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Cover art for podcast episode AI’s Impact on Healthcare Customer Experience

AI’s Impact on Healthcare Customer Experience

Welcome to the Health Marketing Collective, where strong leadership meets marketing excellence.

In today’s episode, we’re talking about the transformative power of personalization in health care marketing with David Edelman, author of “Personalized: Customer Strategy in the Age of AI,” and former Chief Marketing Officer at Aetna. As health care continues to evolve, understanding and implementing personalized customer experiences becomes critical, especially as AI begins to shape patient engagement and expectations.

David brings his vast experience and insights into why personalization is not just a marketing tool but a necessary strategy in the healthcare sector. He shares his journey and the lessons learned during his tenure at Aetna, providing a blueprint for how healthcare organizations can adopt AI-driven personalization to revolutionize patient interactions and increase satisfaction.

We’re diving deep into the principles of personalization, the role of AI in customer experience, and how healthcare brands can balance between personalization and privacy. David also discusses how personalization is taking shape in both B2B and B2C spaces and how essential it is for companies to align their entire organization around customer experience.

Thank you for being part of the Health Marketing Collective, where strong leadership meets marketing excellence. The future of health care depends on it.

Key Takeaways:

  1. Personalization as a Necessity in Health Care: David Edelman emphasizes that health care’s inherently personal nature makes personalization more crucial than ever. Patients’ experiences are deeply personal, involving complex health and social factors, and brands must tailor interactions to their unique needs to be effective.
  2. AI’s Role in Personalization: AI offers unprecedented opportunities for personalizing healthcare experiences. By using AI to manage, analyze, and learn from vast quantities of data, healthcare brands can deliver more relevant and timely engagements, enhancing patient satisfaction and loyalty.
  3. Balancing Personalization and Privacy: David discusses the importance of respecting privacy while implementing personalization strategies. Through secure data handling, clear consent processes, and thoughtful communication strategies, health care organizations can effectively balance personalization with privacy concerns.
  4. Company-Wide Customer Experience Initiatives: Personalization and customer experience strategies must be company-wide. David illustrates that a comprehensive approach involving all departments—from marketing to compliance—is necessary to ensure success in delivering personalized customer experiences.
  5. Education through Personalization: One practical application of personalization is educational—David shares how Aetna utilized personalized video experiences to educate consumers about their health plans, significantly reducing misunderstandings, improving customer satisfaction, and cutting down on support calls.

Join us for these valuable insights and be inspired to drive change and innovation in healthcare marketing.

Transcript

Sara Payne [00:00:10]:

Welcome back to the Health Marketing Collective, where strong leadership meets marketing excellence. I'm your host, Sara Payne, and I'm bringing you fascinating conversations with some of the industry's top marketing minds. Today's episode is all about customer experience. Because no matter what your company does, the customer experience is your brand. And in health care, getting it right can make or break the patient experience. With AI transforming nearly every aspect of customer experience, the opportunities for personalization have never been greater. But how can health care brands harness AI to deliver meaningful patient centered experiences? To help us answer that question, I'm joined by David Edelman, author of a new book called Personalized, Customer Strategy in the Age of AI. He's also a former health care chief marketing officer.

Sara Payne [00:00:59]:

He's spent his career helping brands master customer experience, and he understands the unique challenges health care leaders face. We'll explore why personalization is critical, how AI is reshaping it, and real world lessons from David's time as CMO at Aetna. Welcome to the show, David.

David Edelman [00:01:17]:

Thank you, Sara. Great to be here.

Sara Payne [00:01:19]:

Wonderful. Thank you so much for being here. I know I'm gonna learn a lot from you today. Let's start off with you've spent your career helping organizations transform their customer experience strategies. What really sparked for you a passion in that passion for personalization and customer centric strategies?

David Edelman [00:01:38]:

It actually goes way back, and I'm gonna age myself here. In 1989, before the Internet, I was a young consultant at BCG, and three clients in a row, I just happened to be on, were asking, how can they start using customer information to create value? And the first obvious way was just targeting and doing just a lot of what I thought was privacy invading, manipulative stuff, and I wasn't comfortable with that. And I got some funding from BCG to do a bit of research, wrote an article called segment of one marketing. And that article just got lift off. It was picked up. I spoke at conferences. I helped get clients and do work with BCG. But what became very clear early on and especially as the Internet started coming was the word marketing was just too limiting.

