Path to Customer Centricity: Sri Narasimhan, CVS

The Gist

• Igniting customer-centric culture. Prioritize customer feedback and embed consumer perspectives in all aspects of operations for a customer-centric culture.
• Empowering frontline engagement. Invest in frontline employee training and recognition to enhance customer experience and foster a positive work environment.
• Strategic integration of consumer centricity. Develop a clear vision and intentional approach to embed consumer centricity across all business units, focusing on measurement, action, and culture.

Dom Nicastro: Hello and welcome to CX Decoded. Dom Nicastro here, managing editor of CMSWire and we're here to talk about establishing a customer centric culture, something we all want to do, but it's difficult to get there takes a lot of work and that happens through igniting culture, acting on feedback, applying learnings. And here to do that for us, someone who's in the trenches doing it now for his company, Sri Narasimhan, vice president enterprise consumer experience for CVS. Sri, what's going on? 

Sri Narasimhan: Hey, Dom, thanks for the time, excited to be here and chat with you about this. And by the way, awesome job on my name, that is to use customer experience lingo and you have an LTR of 10.

Leading the Charge in Consumer-Centric Revolution

Nicastro: Net Promoter Score’s high already right off the bat, customer effort score is good. All right, that's a good start, Sri. Sri, you know, I think a lot of our listeners, customer experience, leaders are always fascinated to know how the team lines up within your organization, where you sit, who's around you, that kind of thing. So I would love to know who we're talking about, you know, how many people are involved here? And what are the primary objectives of your team?

Narasimhan: I'll start with a little bit of a vision for CVS. You know, Karen Lynch, when she took the job said that she wanted to be the most consumer centric company in healthcare. And around that she actually brought in a chief customer officer, Michelle Peluso to really ignite and drive that vision. So my organization as the head of enterprise customer experience sits in a central role within the organization and spans all of our different business units. So retail Aetna, Caremark, healthcare delivery, we cover it all.

And what I have in terms of structure is I have a group that's focused on measurements to making sure we take all the data, we get 17 million pieces of feedback, just from surveys around the company, all the social media data we get and other data that we would collect internally and making sure we drive action on it.

And then a big function I have is around what I call change management and strategy. But I don't think we'd be successful unless each of these business units aligned up and really leaned in with so each business we work with, has a function dedicated and the way I like to put it as we were so adamant and so forceful in our desire to be consumer centric, they created organizations to deal with us. But we have great partners in each of these businesses that are actually helping us drive change and really embedding this both in terms of improving operationally and embedding it in our culture.

Related Article: What a Customer-Centric Approach Really Takes

Empowering Employees Enhances Customer Experience

Nicastro: Yeah, and a lot of the recent conversations we had here on CX Decoded talked about the correlation between customer experience and employee experience. It's almost like becoming a core KPI or a core principle of customer experience is delivering great employee experience. And the CX people are the ones to do that. Because they have the data. They're good at data. They're good at analyzing data and making actionable outcomes out of it plans, KPIs, how much of your job would you say is employee experience?

Narasimhan: Yeah, you know, it's a great point, even if you walk into a store, and there's a positive energy in the store, and you can see the employees are happy being with each other, you feel that as a consumer, and you want to be there, you want to be a part of that experience. And I always say that no one walks into their job saying they want to do a bad job, right?

There's a ton of positive intent, you always have a why, for why you join an organization. And it's our job as leaders to help unlock that why, move the obstacles out of the way, so that you're really able to live that and deliver the best in class experience that I'm sure you wake up every day wanting to do and particularly for an organization like CVS Health, we're managing people's healthcare, this is an awesome opportunity to impact someone's life. And I think what we really focus on is creating the mindset where you're saying, I can't wait to help this consumer, I can't wait to help this patient versus Oh, man, this is another inbound call. So it's a huge part.

And one of the big things we've done culturally is really embedded, what I'd call service standards. And the focus has really been on things that everyone would know to do. But it's one of those things where if you reinforce and focus on it, you can create this environment and it becomes a part of your DNA. So I'd say a large portion of what we do is really trying to drive frontline engagement, frontline learning, but also this cultural aspect where we put the consumer at the center and really unlock the potential of those frontline employees through activities like service standards recognition, and making sure that we create a culture where you just can't wait to talk to the member or the patient. 

