The AMA is an organization with a 178-year history of helping physicians do what they do best—provide high-quality patient care.
When AMA members and customers encounter problems accessing its vast menu of products, services and content—it’s crucial to find ways to solve those problems and deliver a seamless experience that is friction-free. That’s why the AMA established and evolved a customer-experience (CX) operation that removes obstacles and improves access. These efforts have recently led to international recognition and global industry awards.
The AMA recently has received a slew of awards, including two CX leadership honors from the Customer Experience Professionals Association, with multiple accolades from the US Customer Experience Awards (US CXA) for transformative strategy, innovation, customer-centric culture and the prestigious best CX team of the year and best employee-driven CX team.
Most recently, Gloria Gupta, senior director of customer experience for the AMA, earned gold as US CXA’s CX leader of the year, and was recognized by Reuters Events as one of the top women leading change in health care for her exemplary leadership, driving organizational change and impact.
The AMA’s CX improvement outcomes reflect years of collaborative change and continuous improvements.
“Enterprise change takes time, which can cause self-doubt,” Gupta said, when asked about leading the AMA’s CX transformation. “My best advice—be patient, because the best antidote for self-doubt is impact.”
Focusing on customers’ needs
The transformation began when the AMA created a special team called CXOne, which collaborates with 400 employees that lead brand, marketing, product, IT, mission, sales and service across an extensive menu of AMA product lines and digital platforms.
CXOne leveraged a strategy they call “the four C’s,” which aligned improvements with the AMA brand, evolved customer data and tools, changed cross-unit collaboration and sustained results. The four C’s were:
- Culture: Inspired employees by fostering an emotional connection to the AMA’s brand and customers.
- Capabilities: Established customer-listening methods that resulted in actionable data and training that gave employees new skills and tools they need to solve customer problems.
- Collaboration: Redefined collaborative work across business units by establishing common goals, which elevated customer and business outcomes.
- Celebration: Amplified customer-experience results and sustained change by recognizing employees for achieving CX and business goals.
“We see our customer-experience operation as an important way to deliver on the AMA’s brand promise of being physicians’ powerful ally in patient care,” said AMA Chief Experience Officer Todd Unger. “When lives are on the line, customer experience takes on a whole new meaning. It’s our job to deliver.”
Improving customer access to AMA value
Each year, 2 million customers log into the AMA’s 20 digital platforms. But website tracking data showed many were having trouble signing on. Poor access to platform content and services reduced traffic and hampered AMA membership growth and retention.
To tackle the problem, the CXOne team dug into website usage data, which showed that physicians were abandoning AMA’s websites because of login difficulties. Product and IT teams helped isolate and find solutions for users who were experiencing login problems.
“Most login friction was caused by antiquated password recovery—busy physicians and customers didn’t remember their username and password. We needed to fix this,” said Jeff Phillips, director of CX operations at the AMA.
After the CXOne team uncovered the problem, the AMA improved customer password recovery by adding SMS text for “forgot my password” prompts and offered “live agent chat” as a new service channel for quickly solving friction.
In all, 120 login improvements over five years made it easier for customers to access AMA value, delivering impressive results:
- AMA user abandonment dropped by 67%.
- Technical friction requiring customer follow-up decreased by 21%.
- Improved login supported membership growth—with a 12% increase over the same period.
In eight years, AMA’s CXOne team undertook 800 improvements that reduced customer effort and eradicated friction.
Recently, CXOne trained 70 AMA employees in CX design. Placing new skills in the hands of nearly one-fourth of employees in the CX collaborative network created a collective understanding of tools and methods and promoted customer-centric leadership across business units. CX design experts now contribute to nearly 200 CX improvements a year.