David Edelman [00:02:40]:

Mhmm. It was really much more about customer experience, about thinking through the whole customer journey, including the use of products, including how you work with existing customers, deliver customer service. All of that was on the table. And think about the brands, especially now, that you're drawn to. You're drawn to brands that use information about you in ways you feel appropriate to deliver a great experience, whether it's Netflix, Spotify, Uber, Amazon. And now that's spreading to non digital native brands. So I'm just very excited to help this and and to make sure it's done right. Yeah.

David Edelman [00:03:26]:

Because it's really a tragedy of the commons risk here where because of especially now with AI and some of the capabilities, people can be bombarded, can feel like they're being manipulated, and that's not where we wanna go.

Sara Payne [00:03:40]:

Yes. Absolutely. And we'll get into some of that in the conversation. But I did wanna ask you, why do you believe personalization is more important than ever in health care today specifically?

David Edelman [00:03:53]:

Sure. It's because health care is personal. It really is. Everybody has a different situation, a different context in which they are facing things, whether it's literally the health issues, whether it's socioeconomic issues, conditions in their neighborhood, ability to have transportation, family situations. There's hardly anything besides maybe financial affairs that's more personal than your health. And so if something isn't really relevant for your situation or not helping you, you're gonna tune it out. You're gonna be frustrated. And so the importance of getting it right is paramount.

David Edelman [00:04:35]:

When I was hired as the first chief marketing officer at Aetna by Mark Bertolini, the CEO there, right out of the gate, he said, we have to be more personalized. Mhmm. We have to change what we're doing. And so part of the reason I was brought in, and this was back in 2016, was to bring a much more personalized approach, not just to marketing, but to customer experience, all aspects of communications, helping Aetna help people do healthier actions, all of that. And it required systems, process, strategy, but it was all around personalization.

Sara Payne [00:05:17]:

And I was gonna thank you for sharing the year. I was gonna ask what year it was that you started, 2016 at Aetna. So what are some of the key principles for delivering a highly personalized customer experience in health care?

David Edelman [00:05:30]:

Yeah. So the first is taking the viewpoint of the individual and what we call in the book, empower them. Empower me. When you're delivering personalization, you are implicitly making a bunch of promises to your customer because you're saying, I wanna deliver such a great experience through personalization that you are going to prefer my brand, and we're both gonna get value from that. But in order to do that, there's certain things I'm gonna make sure I do. So the first is to empower you, help you do something you could not do before.

Sara Payne [00:06:11]:

Love it.

David Edelman [00:06:11]:

And I'll give you a really simple example of this, which is I can help you understand your health plan. So let's start with that.

Sara Payne [00:06:23]:

Yes.

David Edelman [00:06:24]:

So one of the problems that I saw right out of the gate in terms of customer experience were how many issues we were facing because people didn't understand their health insurance. Most people don't. We did a survey. We did a survey, basic things like understand premium, deductible, coinsurance, co payment. What what do those mean? Eight percent. Only eight percent of people

Sara Payne [00:06:52]:

I'm not surprised.

David Edelman [00:06:53]:

Got all four right. That's one out of twelve. So that has that's a problem.

Sara Payne [00:06:59]:

It is.

David Edelman [00:06:59]:

That has implications. That means people are gonna do things that don't fit their health plan. They're gonna face charges that they didn't expect. They're gonna call into the call center and be frustrated. Nobody wins. Nobody wins. So we had to focus on empowering people to understand their health plans. And so we really focused down on onboarding.

David Edelman [00:07:23]:

When a new customer join when a new member, we call them members, joins Aetna, we wanted to not have them just get a folder with some pieces of paper or an email with all kinds of PDF attachments. We actually we worked with a company called Sunday Sky who had personalized videos. Mhmm. And these were not glamorous, really high quality. They're basic simple animations, but they were personalized. They said, Sara, this is your health plan. This is who in your family is covered. This is who has a primary care relationship.