Related Article: 3 Ways to Improve EX and CX at the Same Time

Empowering Frontline With Service Standards

Nicastro: Yeah, that service standards concept is fascinating because it sounds like it's empowering the frontline to always have something to be measured by like, Hey, look at this example, that was part of X service standard, or Y service standard. Do you have any examples of what some of the service standards are?

Narasimhan: Well, there's a couple of different ways we approach it. One is just as an example, making sure that when someone walks in to our store, or calls into one of our call centers, that we always provide a warm greeting. And I know that seems simple. And you probably hear that all the time. But it does change the whole tenor of the call or the interaction, when you come up with that warm greeting. Now, everyone knows to do that. But it's one of those things where it doesn't hurt to reinforce because if you think about it, you have to be intentional about these things. And you have to actually say like, Hey, this is something that's important that we do every time.

You know, it's not necessarily something we want to create, like a stick around. So, you know, it's not like something we measure formally. But as we start training and practicing and embedding, you start seeing that become a core part of what people do. The other thing that I think is really important is we take a lot of pride in creating engagement between the consumer and our frontline employees. So through activities like closing the loop, we want to create a dialogue where you're learning and getting better in real time. So I think a lot of the best CX organizations do this, but we free the data, we get as much of that information to the frontline employee.

So they can learn, they can get better, they can adapt as they go. And it creates this sense of because you're seeing the feedback in real time. It creates this culture of wanting to deliver that great experience because you can see the result. And one of the things that we have that's I think tremendous is videos. And you'll see some of these videos, particularly from our specialty patients, where it's emotional, these are really complex conditions. These are complex situations that these patients are in, and our reps are helping them navigate that.

And just the way you hear the patient talk about the interaction with a rep is meaningful to someone like me, it wasn't even involved in the interaction. Now imagine if you're that rep and you're able to see the impact you have. It creates this positive cycle that perpetuates this feeling of wanting to be a part of that patient's life and wanting to really be a partner with them and healthcare, which is what we're driving towards.

Related Article: What Defines World-Class Customer Service Now and How to Get There

Frontline Employees Are Key to Brand and Service Excellence

Nicastro: Yeah, the front line and customer interaction is like the most important thing that happens in a company's day, isn't it? It's like more important than any board meeting. No offense to your team, Sri. Anything you guys are talking about on a Zoom or a board meeting, empowering those frontline agents? Is everything like what level do you take that because it can be a thankless job sometimes because the consumer is having a frustrating day, like you said, it's emotional, health care, very sensitive. And powering that front line. It seems like everything. 

Narasimhan: The way I always think about it is they are really the tip of the spear. And in many ways they carry the weight of the organization. Those individual interactions, millions of them that occur, to your point are, what develop and what create your brand and what create how you're considered and thought of as a company. So making sure those people are equipped again to tap into their why to tap into their positive intent. Because there's some of the best people we have organizationally, the more we can equip them and get those blockers out of the way, get those issues out of the way that prevent them from achieving and serving our customers in the best way, the better off we'll be. 

Related Article: The Best CX Lessons From Real Customer Conversations

Strategic Integration of Consumer Centricity at CVS

Nicastro: You have to build consumer centricity and you have to live behind that promise. So, you know, what are some of the ways that CVS is integrating this consumer centricity mission into every aspect of its operations? And how was the strategy being communicated and embraced across these different levels of the organization? You mentioned, like this new organizations being formed and stuff like that. So it seems pretty complex?

Narasimhan: Yeah, you know, it's funny when I took the role, the first thing I did was as a good corporate employee, I developed a four part plan. Just kidding. But that is actually we've been more so than any other organization I've been a part of taking a very intentional approach to trying to drive consumer centricity.

And I'd say there's really four things, we're focused on one, do we have a consistent view and measurement of the consumer experience across all the various touchpoints that we have? And as we came in the organization, that's one of the first things we did we said, hey, can we move to a consistent platform, a consistent way to measure. We chose NPS as our measurement. I mean, you can choose whatever I think is most meaningful to you. The reason we picked NPS is we felt like it was a higher standard than say, you know, any other transactional metrics, but we use other metrics too. And data to make sure we have a clearer picture of what the consumer is experiencing. 

