in, we'll have a mug that says one gallon donor prepared for him.
• 18:11
  And as he gets on the bed that day, we have a surprise.
• 18:14
  We bring him out, we make it a big deal.
• 18:16
  We take a picture, we post on our social media.
• 18:19
  We call it our milestone mug program that allows us to take some intelligence that we know about the donor.
• 18:24
  We can anticipate that they're coming in and then create an experience for them that day that
• 18:30
  kind of knocks their socks off and makes them go, wow, that was really special.
• 18:33
  That's great.
• 18:34
  And I love the fact that you have some systems built behind it so that you as an organization and your team members are able to be proactive and really have that surprise
• 18:44
  element because that's so impactful.
• 18:46
  So you guys have been doing some great things.
• 18:48
  Your retention numbers are improving, which in your market, as you mentioned, is hugely important as you're trying to find that next generation that's going to pick up that ball
• 19:00
  and start that donation habit.
• 19:02
  Can you talk a little bit about results?
• 19:04
  know that you have been, as an organization, you all have been focused on NPS or Net Promoter Score for a couple of years.
• 19:10
  I don't think it's, or I wouldn't say that it's necessarily
• 19:13
  across your industry, but it seems to be gaining steam as a metric.
• 19:18
  So can you talk about the metric of NPS and how you're doing there and some of the other metrics that you might be utilizing as an organization or maybe that your industry uses?
• 19:28
  So we didn't have a really good metric.
• 19:30
  We were asking donors, previous to using NPS, we were just asking donors a random question on a five point scale, but it didn't correlate to the behaviors we saw from what they said
• 19:40
  they were going to do versus what they actually did.
• 19:42
  So we knew we had some dissonance behind the measure that we were currently using.
• 19:46
  And after going through this program and asking questions, we learned of...
• 19:51
  Net Promoter Score and heard of it, been exposed to it in surveys we'd taken.
• 19:55
  So we kind of baselining, saying what was our Net Promoter Score?
• 19:59
  And we were very pleased when we first kind of rolled it out and did a six month pilot, we had a Net Promoter Score of 87%, which is exceptionally high.
• 20:08
  And so we did go out to some of our friends in the industry across the country, around the world, and some of them were using NPS.
• 20:15
  And what we found is as our benchmark,
• 20:18
  mark, we were kind of just barely above or right at where some of them were.
• 20:23
  And as we built out our programs and kind of truly made this a culture change, we've watched slowly but surely our NPS score grow.
• 20:32
  And just for perspective, for those who aren't using NPS, anything over 80 % is considered an exceptional NPS score.
• 20:38
  So being at 87, we even internally have some debates about, man, maybe we're already as good as you can get.
• 20:44
  And so, because how much more are you going to move this?
• 20:46
  Because 100 is the top you can be.
• 20:48
  But I'm proud to say that every single year on our corporate metrics that go to our board, NPS is weighted very heavily.
• 20:56
  It's even weighted as heavily as how many units we put on the shelf, because we know there's a direct correlation to the higher we get with an NPS score.
• 21:04
  We've watched our donor retention rates and the way we qualify that is saying your donor frequency.
• 21:10
  How often are you going to donate every year?
• 21:12
  So as we've watched our NPS score grow, and as of this point this year, we're over 90%.
• 21:17
  We're at 90.44 % NPS score this year, year to date.
• 21:22
  We've also watched our donor frequency rate climb at the exact same rate.
• 21:28
  And so we know there's a correlation here.
• 21:30
  This has been a really great thing for us as an organization.
• 21:32
  And what we can get, it's really hard to get somebody to come and donate.
• 21:35
  There's a lot of objections.
• 21:37
  Some of them are very valid.
• 21:38
  Some of them are...
• 21:39
  are challenging.
• 21:40
  A lot of people are afraid of needles and that's normal.
• 21:44
  But as people decide to make that donation, we get them to come back.
• 21:48
  That's where we start seeing a lot more success in keeping a safe, stable supply of blood on the shelf year round.