David Edelman [00:08:02]:

Oh, your husband doesn't? Here are five PCPs in your area taking patients who are in network. Click here to make an appointment.

Sara Payne [00:08:13]:

Brilliant.

David Edelman [00:08:14]:

You you have children. You may wanna know that here are three urgent care centers near you. Instead of having to go to an emergency room, these urgent care centers are available and in network. And then we explain all the different economics and everything. 70% of people watch the three and a half minute video.

Sara Payne [00:08:36]:

Wow.

David Edelman [00:08:36]:

Calls to the call center went down by over 20%.

Sara Payne [00:08:41]:

Wow.

David Edelman [00:08:41]:

Net promoter score went up, and people started opening up more of our emails when we were sending them stuff because they started to trust us more. So that's about empowering them, about looking at personalization from the perspective of the customer to help them do something. That's where you gotta start.

Sara Payne [00:09:01]:

Love that. It's such a great example. Thank you for sharing that. I mean, I think it's no secret there's a lot of room for enhancing the customer experience in health care. Right? And and I think recent events really emphasize customer frustration around navigating a complex system and and and and increased costs over time. But that's just such a brilliant example. You know, you said, you know, relatively I'm sure a lot of work into it, but a relatively simple idea of taking personalized data you already have about that member base and putting it to action with a with a very customized, animation as you called it or or video animation. Brilliant.

Sara Payne [00:09:43]:

Let's talk a little bit about that fine line between personalization and privacy concerns? And sort of what is your perspective on how to deliver a more personalized experience while respecting that data privacy, you know, and and frankly complying with things like HIPAA?

David Edelman [00:10:04]:

Yeah. So some things are just basic mechanical guidelines on how. So, for example, even things like that video, it's two factor authentication to actually get to that video. So we're not just simply sending an e an email on the open Internet with an attachment. That's not where we're going. So there's a link to the site. You have to be authorized. You have to go through the authentication process, and then you get the video.

David Edelman [00:10:32]:

And anything we might have sent even through direct mail was going to be in a completely sealed envelope. The window on the envelope is just merely your address. Nobody sees anything. I mean, there's just basic blocking and tackling

Sara Payne [00:10:48]:

Yeah.

David Edelman [00:10:49]:

In terms of the execution that are just you know, there's no excuse. You just you gotta do that. So from a delivery perspective, we had to be super clear. But then there is the general issue. Even if you do all those things right, are people comfortable?

Sara Payne [00:11:06]:

Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

David Edelman [00:11:06]:

And, you know, things that I feel may help me may seem creepy to you. And so people have every individual has their lines in different places, but what we are seeing are are a few things. So this is so I'm gonna just divert and come back. When we wrote the book, b c I wrote the book together with the Boston Consulting Group, and we did research on people's attitudes towards companies using information about them. And what was interesting and it ended up the book took us two years to write, so we did two years of research. And 75% of people in The United States say they will give more business and have given more business to companies who use data about them appropriately. Interestingly, though, two thirds of people said they have stopped doing business with companies who have used information about them inappropriately.

Sara Payne [00:12:07]:

So use my data, but use it well.

David Edelman [00:12:09]:

Use it well. So that means when we reach out to you, and, for example, we know that you're a diabetic who has not had your levels checked in three months, and we wanna make sure you get your levels checked. We're not gonna send you a note that says, we know you're a diabetic who is not we're we're not gonna do that. Right? We're going to send you a private communication. So you get a notification that there's a message from Aetna. You look at the message, and the message encourages just simply encourages you to get your levels checked, possibly, depending on the nature of it with an incentive, maybe because it's Aetna with CVS, to go and actually do it in a CVS. And Sure. You know, there's different ways of doing this and, you know, all have to be within compliance, but we're not going to position it as saying, you know, we see your situation and, you know, you haven't done something you should.

