All Business is Personal

Transcript performed by A.I. Please excuse the typos.
00:00
Joseph Michelli, PhD. This guy is a New York Times bestseller. Let’s not iteratively improve the patient experience. Let’s blow it up. The real bottom line is emotional intelligence is still only in the realm of humans. I will continue to argue that empathy, if you search for it in AI, is only going to give you a definition of it and not be able to demonstrate it in practice. I could have a terrific clinical outcome and a terrible experience. And the reality is everyone in the organization should be aspiring to both.

00:29
Personal care means your outcome is going to be extraordinary and the way we treat you is going to be extraordinary because you are a person who deserves that.

00:42
This is Dental All-Stars, where we bring you the best in dentistry on marketing, management and training.

00:51
Welcome to Dental All-Stars. I’m Alex Nottingham, founder and CEO of All-Star Dental Academy. And with me is Joseph Michelli. Now, normally I don’t go through these long bio stuff, but for you, I have to read this verbatim. Not because of you, just because this guy is a New York Times bestseller. He’s got some, and not just that, the books are so relevant to what we’re talking about in dentistry. So Joseph Michelli, PhD. He’s a certified customer experience professional.

01:20
the author of 13 books, gosh, you one or two is a lifetime achievement. He did the book, The Rich Carlton Hotel Company, love that book. Mercedes-Benz, Starbucks, another New York Times bestseller. Zappos, Airbnb. So as I mentioned, in addition to being a New York Times bestselling author, he’s also a Wall Street Journal bestselling author. He has helped leaders and frontline team members improve the experiences they provide to colleagues and customers.

01:49
Joseph is an also internationally sought after keynote speaker. Absolutely. On leadership and human experience design. We’re so happy to have you Joseph Michelli. Welcome. You left out the two important things when I’ve been on your program before. I’m a big fan of yours. Those are the only two things you really need to have in the bio. Well, I’m just, I’m just starstruck. It’s you embody and you write about the stuff that we, we teach, you know, you’re, you’re the textbook, right?

02:19
You’ve always great business books. All right. And, and, I’ve interviewed some of the, you probably know about traction. You’re in that field. I interviewed their CEO and I mean, that’s the level you play on. So it’s always, it’s always fun to bring the people that write about it. It’s great. And study this. So you have another book that just came out and, okay. And yes, I’ll repeat. We’ve had Joseph on it several times and it’s been way too long. We got to have you more often. We’re ill. Okay.

02:48
but we’re so happy to have you. So this new book you have, All Business is Personal. Tell me a little bit, give me a backstory, educate me about what is this book about, your research and some of your key findings. Then we’ll go into some of questions that I prepared. Yeah, here’s the Cliff Notes version. I can filter for this company. Their CEO had previously been the chief operating officer over at UCLA Health Systems. He then went over, was the CEO for Stanford Health Systems.

03:18
And then ended up over at one medical one medical is a tech startup the startup was founded by a physician by the name of Tom Lee harbored trained Internist who also got his master’s degree in business from Stanford Business School So the guys got a few brain cells attached and he developed kind of early technology on the BlackBerry to take the physician’s desk reference and turn it into a digital product so that was his first claim to fame but

03:45
Beyond the technology tool, he decided he was gonna really try to reinvent primary care. And so he started in San Francisco, one clinic, and he got a bunch of technologists from the Silicon Valley and they said, let’s not iteratively improve the patient experience, let’s blow it up. Why is it that in traditional primary care, for example, people have to call for an appointment? This is about a decade and a half ago. Why is it that people have to wait in a waiting room and an exam room?

04:13
I mean, that just seems like double waiting. makes no sense. Why are doctors always running beyond time? Why can’t they manage their schedules more efficiently? Uh, and so he developed a experience where they, their app is phenomenal in terms of helping you triage your symptoms, helping you determine whether you need to just click a button and get treated now, or if you need to come into one of their clinics, which is, which are dispersed throughout the country. Uh, and if you can make any appointment you want on that app as well. And the provider comes to you from.

04:43
their treatment area to your waiting area and 97 % of the appointments are within three minutes of the scheduled time. So just some of the examples of the changes, right? Lots of same day, next day appointments and all of that made it as my buddies Gilmore and Pine like to say, an experience that people are willing to pay just to have. So if you go to one medical, you’re still using your health insurance. It’s not like you’re circumventing the reimbursement model that everyone else uses. You’re just willing to pay a slight premium.