• 21:55
  I'd love to hear too that you're able to see that direct correlation to donor frequency as your NPS goes up.
• 22:02
  as valuable as NPS is, or really any metric you're using, whether it's just a kind of a general customer satisfaction score or something a little more specific like NPS, no
• 22:15
  matter what you're using,
• 22:17
  Scores are good and scores increasing is great, but it's still very subjective, right?
• 22:21
  It doesn't always necessarily equate to, let's say, an increase in profitability or an increase in donor frequency that's happening in your world.
• 22:30
  So it's great to hear that you're able to connect the dots and show that as one goes up, so does the other.
• 22:37
  It does.
• 22:38
  that also translates across the board is even this year, we're having a very strong hearing at as any organization, we're doing a million things, but we've prioritized a lot
• 22:47
  of the things we do.
• 22:49
  And so we are seeing a donor growth.
• 22:51
  We are seeing a more stable blood supply than what we've seen in years previous.
• 22:55
  And so there's a lot of hope for the future that while you'll never say you have it solved because it's always a puzzle, what's going to keep donors motivated and keep things
• 23:03
  engaged and coming back.
• 23:04
  but we know the way we treat them is very high on that list.
• 23:08
  for sure, that's amazing.
• 23:09
  So Kevin, another question I have for you, while we were working together, so while I was traveling down and visiting you guys at Gulf Coast and conducting some of the workshops we
• 23:18
  talked about, then rolling the tools out to your team members, while I was making that trip from Cleveland to Houston, you were making the trip from Houston to Cleveland a few
• 23:27
  times a year to go through CXEA, which is our Customer Experience Executive Academy program.
• 23:34
  And so you are a graduate, you are a proud alum of that program.
• 23:38
  And I'm just curious if you can share with the audience how you draw from that experience, how you draw from that classwork or the relationships you made.
• 23:46
  How does that help you being a graduate of CXEA?
• 23:50
  How does that help you, especially with what you've accomplished today, right?
• 23:54
  That the fact this initiative is still going so strong here five years later and all the other things and you're growing your staff that's focused on the donor experience.
• 24:02
  How do you draw from the coursework and how does that help you?
• 24:07
  David, it was a great experience going through Customer Experience Executive Academy.
• 24:11
  It was the next step for us as organization to say, we're going to invest the time, the finances to go invest in having a customer experience revolution, we need to make sure
• 24:23
  it's sustainable.
• 24:23
  So we did two things.
• 24:25
  We built the department, which we talked about.
• 24:27
  We said, we're going start having some people who are going to say our number one priority every single day is to make sure that this is
• 24:32
  a cultural change in our organization.
• 24:35
  We also wanted to make sure that we invested in the long-term finishing this out and making sure that we're staying true to this.
• 24:44
  And so we made the investment to go through the Customer Experience Executive Academy.
• 24:48
  And so over four quarters, I went up to Cleveland and despite your best efforts, I have not become a Cleveland Guardians fan.
• 24:56
  mean, you got me there and I did go to the stadium.
• 24:58
  It was really cool.
• 25:00
  But there's a few things I took away from the class is that much to my, you know, short-sightedness is that I know whenever we've been consulting with y'all about coming on
• 25:09
  board, we're very much like, hey, listen, Dave, the blood banking industry is very, very particular.
• 25:15
  Our customers are different than everyone else's.
• 25:17
  But going through CXCA was kind of eye-opening.
• 25:21
  I'm sat in a room full of
• 25:23
  professionals who were wanting to become really, really great experience as well.
• 25:27
  And there were people from all kinds of industries, from home lending to a police department, to people selling stone and houses and recycling.
• 25:37
  It was very interesting that for one of the first times in my career, I wasn't just in a room full of people who were in my industry.
• 25:44
  was in a room full of people who were aligned through service.
• 25:47
  And as we unpacked the methodology, as we kind of rolled out our updates of what we were doing on organizations, it became very obvious that we're not that special in our
• 25:56
  industry, that customers are customers.