David Edelman [00:13:07]:

We make the right kind of suggestions. We think about what's going to appeal to people in terms of their own health, their family, in terms of what their priorities are, and we do it from a point of view of helpful and connecting, certainly never a point of view of scold. So if you do it with the right tone and it's helpful and it gives people also a way to take action as opposed to just blurt something at them, then we find that the unsubscribe rate, negative feedback rate is negligible. Negligible. Plus, we tested everything on our own employee base first.

Sara Payne [00:13:50]:

Oh, great. Wonderful. Smart idea.

David Edelman [00:13:53]:

Yep.

Sara Payne [00:13:54]:

So the the results you shared in in this Aetna example, pretty impressive. And I imagine that kind of transformation in the customer experience and being able to do this work required some pretty strong buy in across the organization. In your experience, having done this not only at Aetna but with other companies, how important is it for customer experience to be this company wide type of initiative versus something that is just owned by marketing or owned by customer service?

David Edelman [00:14:32]:

It really is a top of the house strategy priority in every company. So one of the other things we did for the book was look at over 200 different companies who claim they were pursuing personalization. And we scored them on two dimensions. One is, did they actually have the capabilities to deliver personalization? And then what was the experience? And we surveyed their customers. We did mystery shopping. We did a number of things. And so we created a personalization index that could measure a company's prowess at delivering personalization. And then we correlated that with financial data.

David Edelman [00:15:13]:

Oh. And what became clear was that leaders, which was about 10% of the companies we spoke with, were growing at about 10% per year on average over the last four years versus laggards who claimed they were doing it but not really was zero to 3%.

Sara Payne [00:15:36]:

Wow.

David Edelman [00:15:37]:

Okay? And that was about a third of the companies. And then you had a middle that was about four to seven. So you have an imperative of growth. Growth is not something that just happens in the marketing department. Empowering customers and delivering a broader experience where you are essentially competing based on customer experience. Well, that takes marketing. It may take sales. It may take customer center operations.

David Edelman [00:16:06]:

Depending on the company, it could be product. Compliance is gonna have to get into the game. And so this is something at an executive leadership level. When I was brought in to Aetna, Burke Mark Berlini made it very clear to me that even though I was called chief marketing officer, I was going to have customer experience as part of my remit because they really hadn't had a formal focus on that, and he wanted to build that. And I had budget to get a team and get that going.

Sara Payne [00:16:35]:

A lot of that was really led and driven by you in that role. But, you know, obviously, having a CEO tell you this is a priority, David. Focus on this. Build a team on this.

David Edelman [00:16:45]:

Giving me a formal time in the executive leadership team meetings on a regular basis. So every three months, I had an hour, not just talking about the progress, but putting decisions on the table. There are trade offs. There are things we gotta problem solve together. And getting those discussions going, which really hadn't happened before, but now we could. And it really did take a village to get progress on things. Like, for example, spending doing the videos and spending the money to do it. Okay.

David Edelman [00:17:18]:

We, of course, tested it before we rolled it out broadly, but we needed to get buy in from the businesses in order to do that.

Sara Payne [00:17:26]:

And you did this for how many this these personalized videos for how many hundreds or thousands of members? Millions. Millions. Wow. That's just that's amazing. Kudos to you for that. When you say it takes a village, that I I I feel that for you. I feel that.

David Edelman [00:17:43]:

And when I work with other companies now, it's very clear that the kinds of things that they wanna do from a personalization perspective, even in b to b companies, which I'm now doing more and more work with b to b companies, that that requires a careful dance between marketing. Sales is super important. They may even have third party channels they have to align. Right. There's also customer success teams that they might have to have involved. So, of course, it depends on the line of business, but there's a broader coordination that has to happen and especially making sure that data moves across.

Sara Payne [00:18:27]:

I was gonna ask you that. You you just, previewed my next question, which is health care marketing leaders serve so many different audiences, patients, providers, sometimes employers, payers. And I was gonna ask if personalization looks different for b to b b to b versus b to c health care brands, and and if there's sort of anything to be keeping in mind when applying these AI driven personalization strategies, you know, for b to b b versus b to c?