Second, we want to, as we talked about already, drive that action at the front line. So democratize the data as much as possible to make sure that all of our frontline employees, corporate employees, everyone has access to what the consumer is feeling and what the consumer is seeing. So that we can make really meaningful change, coach at the frontline, learn at the frontline, but also from all of our employees across the organization, embed the consumer in what we're doing. 

The third part I think, is really solving pervasive or systemic issues. Across the organization, we've got partners that we've built and developed, we have what we're calling out, it's a dirty word sometimes in corporate America, but SteerCos where we have actually brought these are the primary issues consumers are facing, what are we going to do to address it, and making sure that we have plans and there's been 100 plus initiatives across the organization where we are actually going to take on and address consumer feedback and make sure that we're taking care of all the systemic roadblocks that are in the way, process issues, etc, that we come across. The way I like to say it, Dom, is consumers are the best mirror. If you're looking in the mirror, and you're looking for ways to get better, there's no better place to live than a consumer and their feedback. So we've really embraced that. 

And then the fourth part is cultural. So building a culture of recognition, not just talking about the problem, so many organizations just focus on the problems. I think it's the way we're all wired. We're making sure that when we deliver great experiences, we're telling the agents or the store employees, great job, amazing, we create that culture where they want to do that, they want to feed that.

And then also just making sure that, like you said, when we think about culture, putting the colleague and the consumer together, and creating that interplay and that interaction that's meaningful, so that, again, you build that virtuous cycle. So we've taken a really deliberate approach. I think we've had pretty good success so far, obviously more to do. But if you're going to approach consumer centricity, you mentioned it right up front. It's a complex problem. It's something everyone talks about, you better have a real formal definition and a real formal plan. I think we've done that. And excited to see as we continue on that journey.

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Unveiling the Reality of Customer Experience

Nicastro: Well said, you know, and those four pillars, I want to go into that first one, data and analyzing that data, collecting it and making sense of it. Because I think a lot of times when you look at customers, if you've probably searched customer experience images, right on Google, you're gonna come up with a smiling front desk person and shaking hands, right? Here's the reality of what customer centricity and customer experience is, you're looking at data all day, right? And trying to figure out what your consumers are telling you through that data. So I want to ask you, the tools that your team deploys, like, what are some of the tools that you're using into you don't have to, you don't have to name the vendor name, but like, just the general concept of the tool? Is there like a central data repository that you're looking at? Or is it a little disparate? That's the reality, and you just kind of have to combine these tools and try to make them integrate and work together?

Narasimhan: First of all, I'll tell you, my parents are both scientists. And when I told them, I work in customer experience, you're totally right. I think they imagined me as one of those stock images of calling customers on the phone. But you're right, it's a very data centric role. And data is really critical to everything we do. So we use a single survey platform to send and receive feedback, right, we are on the Medallia platform. One thing that we thought was critical is to make sure that we standardize that across the enterprise. And one of the key things I'd say is that the act of soliciting feedback is in and of itself an interaction.

And you want to make sure you're doing that consistently because consumers know, increasingly that Caremark CVS, Aetna are the same company. And so we want to make sure that we have a consistent approach, both in terms of the look, feel and how we send the survey, but also in terms of the data we're collecting, so that we're able to really understand the touch points across our consumer base consistently. So that's just a survey feedback. And like I said, we receive as an inbound receiver on 17 million pieces of feedback annually. So huge survey program that we run and operate. One of the key things we do off that survey program too that I think is a really critical components closing the loop.

So following up with consumers after they send us a survey, to learn more, the way I describe that, as the people doing those closing interactions are kind of like root cause analysts. A lot of times consumers aren't going to talk in the language uses internally. They're just going to say, X, Y and Z was terrible. Now that's not particularly useful for us. But when we have the agent, look at it, follow up and understand, it'll say, oh, yeah, that was related to this policy, or this procedure that we had and then we can look at those policies and procedures and get better. So we really want to leverage the voice of the customer through the employee through our closed loop program. 