• 25:59
  And what it looks like to create a good experience, it reinforced why the methodology works.
• 26:04
  And that as we go and make market improvements, as we set standards and establish them and raise the bar and train our staff,
• 26:11
  We watched those tides rise.
• 26:14
  We're also going to see our customers have a better experience and then we'll get those gains, financial retention, whatever that case may be for their organization.
• 26:23
  And we saw that across the board.
• 26:24
  And so we built a friend network, but we also kind of leaned on one another to grow our own organization.
• 26:31
  So there was just something very healthy about that perspective for me going through CXCA on top of the content, so also the network.
• 26:39
  You know, another question I have for you, Kevin, because I know that we did a lot of great work together, but I do know that you're always tinkering.
• 26:45
  You're making some changes.
• 26:46
  You're doing things.
• 26:47
  And so I'm just curious, going through CXEA, going through the Academy, the goal of that class is to not only get you up to speed on all of our content, but also kind of the inner
• 26:57
  working.
• 26:57
  So if you ever had to go back and conduct your own customer experience cycle workshop to maybe make some updates or maybe decide to make a few changes.
• 27:06
  you have that ability.
• 27:07
  So I'm just curious, does having that knowledge, does that help you when you're tinkering, making changes, or even just keeping things alive?
• 27:15
  It gives you the confidence.
• 27:17
  Any organization that has 800 people, you're going to have people on every camp, right?
• 27:21
  You're going have the people who want to tell you that, listen, you know, this is great, but this is a flavor of the month.
• 27:28
  But whenever you have the confidence that says, we're going to stick with this, I can confidently say that this is going to make a difference.
• 27:33
  We did some additional, you know, internal customer experience cycle workshops with internal departments.
• 27:40
  So we've reinforced this.
• 27:41
  through our external teams.
• 27:43
  And so that confidence of knowing that this, you know, when somebody wants to say, hey, is this really, this is gonna take a lot of, this might take some time.
• 27:51
  And you can confidently say, that time is very well worth it.
• 27:55
  We're great fortunate to saying it's also aligned with our strategic objectives, but it's also aligned with our organizational goals of making sure we have blood available for
• 28:04
  every patient.
• 28:05
  So that confidence of tinkering with things and.
• 28:08
  literally constantly just looking to update, making everything 1 % better every single day is just that constant improvement.
• 28:16
  And we do this, whether it's a one-on-one with my manager over our customer experience department, who's just absolutely incredible.
• 28:22
  Our conversations are always, how do we get 1 % better?
• 28:25
  How do we reuse the tools?
• 28:27
  One of the more recent ones was negative visual cues and teaching a team.
• 28:32
  You know, it's great that
• 28:33
  myself and Victoria understand that.
• 28:35
  But when we went and taught our teams, literally the group chat afterwards was after they went back to all their locations.
• 28:42
  I had no idea and all I can see around here are negative cues.
• 28:46
  And so now we have a whole bunch of people who are helping us to change that culture and seeing that, you know, there are better ways to do things to give better perceptions to
• 28:55
  our donors.
• 28:56
  That's great, I love that.
• 28:57
  Hey, one last question for you, Kevin, then I'll let you go, but it's gonna go back to NPS, because when we were chatting before we went on the air, you said something that
• 29:07
  really stood out to me, and I think it really helps the success, attain the success that you've achieved as an organization.
• 29:14
  You shared with me that you are now using NPS to the degree where you are able to...
• 29:20
  get MPS scores down to the individual that actually interacted with that donor or whatever the interaction was.
• 29:28
  And then the next thing you said really stood out to me because then you said we can then take that information and give them a shout out for a job well done.
• 29:37
  You did not say we can find out who screwed up and then go tell them they did something wrong.
• 29:42
  But that's what usually organizations, they kind of fall into that trap of being punitive.
• 29:48
  and busting people, and that very often is what stops initiatives from working well.
• 29:54
  But you're looking at it the other way.
