Explore Key Considerations for Scaling Relationships
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Identify key considerations in scaling relationships.
- Describe how technology helps build relationships.
- Describe how technology can harm relationships.
Relationships Help Organizations Thrive
Relationships are the center of what helps organizations achieve sustainable success. Even if organizations create high-quality, in-demand products and services, it’s difficult for organizations to thrive without strong relationships with customers.
In the Relationship Design module, you learned that relationship design is the creation of experiences that foster ongoing engagement and strengthen connections between people, companies, and communities over time. This means that relationship design helps organizations create user experiences that build better relationships between their business, their customers, and greater society.
But what happens when the number of relationships you’re building and nurturing far outweighs your ability to provide authentic and personalized communication? This is where technology’s innate capacity for scale can help. Automated chatbots, for instance, can take an enormous weight off the shoulders of human customer service agents.
Yet it’s important to involve careful and intentional thought when you use technology to scale relationships. In this module, you learn about the key considerations for using technology to scale relationships, including how you can do it responsibly.
Let’s begin by exploring the key aspects to consider when you want to scale relationships with technology.
Key Considerations
As you begin to think about or enhance your plan for scaling relationships with technology at your organization, it’s key to consider:
- What kind of relationships you want to build with customers at scale
- How technology can enable these types of relationships
- The associated benefits and trade-offs
Let's check in with Bloomington Caregivers to understand how organizations can apply each of these key considerations when thinking about scaling relationships.
Ready to Scale
In the Values-Driven Design module, we learned how Bloomington Caregivers—a home healthcare agency in Bloomington, MN—brought a new mobile app to market. The app helps customers experience more efficient and accessible outpatient care after doctor visits at Bloomington Caregivers’ new family medicine facilities.
Bloomington Caregivers uses the practice of values-driven design to center its design process on its core values. This helps ensure that the agency actively expresses inclusivity, customer success, and accountability in its products and services. Now Bloomington Caregivers is ready to scale these facilities across the greater Minneapolis region to over 20 locations in the Great Lakes region.
To build patient relationships at this larger scale, Bloomington Caregivers knows that it needs to use technology. But before Bloomington Caregivers launches into any implementation plans, the agency takes time to consider the key considerations covered earlier.
What kind of relationship do you want to build with customers at scale?
Bloomington Caregivers wants to scale while effectively maintaining the high-touch accessible treatment patients have come to expect. This means preserving the ability to be a responsive team that prioritizes building trust with patients and providing them with access to after-care services wherever is most convenient for them. So Bloomington Caregivers focuses its scaling efforts on being convenient, accessible, responsive, and trustworthy.
How can technology enable this type of relationship?
Bloomington Caregivers can use a chatbot, artificial intelligence (AI), or even AI-powered chatbots to deliver convenient, accessible care to patients that’s responsive to patients’ needs and builds trust. This includes giving patients the option to chat with a provider or leave a message if the issue is something a tech-enabled conversation can’t resolve.
Bloomington Caregivers can also use an in-app scheduling feature to make it easy and efficient for patients to set up annual, sick, and follow-up visits with their trusted providers. What's more, Bloomington Caregivers already has plans to set up kiosks at each location, responding to patients’ needs for a convenient and accessible way to use its services, including those who don’t have access to a mobile device.
What are the associated benefits and trade-offs?
Bloomington Caregivers enables patients to preserve their relationships with their trusted providers while scaling through these various technology options. Patients have convenient and accessible ways to receive after-care services with the opportunity to share questions directly with their provider or a member of their provider’s team.
Yet, although Bloomington Caregivers can use technology to maintain and build trust with its patients, the trade-off for scaling with technology can be challenging for such a patient-centered practice.
For example, both patients and providers at Bloomington Caregivers benefit from consistent communication about patients’ healing or treatment processes. Using tech, even with the option to connect with a provider, may decrease the frequency of these key conversations because patients may be hesitant to share personal details outside the setting of their trusted provider’s office.
Next, let’s explore how using technology to scale relationships helps build relationships and examine the potential ways it can harm them.
Scale to New Heights
When implemented with careful thought, technology can help organizations scale relationships to new heights. Yet it’s important to keep in mind that technology is just the gateway to relationships. Technology is a tool, and, as with any tool, organizations can use it to help them reach their goals, but it won’t do the work for them.
Technology won’t replace face-to-face or individual relationships. Yet it can help with geography, time, and scale challenges. For instance, in addition to tech-enabled chat features, organizations can use various communication technologies such as video conferencing or asynchronous messaging to bridge communication gaps across time zones and countries. What’s more, technology enables organizations to build relationships at scale through social and online learning platforms that connect users with them and each other.
Still, it’s key for organizations to be realistic about what it takes to maintain the relationships at this scale. Organizations need to define what quality, tech-enabled relationships look like for the groups of people they’re not always available to support personally. For example, organizations may decide to invest in creating videos so they can still create emotional connections while amplifying their reach. Or their values might suggest that emotions aren't as important as efficiency, so they use a bot or an app to scale speedy service.
Bottom line: If organizations don’t take the time to make key considerations before implementing technologies at scale, they risk harming their relationships with customers, communities, and greater society.
Major Mistake, Major Harm
In a recent example of how technology can harm relationships, a major healthcare company came under fire when it removed customer’s direct access to its doctors and replaced it with access to a broader team of nurses led by a nurse practitioner. This decision was in an effort to increase the speed and efficiency in its service to patients and shift away from patients seeing a solo doctor with limited time to spend with each patient. In this case, the company prioritized service efficiency, but it learned that relationships and trust were more important to its customers.
Through the lens of the key considerations we learned about earlier, we can think of the kind of relationship the company was building and the associated trade-off. The type of relationship was personal (between doctor and patient), which was also the biggest trade-off.
When the company removed patients’ access to this important relationship, it did serious harm to its relationships with customers. As an alternative solution, the company could have used tech to bolster this relationship. For example, they could automate scheduling follow-up visits and related insurance procedures or add new ways to connect through technology, such as scheduling e-visits for follow-up appointments, to strengthen and build this relationship.
Organizations can do serious harm if they don’t apply great thought and care when using technology to scale relationships. And when they do, everyone—organizations, customers, and society—wins.
Next, we explore how organizations can use technology responsibly to scale relationships.