The other things we do we look at lots of data, we're looking at digital session data, call transcripts, social media data, and just SharePoint around desperate data. I think the way this industry is moving is consumers are telling you their experiences empirically, almost to the point where you don't need to ask. So we are moving more and more towards predicting those experiences.

Because we know that if X, Y and Z happened, traditionally, you're going to be a detractor. So we can understand that and measure X, Y and Z without even asking you and follow up and get to you without even sending you a survey. So we're increasingly looking at other sources of data to help drive our decision making. And yeah, we do, we pull it all together that platform around our survey feedback is excellent. But where we really find the value is enriching it with all the operational data and information that we have organizationally, so you can really drive change. 

One of the things we do in our call centers, we link NPS satisfaction to call time. And one of the things we saw is that after a certain cut point in our call center, that NPS declined dramatically. So what we did is we actually created a safety net acting on that where the supervisors informed when you hit that cut point. And they'll reach out to the agent and say, Hey, is everything okay? Do you need any help? And the agents love it, because they know now that they've got this net behind them, if they're on a complicated call, and it's just a proactive way to combine data sources and act on it. And driving action is really a critical piece of this, to make sure that we're driving the best experience. So we're doing things like that all the time, to try to make the most of all these sources of information that we're getting from consumers. 

Related Article: Customer Understanding: Harmonizing the Depth and Breadth of Research

Employees Are Key to Enhancing Customer Experience

Nicastro: And that is an absolutely critical example of employee experience meeting customer experience, you're literally inside of a call using your customer data to inform your employee that something might not be going right. And you're right involved in the middle of that transaction with the consumer in real time. That's powerful. Like if you can do that. And that means you're walking the walk with employee experience meeting customer experience, to that effect, do you actually tie in things like EPS, right, your Employee Promoter Score, things like that? Is that something your team handles? Or is it more like on an HR side of things?

Narasimhan: So we partner with HR, HR runs those survey programs? Well, what we do though, is we leverage that data heavily. And I think you're right, that connection is really critical. And one of the examples I'll share is that, again, both in our call center in our stores, when you see a new consumer interact with a new rep, experiences tend to be poor, when you have a new consumer system and new to Aetna. They're trying to learn, they want to learn about how everything works, and how do they actually access their coverage.

If you put them with a new rep, who’s also learning makes sense, right? Those are going to be poor experiences. So can we actually get smart about that and move like a newer rep that we know is probably looking for more information about what they're getting in their plan with someone who's more seasoned, who understands all that nuance. So those are the other things we look at all the time, it's more like also, in addition to the employee engagement data that you're referencing, the empirical data.

Another quick example, if you look in our stores, stores that have challenges with attrition, typically have a lower NPS. And so what you want to do, because you know, you're moving employees in and out, so you want to look at that as a root cause of the problem. So what can you do to solve that, and we work leadership all the time, because we monitor that to say, hey, like, you know, if we can solve that problem in the store, it will CMPs improve. So taking it a step further beyond just as employee engagement scores, which we work with a ton. We're trying to get also to some of those operational metrics. So again, it becomes more actionable for us as we work with the field.

Related Article: Why Organizations Should Care About Employee Engagement

Net Promoter Score: The Northstar Metric for CX

Nicastro: Yeah, there's a lot of CX leaders out there that obsess over, you know, a couple of metrics, couple of KPIs. It sounds like you guys are doubling down on a lot of these metrics. But is there something that you and your day like every quarter, you really are bearing down laser focusing on one or two or two or three KPIs? Like, is there something that stands out? That really drives a lot of your decision making over these kind of subset KPIs? Like these are the little ones we do care about, but they're not really driving? A lot of? So what I'm getting at is what are the main KPIs for you?

Narasimhan: Yeah, it's a great question. As I mentioned, I'm a pretty data centric guy, came from a family of scientists. If you're asking for me, I use like, I use multiple KPIs. But organizationally, it's important that probably communicate a North Star. Right. I think if you're going to drive this consumer centricity change, picking a Northstar metric is critical and I think a lot of people get caught up in what is that metric.