David Edelman [00:18:58]:

Yeah. So there are complexities in b to b because what is the unit of personalization? Is it the company? Is it a particular buyer? Is it a user in a company? So there are strategic decisions you have to make that are a bit more complex. And from a data management perspective, keeping track of all the layers of householding, as we say, on a b to b level, is not as easy as on a cons even on a consumer, getting a household right is a challenge. But on a b to b, it's even more complex. I mean, just give you a very simple example. One of my clients, you know, has Fidelity, the investments company, about six different ways. There's Fidelity. There's FMR.

David Edelman [00:19:42]:

There's Fidelity Investments. There's Fidelity this. And, you know, that has to do with just some of the legal configurations of the company called Fidelity, but they buy what they buy all as just one entity. So, yeah, how do you household all that? So there's there's questions about that. There's also a difference because at the top end, you're gonna have more account based marketing where you're gonna have a more limited focus on named accounts, a lot of data and effort thinking very explicitly about those accounts, account managers, sales heavily involved supported by marketing. But then at the bottom end, it's gonna be more like the general consumer market where you're dealing with a lot of small businesses. You're doing that digitally. It's on a broad basis.

David Edelman [00:20:31]:

Increasingly, you're using AI to manage that. So it really depends on who your market is, but you often have, especially as you get to bigger accounts, more complexities in terms of channels.

Sara Payne [00:20:45]:

And I'm curious because you consult so many different organizations. Are you seeing now sort of more growth in sort of the b to b, personalization of the customer experience where maybe it was sort of trailblazed a little bit more on the consumer side, but is it really starting to to pick up more and more on b to b side?

David Edelman [00:21:04]:

No question. It absolutely is. And let let me give you an example. This isn't in health care, but, a good example from the book. So Cisco, the technology company, had salespeople. Every one of their salespeople is dealing with accounts where they're trying to sell over a hundred different products into that account. Okay? So and then they have multiple accounts, and they've got over a hundred. But how do they possibly stay on top of all of that? And so what the salespeople had been doing was the latest new product announcements, they would funnel those on to their customers, and the customers, most of the time, felt, well, this is an irrelevant product for me.

David Edelman [00:21:46]:

Why are you doing that? And they wouldn't get response. So they created much more of a CRM capability on steroids where they got data about each account. So what products was this account using? How many what's the profile of people using each of those products? Is the usage going up or down? Are there outside announcements we should know about this company? Are they opening up new offices? Are they buying anyone else? Are they spinning something out? New product announcements by the client. What content has this company looked at on our website? What has worked and what hasn't. And from all of that, using AI, create the capability to stack rank the suggestions for the salesperson of who to contact, about what, with which content, why. And then they would have a much more relevant set of interactions, and that led to a lot more customer engagement, much more personalized approaches, and impact the top line. So, yeah, that's helping the there's still a salesperson in the middle, although some of the stuff is going out directly in terms of marketing, but it was all intelligently coordinated for each account in a way that they just weren't before.

Sara Payne [00:23:07]:

Great example. Thank you for sharing that. We've talked about AI. We've made a lot of references to AI here, and I wondered if you could just sort of give a little bit more of an explainer on the role of AI here in helping to, you know, manage the data in a way that really power powers the this personalization approach.

David Edelman [00:23:33]:

Yeah. Sure. And let me use a company as an example, and I can show you the different levels of there's a lot of different ways AI is working. So a company that I've worked with called Ikerio Health. And IkarioHealth works with health insurance companies to manage behavior change programs. They focus mostly on Medicare, and they help companies figure out how to get members to do healthier actions so that the so that the company can get better health outcomes and get better stars ratings. So it's all a win win if they could pull it off. Yeah.

David Edelman [00:24:10]:

So Accario essentially white labels the behavioral marketing program. So they run it on a white label basis for company. And, for example, United, for some of their lines of business, United was their first client. So it's not just small ones. So let's go through thinking about this. So first off, a carrier has to figure out who in the customer base to to focus on, who to target. So you need predictive modeling, looking at all the data that you have about somebody and creating a prediction of risk because you wanna go after people who have the highest risk.

Sara Payne [00:24:53]:

Yep.