05:12
to have that ease of access and those conveniences. And that premium started at $39 before e-commerce, it was strictly this. It was like, send us a check. And some people didn’t, some people didn’t. Now in e-commerce and moving forward to the $4 billion purchase of Amazon, it’s just a bolt on to your Amazon Prime. If you want that added feature, they’ll charge you like $9 or $10 a month to have access to this particular thing now called Amazon One Medical. Interesting. Oh, I’ve seen them promoting that.

05:42
That’s your client behind the scenes. And I love some of the things you talked about, like blowing up customer service, like not just trying to just totally like incrementally fix it. The issue with medical, so we’re talking dental and it’s in the healthcare space, dentists do a slightly better job than medical. There’s still lot of room for improvement. And if this guy can…

06:10
totally revolutionized this that you document in your book. Um, there’s hope right for, for others as well. So in, in terms of, uh, what were some of your, your, your, your findings in terms of this, or actually, you know I love to talk about? Like the, let’s start with the pain. What, what were people normally dealing with? And we can say medical and even dental, like in terms of the patient, the patient experience, and then how is, how is

06:40
how did they fix it? And then how can we translate that into, you know, a smaller practice or whatever that might be? Sure. think there’s several of them. One is the impact on the providers, right? So, okay. Desktop medicine, despite all of the beauty of an electronic medical record, have really, has still been a very big challenge. And if you look at providers, many of them were still practicing in their pajamas in terms of taking care of the notes.

07:05
So they were early adopters of using AI in the patient interaction space with permission to capture the interaction. And then the task was no longer having to pay attention to the patient and write things down on iPad or on paper, let that be done in the background, and then have your pass afterwards kind of quickly to approve and check. So some of the technology around that. The communication platforms, both again from the patient side and the provider side.

07:32
If I am in the app and I want a question about billing, I mentioned something about, you know, I don’t understand this charge. That’s being triaged by AI. That’s going to go in the administrative queue. If I mentioned sniffles, it’s going to go into the clinical queue. So a lot of that backstage sort of automating processes that required a delay for people to get communication, added burden required a human to be the kind of traffic cop for those sort of things.

07:59
And so removing a lot of those pain points, pretty important. I think on the other side of it, it really enabled patients to choose the experience they wanted. Being able to fly to another city and as I’m landing, if I have some kind of symptoms and I want to check it out really quickly, and then through a curated list of questions that it’s asking me, it kind of directs me to what my course of treatments should be. If I need to run to a clinic in San Francisco, let’s say I landed there.

08:28
It would direct me to the closest clinic and get me to the most convenient time If I just need to treat me now it immediately allows me to click on that button and I could get treated now and Treated by someone in state right like it’s kind of important because if it’s gonna need a prescription It’s gonna need someone in state to do that and then they can integrate with Amazon Pharmacy make sure that medication is to my hotel within the next four hours maybe at the worst case the next morning and I’m ready to go into the next event right and I think

08:58
What that means in dentistry is probably different, but I think the ideas are still the same. How do we reduce the cognitive load on the people who provide the services? How do we streamline the experience around people’s lifestyle on receiving the services? How do we curate information and content that allows people to self-serve where possible? One of the premise, and I love AI because this is part of it, and at first it was little scary, but even for this preparation for this book, it’s like, tell me what is…

09:28
Because you do so all your books are so in depth and and so rigorously studied and analyzed. But what I I liked about it, the premise, and we’ll see the AI got it right. Help me. Is that. Yes, there’s technology, but it’s not losing sight of the human touch. Right. And that could happen a lot. I think you and your technology did a good job with that summary statement. think that really.

09:55
point of it all, right? And you need both. Technology is going to enable us to do things, maybe not as promising as it looks really in the face of it. It’s going to take a little more time, think. Some of this idea of it’s going to draft all of our content for us, well, that may be true, and that’s a nice thing not to have to draft it, but you have to still go back over and read it unless you’re kind of an idiot and you just want to take your chances and gamble on what hallucinations might be in there. So you still have to oversee it.

10:23
But more importantly for me, it’s around let’s personalize through technology. Let’s understand your wants, desires, preferences, behaviors, all of that. Let’s get that right. Let’s message to you that way. Let’s build our experiences based on that. That’s all the personalization, but to make it personal takes a person. I mean, it takes a human to human interaction. And you know, when it’s leaving the, your clinic,

10:51
It’s that goodbye from a real human that communicates whether or not we appreciated you, we’re looking forward to seeing you authentically. No scripted AI, if we had a robot who was communicating those messages at departure, would be able to deliver that with a feeling state that drives an emotional connection. And that emotional connection drives lifetime values. So all these technologies, what they’re gonna do for us is make us more efficient and more competitive, and all of our competitors are gonna be more efficient and competitive.