And frankly, my opinion, Dom, is you pick one that you like, and you stick with it consistently, because that's what you need to rally people around. And for us, that was Net Promoter Score. It's something that again, we felt like the standard was higher, because what's the most common complaint about Net Promoter Score is, you're asking about the brand, not about me, or the experience I delivered. What I often say to people when they get that is, well, don't we all own this brand. We all own it together, right. So it creates a more of a sense of community around the experience and aligns people to the broader challenges. So it's not just like this is the contact center score. This is the store score.

When you're dealing with NPS. It's our score, and you can rally your organization more dramatically to improve experience. So NPS is our North Star. A few of the others, though, that we look at and are increasingly looking at, are things like churn. If we look at our extra care membership and the front store, we're looking at things like the links in terms of utilization and claims and Aetna and Caremark we're looking at metrics around the refill experience. So we try to, I think you're hearing a consistent theme for me.

We love the survey metrics, we think they're really important. We're enriching that as much as we possibly can with the consumer metrics that we collect as an organization. Because I think you want to get a balanced scorecard view. So ideally, you have NPS and some of these other critical metrics that link to experience all in one place.

So that you really get a balanced view of what's going on in your organization. So kind of a combination, NPS is our North Star. But we use a lot of the business KPIs as well, especially those that we have discovered that link to NPS adherence is another example, to make sure that we have as much of a view of the consumer holistically as we possibly can.

Related Article: Net Promoter Score: Top 3 Impactful Trends

Frontline Agents Transform Challenges Into Positives

Nicastro: All those layers, you talked about baked into what the NPS outcome is. And I think the best example you mentioned was that you're correlating NPS into these calls in real time, and delivering kind of an outcome or a pivot, right, you're delivering a pivot. And those agents, those frontline agents in the call center, they need support, man. Yeah, it's a thankless job sometimes, I mean, I can say it over and over again in this podcast, but no one calls a call center to say, hey, just letting you know, I'm really happy and you're doing a great job. Goodbye, right?

Narasimhan: I mean, I tell you too, just because what you said resonates so much with me, I've been on these calls listening. And I don't know if I could do that job, the amount of anxiety I would feel when you have someone with a real serious problem calling you and you're trying to address it, and you're doing everything you can to find the answer, and they're impatient with you. I marvel at our people, they are some of the best. And I marvel at the fact that you could have someone coming in so hot, and leaving so happy. And they do it time and time again. And it's one of the most impressive jobs and fields out there just in terms of that skill, turning a negative into a positive or a challenge into a positive. It's incredible.

Related Article: AI in Contact Centers: Championing Your Agents

Building a Culture Centered on Consumer Experience

Nicastro: Yeah, one of the foundations of your customer centricity effort is building that culture. And I can never figure out culture, I'll be honest, you know, it's hard to measure like, you know, culture score, like how do you do that? So what ultimately are you trying to get at when you talk about building a culture of customer centricity? You know, I've heard people say things like, oh, this employee is a great fit into our culture like, and that sounds like kind of clannish to me, right? Like they are part of our culture. You want people that are unique and different, and bring different aspects to your culture and challenge you a bit. But anyway, like, what does it mean, in terms of consumer experience? And culture? Like how do you how do you guys view that? How do you get there,

Narasimhan: You make a really good point, you don't want to make culture, this box that everyone fits into, right? And I think that, you know, American society, you want diversity, you want people that are bringing different experiences, challenges and skills to the table. For us, I think if you're talking about the culture, we want to build across our entire organization. It's really straightforward to me, it's putting the consumer at the center of everything we do.

And I think what you see is a lot of people think they're doing that, or trying to do that, but maybe need that framework or that sense of what does that actually mean, to help drive that and, you know, I'll give you an example. I see organizations all the time, develop products, and then push that on the consumer, right? You see it constantly. It's like, Hey, I made this product. How do we market it to the consumer? I think what we want to do, and we're trying to do increasingly, is embed that voice of the customer into a lot of those decisions we're making both in terms of our product development or operations, how we approach, you know, our day to day, we want to start with the consumer and then build the process. And some of that's going to take some time to unwind because organizations across the world have always started with the product.