David Edelman [00:24:54]:

So first off, there's a predictive model there. But then what they realized, Ashley, is we need even more data than, traditionally, health companies had in order to even do that. So they used AI to integrate data, to actually write the code that could integrate claims data with marketing data, with call center data. And instead of having big CRM projects, you can actually have AI that looks at one database, understands its schema, look at second, understand the schema, and write the code to bring it together. So there's a company called Narrative that has a capability, but I carry out built their own. So they're bringing this together. So they're bringing the data together, more and more data, then they're doing the predictive modeling. Then they have to layer in, okay, if that's the case, what, what's the channel by which we wanted to how much value is there? Do we wanna call this person? Do we wanna just send an email? And so they have to really think about the economics of risk there.

David Edelman [00:26:08]:

And based on their experience of running programs, what's their prediction of what channels somebody will respond to? So first, it's predictive of who to go after, then the prediction of how to go after them. And then they use generative AI to come up with a whole lot of different creative capabilities, and then they have yet another AI to create multivariate testing. So instead of just a b split testing, they're doing a b c d testing to test a whole bunch of different things against different people to figure out the right way to get Sara to do what we want to. Because to get Sara to do it is gonna be different than David. And then they harvest all that data and use that to feed the AI models. I think I went through about five different AI capabilities that were in that cycle.

Sara Payne [00:27:01]:

Yeah. No. I appreciate you diving into that. I think it's super helpful, and, obviously, obviously, people can probably get an even clearer understanding of it within the book. Speaking of the book, we touched a little bit. I know you have, I believe, five is it five principles in the book? And I think we touched on on one, which is empower me. You wanna briefly go through, the other four?

David Edelman [00:27:26]:

Yeah. Sure. So once you decide how you wanna empower your customers, you have to figure out what do you know about them? What could you know about them? So they want you to know them appropriately. So you have to think very strategically. What data do we have about a customer? Is there new data we could create? Maybe we just ask them some questions about their priorities from a health perspective, for example. Maybe we ask them, you know, what how often do they wanna get do they wanna get updates on certain health ideas? Do they want certain things? How do they trade things off? So you could ask them questions. You can also, now with AI, harvest data out of call center interactions. What were people talking about? And that can become data.

David Edelman [00:28:16]:

So thinking very strategically about all the data so you gotta know them. Then once you know them, you wanna reach them appropriately. When I first came into Aetna, there were several different divisions, a lot of them overlapping, hitting the same customers. There were no regulators on what we were sending to people. Somebody could easily, easily get up to 20 emails a month that were not necessarily related. And you could see that the responding rate on emails, if you sent more than four per month, it just plummeted.

Sara Payne [00:28:50]:

Like Dropped off.

David Edelman [00:28:50]:

Great deal. So less is more. And so you've got a thing from a reach perspective. How do you wanna manage the timing, the volume, the cadence of communications with them? Then you wanna show them something that's relevant. And this is where the Sunday Sky personalized videos is a perfect example of showing people something that is personal that they can easily digest. They see the relevance for themselves, and they're much more likely to engage. And then the last is delight them by getting smarter and smarter as you test and learn, test and learn, test and learn. So empower me, know me, reach me, show me, delight me.

Sara Payne [00:29:35]:

Love it. So great. Thank you for that. Before we wrap up, they would love to transition, switch gears here for a few quick fire questions.

David Edelman [00:29:45]:

Ah, okay.

Sara Payne [00:29:46]:

What's one brand inside or outside of health care that you think is really nailing customer experience?

David Edelman [00:29:54]:

Well, there's the digital natives, that's certainly from, you know, an Uber, Spotify.

Sara Payne [00:30:00]:

Yes.

David Edelman [00:30:01]:

All of those have really done a lot in terms of customer experience, but there's also non native brands. I'm just gonna throw out a quick one. I know this is a quick fire, but people may not have heard of the other Sysco, the food delivery company.

Sara Payne [00:30:15]:

Yes.

