A three year journey responding to customer needs

On this day, March 12th, three years ago we were notified of what was believed to be the first confirmed case of COVID-19—then mostly referred to as coronavirus—in our city, our company, our building. The next day, Friday the 13th, ~97% of my colleagues and I began working at home, not knowing when or if we'd return. That was among the many things I didn’t know was ahead as I packed up to leave for the last time for the next two years.

The weekend prior, a few of us were asked to stand up a special service team that could handle any "coronavirus" related needs. Our incredible IVR team quickly added call reason recognition for any words and phrases we could think of related to the virus and added routing logic to get callers to the new team. Our amazing knowledge and learning teams quickly crafted documentation and training materials to quickly ready members of the team. Our tireless workforce team identified call reps across geographies to tap for the new team and to plan the impact to call patterns.

This group collectively was able to pull this all together in less than 48 hours, over a weekend, with no notice, in time for a press release on Monday. It was only the beginning. 

A few dozen of us pulled together and formed 12 or so workstreams to organize our efforts to be ready to anticipate and help our members. That stretched us pretty thin because we all also had our day jobs in addition to pandemic response, so I began reaching out to anyone I knew across the company that might have people who could help. Besides any relevant skills, I looked for teams that may have capacity because they couldn't fully do all of their work remotely. Though some refused for various reasons, many jumped in to help, staying a part of the emerging program for the next several months. 

One of the workstreams we stood up was for basic needs. Food, transportation to medical care, detection and protection. For the first two, we already provided these to some members as part of their respective plan benefits. As a result, we already had partnerships with vendors that could assist, so we began devising plans to scale these. 

In parallel, both the newly created special service team as well as the existing call reps began hearing members mention on calls they were running short on food. The business intelligence team mined this feedback from the calls data, and supervisors shared it in daily huddles.  

So, at the request of one of the call center leaders due to the growing number of incoming calls, I pulled together several leaders from across the company at 7p, March 19th. Less than 24 hours later, our care management team began calling anyone who mentioned needing food. They offered 14 prepared meals, shipped to their homes.  

The following week, we stood up a SharePoint site for any employee across the company that became aware of a member in need to request the same 14 meals. We bootstrapped a fulfillment process that quickly broke due to demand exceeding the initial food partner's capacity. We added a second partner and adapted our process to split between the two. We exceeded that one too. We added a third.  

In less than a week, we were receiving over 2,000 unique requests a day, submitted solely by employees. For the first month or so, it was basically 4 of us operating what we invented, 7 days a week, often into the late hours each day. It was everything we could do to keep up. When the corporate communications team approached us wanting to do a national story profiling what we were doing, I pleaded with them not to. We were already swamped. Opening the proverbial floodgates could have resulted in far more demand than our tiny team could manage. 

We also faced internal criticism from a senior leader for not having “Amazon-like” order tracking, for quality issues when a delivery would get taken or damaged, and for the turnaround times for delivery by the quickly added partners. Despite those headwinds and criticism, we kept going, addressing and improving as best we could with our limited resources.

Then, a generous leader in Group Medicare offered most of her team to assist, which effectively quintupled the number people helping. A population health team offered help as well, but wouldn't be ready to engage for 3 months after we started. By the time we handed over the reins to them in late June, we had delivered over 850,000 meals. Over the next year and a half, the transitioned program delivered another 800,000 before shutting down at the end of 2021, for a total over 1.6 million meals.

We continued to adapt to new information from the CDC, the White House, the WHO. We continued to collaborate with teams—both inside and out—with which we had never worked before, providing emergency disposable masks, washable reusable masks, safety kits that included things like pulse oximeters, and loaded debit cards, all the while continuing to do our “normal” responsibilities of readying for the annual election period, shutting down a decades old platform with tens of thousands of users and shifting more needs to digital self-service to make service even simpler.

The book linked here was written by a former professor of mine, Gerald Kane , and colleagues of his, Anh Phillips with Deloitte , and Jonathan Copulsky , a senior lecturer at Northwestern University . Jerry had mentioned in a LinkedIn post before it was published that he was working on a book around COVID-19 response and how for some organizations, it had catalyzed a speed-to-impact much different than seen before. I reached out to see if he may be interested in including some of our stories. Turns out, he was already talking to a friend and colleague of mine, Brad Keller , whose team also did some unique things around pop-up workspaces and adapting existing ones to help with the pandemic response.

Ultimately, the stories Brad and I shared became part of the book that went to print in 2021. As a result of the timing of when it went to print though, it didn’t include some other things we did, including helping community members schedule vaccine appointments. We targeted the hardest hit communities, partnering with cities, states and organizations across the country. We reached over 2 million people, creating and recreating the program as vaccines slowly became more available and community needs shifted.

But the reason for mentioning the book is because of the prescience of one of my comments in it. 

“I hope the lessons we learn in this moment permeate other areas of the business; they’re not just for times of crisis. We’ve learned a lot of rich lessons, like our capability to act with speed and adapt to the changing needs of our customers. It is often easy to lose sight of what you just accomplished and move on to the next thing. I hope we internalize what we’ve learned from our response to be even better for what may lie ahead.”

Flash forward 3 years, roughly half of the people—from the executive team to the front lines—that I worked with on these things have moved on from the company, myself included. Some moved on by choice, others were forced out. Shortly after we wrapped the vaccine work mid-year 2021, I tried to pull together a cross-organizational lessons learned session to capture the best practices and codify into standard processes across the pandemic response efforts up to that point. Unfortunately, that was scuttled by my peers and leaders, with the reasoning being a combination of teams being too busy to devote time to it, and that for some, too much time had lapsed, making it likely they had forgotten much of it. Despite having had a leader fond of the Winston Churchill quote about not letting a good crisis go to waste, in too many ways we did.

That said, 3 years ago, I had no idea how much impact a handful of dedicated people could have for so many in such a relatively short amount of time. Being collectively and singularly laser focused on customer needs and combining that with creativity and tenacity produced astounding results.  Clinical teams engaged person-to-person with millions of members. Additionally, we helped hundreds of thousands of people who weren’t customers but lived in the communities we served. Though many of us involved have gone different ways, I’m certain we have all taken with us the valuable memories of what we accomplished together and how truly customer centered it was.

#coronavirus #covid19 #customercentricity #agile #agilemindset