• 29:55
  You're saying, hey, we're using MPS.
• 29:57
  We're able to get to the individual person so we can say, hey, go get them.
• 30:00
  Do it again.
• 30:00
  You're doing great.
• 30:01
  Can you tell us a little bit about that process and how you use that and who's looking at those numbers?
• 30:06
  Great question, Dave.
• 30:08
  So when we first got our MPS score, all we really had was here's our score and we kind of knew that maybe we had knew the score from our mobiles where we took blood drops to people
• 30:18
  versus where we had it on our fixed sites.
• 30:20
  But even that divided our organization.
• 30:23
  It was like saying, you we're in two different camps.
• 30:25
  It's good to know.
• 30:27
  But we went through and worked through and this is a great exercise in teamwork.
• 30:31
  Our IT department did an amazing job of
• 30:34
  kind of hearing us out of, we need more and better data.
• 30:37
  Our donor collections leadership team was saying, we want to know, we see this as a corporate measure, we, this going out to our board, but you know, how do we use it?
• 30:45
  So we all came together and worked with our IT department and they built us a really awesome dashboard to where not only can drill down NPS score by employee who screened the
• 30:57
  donor, who was the phlebotomist, we can also go down by supervisor who was in charge.
• 31:03
  of the teams on the day those donors came through.
• 31:05
  We can also drill it down by location.
• 31:07
  We can also drill it down by attributes of the donors.
• 31:11
  So we can start seeing what are donors in certain age demographics or any kind of demographics.
• 31:17
  What is it that they're saying about us?
• 31:19
  And you're right.
• 31:20
  Then we go look through and say, where are some recognition opportunities?
• 31:24
  Where can we go find people who are exceeding our 90.44 NPS score and give them some
• 31:30
  love.
• 31:31
  so internally we built systems.
• 31:34
  We have recognition systems.
• 31:35
  We have a rave program where supervisors can go in and give recognition to team members.
• 31:40
  They get points towards an online store.
• 31:42
  So those are aligned with our pillars and our never and always.
• 31:46
  So as a blood bank, we deal with blood types all the time.
• 31:49
  So one of our never and always is always be positive, playing off the blood type and never be negative.
• 31:55
  And so
• 31:56
  we have a B positive award.
• 31:59
  have an annual employee event where we recognize one of our employees who got submitted as nominated to be that B positive person who's like the model.
• 32:08
  And then this year we also launched a campaign where donors, where all of our employees have an opportunity to win a B positive pin where they get to wear this on their employee
• 32:18
  lanyards.
• 32:19
  It's kind of a recognition and an outward sign that they've done something to
• 32:23
  go above and beyond and just knock the socks off of a donor and create an awesome experience.
• 32:28
  And so we do, use the data to help us align what we're doing, but also use it for recognition for our employees.
• 32:36
  What a wonderful best practice to really keep the focus and keep this initiative going and so strong.
• 32:43
  Kevin, thank you so much for joining me today.
• 32:46
  It was a pleasure to have you and hear about all the wonderful things you've done in the last five years.
• 32:51
  I'm thinking back as we're chatting.
• 32:53
  When we first started working together, you were effectively a department of one.
• 32:57
  Then Victoria joined your team and you were a department of two, a small but mighty group of two for a long, long time.
• 33:04
  And here you are on the verge of having a 20 plus member team focused on the experience across Gulf Coast Blood.
• 33:10
  And the work you're doing not only saves lives, but the work that you're doing internally for the organization is just fantastic.
• 33:18
  So kudos to you for all the great things you're doing and thanks so much for joining us today.
• 33:23
  Thanks, David.
• 33:24
  It's been a pleasure.
• 33:25
  Everyone, thanks for joining us on the Experience Revolution podcast.
• 33:29
  This episode with the great Kevin Shipley, Associate Vice President of Community Engagement for Gulf Coast Blood in Houston, Texas.
• 33:37
  Kevin, thanks again for joining us.
• 33:38
  And everyone, we will see you next time.