David Edelman [00:30:16]:

When you open up the Sysco app to order, if you're a restaurant, they know within three hundred milliseconds who you are, your menu, your price point, how you buy. And if they have food in their nearby warehouse that they think could be relevant for you, they'll not only give you a discount, but they'll give you menu ideas on how to use that food. And it the people who use the Cisco app love it. They say it's mindless in terms of how easy it is. And Cisco has been growing at 50% faster than its competitors Wow. Three years since they launched the app.

Sara Payne [00:30:57]:

Wow. Another really great b to b example. Thank you for sharing that. What is the biggest mistake companies make when trying to improve customer experience?

David Edelman [00:31:08]:

That they start they don't think about empowering somebody. They don't think about it from the customer perspective. They're just looking for cutting costs. They look at it from an internal perspective versus so we might say instead of saying we wanted to focus on onboarding and educating customers, we might have said, how do we cut calls to the call center, and think about ways to put people into more automated ways of answering calls? And, you know, we're we're focusing on the cost managing that from an incremental fashion versus looking fundamentally at the customer experience and how to empower somebody.

Sara Payne [00:31:50]:

That's such a great point. So important. What's one small change that health care brands could make today to improve personalization?

David Edelman [00:31:59]:

So I actually think educating people better. I actually think the the thing we did with Sunday Sky and personalization videos, why can't you do that with almost any somebody's going in for a hip replacement. Give them a video. Help them understand what their journey is going to be. Great. And try to all the services that they would get. Help them understand who are the different doctors, the get physicians that they're gonna be dealing with across the health care, what's gonna happen when they come home. Like, why aren't we educating people upfront in a really easy to digest way?

Sara Payne [00:32:36]:

Love that. Great great recommendation. Great advice. AI in in customer experience, overhyped or just getting started?

David Edelman [00:32:46]:

I think it's just getting started.

Sara Payne [00:32:48]:

I knew you were gonna say that.

David Edelman [00:32:50]:

Yeah. No. But there's you know, it's gotta be done appropriately, but I think I do believe it's in the early stages. And there's just a lot of different ways of using it. Going back to my Icario example, you know, yes, some of it may be having smart chatbots that people talk to to get answers. I think you gotta be super careful in health care because of compliance and the risk involved. So I think you're more likely to see AI help a call center rep who then controls what happens. But then underneath that, you're going to have AI doing predictive modeling.

David Edelman [00:33:24]:

You're gonna have AI testing, which are the best videos that educate people. I just think all of these things to constantly drive improvement are just beginning to get traction.

Sara Payne [00:33:36]:

Last question. If you had to summarize the future of customer experience in one word, what would it be?

David Edelman [00:33:44]:

I've already said personalized, so I I I'm going to say easy.

Sara Payne [00:33:52]:

Oh, that's a good one. And and and kudos to you for not just giving me a synonym for personalized.

David Edelman [00:34:00]:

Easy.

Sara Payne [00:34:01]:

Well, David, thank you so much for for being here. I know I've learned a lot from you today, and I'm gonna do one more plug for your book. If you wanna hear more about David's amazing wisdom, look for his book on Amazon or wherever you buy your books. Again, the title is personalized customer strategy in the age of AI. And, David, aside from ordering a copy of your book, where can listeners either follow you, to follow your work or or get in touch with you?

David Edelman [00:34:26]:

Sure. Through LinkedIn. I have a very active presence on LinkedIn, a million followers. I'm posting all the time, and there's quite a library of material there. I'm also launching a community, more specific community through LinkedIn where people can actually share their experiences and build on some of the ideas that I'm putting forward.

Sara Payne [00:34:49]:

Great idea. I love that. Thank you so much. Yeah. And I can attest to it. He puts on a lot of great content on LinkedIn because I'm following him, and so I encourage you to do so as well. Thanks again, David. Thanks so much for being here.

David Edelman [00:35:00]:

Oh, my pleasure, Sara. Thank you.

Sara Payne [00:35:03]:

That's it for today's episode of the health marketing collective where strong leadership meets marketing excellence because the future of health care depends on it. We'll see you next

David Edelman [00:35:22]:

time.

Who Should Be Our Next Guest?

Contact us at HCMpodcast@inprela.com with your suggestions for guests who are making waves in healthcare marketing.

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