11:21
And then the differentiator comes down to, did you care about me more? Because the technology will help me. You care for me more effectively, but did you care about me more? And did you demonstrate that through your human touch? I’ll, uh, I’m listening to what you’re saying. And, I’m thinking about even Amazon, which it was the acquirer is they’ll start you with AI, but if you don’t get what you need, they’ll get you to somebody probably not in the States, but

11:50
They don’t give you a hard time. They’re like, look, you have a problem. Uh, here’s your credit. I Walmart plus it’s like, this came bad credit. They know that why am I going to frustrate people unnecessarily? Does it make sense? Uh, and some of these, these big tech companies are investing more in, in, in the human touch when you know, you want to get to that point. And I think the fallacy or, or a, a, uh,

12:16
And this is a laziness upon some business owners. I’m just going to use technology as a firewall. And some companies have done that. A lot of utilities do that. It’s very frustrating. You don’t get a person. Uh, but it’s, it’s like all or nothing. Either it’s gotta be human person and they’re probably deficient or it’s gotta be technology, but it’s a way that I don’t want to deal with it. And I want to cost cut. But the question that you often go is like, all right, you’re, looking short term. How do you look?

12:43
in building a brand. That’s what, yeah, I gotta say, this is what you’re all about. Everything you’re studying are brands. These are stalwarts of what’s out there. And why do they have that brand? What do they stand for? And so I think that’s what I’m hearing you say. I really appreciate the credit on that. I mean, you know how to build a dental practice brand and you know how to make a brand promise and unique value proposition and the distinctions and the operational excellence needed to live up to that promise.

13:13
how to make the emotional connections. It’s just another overlay that I know you do as well, but it’s pretty much all I do. And I do it at scale and mostly Fortune 500 companies become mid-sized businesses, but it is all I do. Yeah, I mean, but what I love about what you’re doing is it’s showing, I love part of what I do. And as we talked about, my background wasn’t dentistry. You my dad’s story, right? Working for Tori Robb is those things. But I was gonna be in your space, either running one of those companies or being part of those companies and so on.

13:42
or consulting for those companies. But what I like to do is see how these Fortune 500 do apply to even the… And it’s interesting, some of these mom and pops are operating, okay, at a much lower customer service, not even close to some of these top players that you would think it’d be reversed. You’d think that they don’t care about customer service, they just want the bottom line, but they know you’re building a brand that people become raving fans for the situation.

14:12
with respect to that. So I will say this, and I think you were alluding to it, the hypnosis of, I’ll use a different word for AI, is we have to be very careful using technology as an escape to the human touch. So tell me a little bit about that. Can you expand? We all know about AI and some of the things it could do, but tell me about the human touch and why it’s so important and why are these big companies investing it? Yeah, and I love what you said, too, the firewall of technology. I mean, I think we have come to a place where

14:41
A lot of small businesses are using chatbots right now when they should be using humans, right? Like it’s the chatbot is not a differentiator that favors them. If anything, the AI program to the chatbots and the bigger players a lot more sophisticated than what they’re coming to the table with. So it’s just kind of a, like a rinky dink chatbot at best. And even then if it solves my problem, great, but you need to look at how often it resolves and how often people want to opt humans. So there’s that.

15:09
The real bottom line is emotional intelligence is still only in the realm of humans. I will continue to argue that empathy, if you search for it in AI, is only going to give you a definition of it and not be able to demonstrate it in practice. It may try to mirror what we think are empathetic responses, but in reality, I have to read you in the moment. I have to read your nonverbal cues in every single dimension of that. I have to be very savvy about what is cueing me on what likely emotions you might be having so that I could

15:39
step into your emotional experience. That’s where the word empathy comes from. And so to me, I just think we have to appreciate if there’s nothing uniquely human about us, then we will be replaced. And we might as well just kind of go on the beach and drink the umbrella drinks right now. Cause quite frankly, the value of humans has to be exploited to its maximum and oversee the power of being technology aided, not technology replaced. Tell me a little bit more.

16:08
about in this book, for example, where, and maybe some of the precepts around the importance of customer service, of the patient experience, of what’s behind that. We know AI, and by the way, you’ll find this kind of funny, and I don’t know if you want to comment on it, but AI looks like a real boy, like Pinocchio. And I’m like, wow, that’s a great response. And I’ll say to it, I’ll say, thank you for your empathy. I I feel it. And I’m like, are you alive or do you have a consciousness?

