Compared to the rest of the country, Saint Luke’s Health System’s metro-market for healthcare is extremely competitive, with many major systems and hospitals competing for market share. As noted by St. Luke’s marketing communications director, Matt Tidwell, “The hospitals here spend literally millions on consumer advertising—so every opportunity to build revenue is extremely important.”

St. Luke’s assigned Matt the formidable task of revamping the customer contact center for the $1-billion, 11-hospital network. His challenge: to increase customer satisfaction levels and drive referrals for higher-revenue services. Matt says, “One of the very first and most important things that Lori Carr did for us was to help make sure we had the right people on board.” This called for improving center representatives’ training and mindset for generating referrals.

When collaboration with Lori and her team was initiated at the first of the year, Matt points out that a “good month” meant that 10% of calls to the center were converted into referrals—but by July, that outcome improved dramatically, to 24.5% of calls. “We saw immediate results from the new platform and the skilled team that Lori helped us to build,” Matt said.

St. Luke’s has since maintained a customer experience ranking as one of the top two healthcare organizations in its highly competitive area. Matt concludes, “So at the end of the day, it was really important for us to broaden our customer view, focus on the strategic, move beyond the tactical, and get to those key marketing objectives that were going to move the referral measures for us in the direction that we needed.”