But I think like, that's where we're going. It's Hey, like, it's awesome to see across the organization especially our Caremark businesses. You know, I'm just thinking about some of the processes we built, where we actually come to the table and say, like, hey, is this actually the optimal consumer experience? And it's really interesting in some of the recent initiatives I've been in, the first thing people talk about isn't expense reduction, it isn't operational efficiency. When they're talking about these initiatives, the first thing they say is NPS consumer experience.

Second thing, right, or one A is colleague experience. And that's what we want organizationally, we want the first metric you think about to be the consumer. Because ultimately, I think that's what drives growth. And that's what drives all the things that we want as an organization, all those financial impacts that comes from that. So that's it. I mean, I think it's a complicated question. I think our answer is simple. We want to put the consumer at the front of everything we do.

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Deep Dive into Customer Centricity at CVS

Nicastro: Well, I'm happy, Sri, to be on the advisory board, because I'm a customer too you know, CVS, we go there. And I'll tell you, sometimes you guys don't have those extra peanut butter, Reese's hearts that my wife likes, you know, because I like to put those next to the medicine when I check out. And you got to step up your game with those.

Narasimhan: I'm already on the phone, Dom.

Nicastro: Dom Nicastro says, Hey, this has been such a nice deep dive into you know, how you guys operate and how you look at customer centricity. I'd like to just wrap it up with like, you know, your one big takeaway, like someone listening to this saying, hey, you know, this all sounds great. We want to get off the ground doing something like this, something where we have, you know, four or five pillars of customer centricity. And we trickle that down to the frontline, how do we empower our teams to do it? So if you're talking to someone similar in your role, like a chief customer officer, VP of customer experience, you know, what's step one? Where do they get going?

Narasimhan: To me? I think it's, I start with intentionality. So start with the vision, what do you want to be? I think that came for us from the top of the organization. And I think that's also really important building alignment from the very senior leadership that you have. I mean, for our, in our case, it's, you know, Karen Lynch, and Michelle Palusa the top top of our org, build that vision. And then I think you have to be intentional about your approach. Consumer centricity is a huge buzzword out there.

And I think buzzwords, if you don't have a really deliberate plan, you often can lose the messaging and lose the focus that you need to actually embed this organizationally. So far. In our case, it was those four pillars I laid out, be consistent about how you measure, democratizing information and data, solve those pervasive issues, and then build up the virtuous cycle through culture recognition, service standards. So I think those are kind of the critical places to start. 

I'd also say I think, another thing for me, big learning for me is being nimble with the organization, particularly in a place like CVS, different parts of the organizations will be at different levels of maturity, as you go through this. So it can't be a one size fits all, for every group you work with. You have to meet them where they are, to some extent, and drive them forward in the way that will be most effective to that organization. So your messaging, the way you talk about the way I talk to retail, might be different in the way I talk to Aetna or Caremark just because they're different organizations, and they listen and respond to different messages.

And then the last piece I'd say that I think hopefully came clear in this is yes, you want to North Star metric 100%, you want to pick one, to rally people around, but you have to be able and willing to use all the disparate sources of information and data that you have coming in. Because I think CX as a discipline is a very data centric discipline. And the way that you actually achieve change is through data based, actionable recommendations. And one of the things we didn't even hit on is even leveraging customer comments and all those unstructured data elements that you bring in, we use heavily use text analytics.

You want to make sure that you have a really strong plan to give database recommendations. Because I think often CX gets thought of as kind of soft and squishy. It's not. To me, it's very focused day to day discipline that's really designed to drive operational change. And I'll add one more I know so that was the last one but one more can consumers are the mirror, listen to the consumers, but you can't just listen. Because there's nothing worse than just listening and not doing anything. You got to act. And you got to build the mechanisms and process for action.

Nicastro: Well, Sri thanks for the wrap up. Thanks for letting our listeners and myself into the behind the curtain of how CVS looks at consumer experience and customer centricity. And also, thanks for having a conversation fit for the dinner table with your family of scientists, because it's all about data. And if it was just customer experience and handshakes and smiles, I think we tune out your family pretty fast. So they want numbers and math.

Narasimhan: Thanks a lot, Dom. I appreciate the time. It's a great conversation. I love learning from you too. And it was great to hear your perspective, you gave me a lot to chew on as well.

Nicastro: Same. Have a good day. Thanks for joining us on CX Decoded.

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