16:38
It says, no, I don’t. says, I just look at probably books like yours and others, and I’m parroting what other things have been said. so least it recognizes it’s not real. But there is something, there’s a lot of science behind that. So tell me, anyway, that’s just a side thing, who knows? But in your book, what are, again, this is a technology company, it got acquired, but you’re talking, the title doesn’t say AI tech, it’s all about,

17:07
Business is personal. Right. So what are some precepts around this? Yeah. And this, on the subtitle, we’re talking to human centered and technology aided, right? So it starts with human centered and that’s human centered design and technology and process in the way you teach your people to interact with folks is what is, what do the human and the humans in front of you need, whether that’s your team members, whether that’s business partners, you know, lot of the successive

17:33
One medical is that they integrated with healthcare systems in large cities as their base of operation, so they didn’t have to take that beachhead on their own. They developed partnerships where they were the primary care front door to specialty, know, highly integrated healthcare systems. And so there was a reciprocal benefit. The point of all of it is we have to figure out what do people want, need, and desire, the stated needs and the unstated needs. And then we can get some inferences from AI on that. And then we can get some ideas on how we might innovate on it. But we are the humans.

18:03
We’re the humans who really know whether or not that stuff makes it or not for us. And we need to test it. And we need to watch human responses. We need to listen to the data, maybe aggregated by AI. But then we need to make the final decisions about what are we going to invest in of all these different things we could do to improve the experience for the human in front of us. What is our highest priority? We can get guidance from these tools. But the ultimate decision should not be the tool.

18:32
defers their decision making to the tool, everybody’s decisions are gonna be the same, increasingly similar over time. So let’s apply this to a dental office. And you said human-centric or people-centric? Human-centered. Human-centered. So how would an office apply what they’re learning in the book about business personal and human-centered? What would be a thing not to do?

19:02
and what would be a thing to do? Yeah, I think the easiest thing to do is do empathy mapping. So empathy mapping, let’s say I’m the greeter, the entry person, recessionaries, what I would call kind of the in charge of first impressions. That person should look at the arrival experience and first universal arrival experience for everybody. Like what do people typically want, need and desire when they walk into this clinic? What do they see, feel, think, do, taste, touch?

19:31
What are their pains? What are their gains? Kind of analyze the fullness of their arrival moments. Then you can start developing that a little more refined. You might say, okay, what do families need when they come in? Or what do senior citizens need when they come in? Do we have different types of forms or documents if somebody needs larger print? I mean, it’s as simple as that. Take on…

19:57
their responsibility for that arrival moment and really walk through and think about the experience. Sometimes it’s decreasing the number of things that they encounter. How do we remove pieces of this experience that are cluttering the experience that are causing them to do more work than they need to do? So that’s the thing you should do. Like at a fundamental level, empower everyone in your organization to be the eyes, the ears of the core customer segments. And then over time, refine that to different customer segments as well.

20:27
What I like about both of these companies, what they do, mean, Amazon and One Medical is that they’re taking barriers away too. And I’m doing a presentation at our next event about systems, right? And so one of the elements of the system is to reduce stress and reduce barriers. And so I like what you’re saying is when you’re, whether you’re a fortune 500 or whether you’re a dental practice or a DSO, whatever that might be is

20:57
you’re saying, okay, let me stick with the human first and walk through the patient experience. What is it like? Would I like that? Would I like a chat box thrown in my face? Would I like to be on hold or have to push a button? What is it? Do I wanna fill out unnecessary forms? Look at every form and say, is that necessary? Is all of that necessary? And thinking about what their experience would do. I think it’s…

21:23
Why is it that- And then you have to say, okay, I like it. Oh, but would my son like it, a digital native? Maybe. True. Maybe. Let me check with my son. Let me develop a patient advisory council of some of my best patients that are representative in the entire sample. Let me create some exclusive events and some cool tchotchkes for them and some props on being in the insider’s advisory panel. And let me-

21:51
test some of these things occasionally before I actually run them up the flagpole. Let me test them with some of these patients who care about making my practice better. And I think if you don’t do that, then there’s those pulse surveys where you do kind of that. You’re trying to get a little pulse survey data from these subsets of it. You have to be careful about not over surveying. think we’re all fatigued with that now in our country. But the point is still the same. We’ve got to get some data that goes beyond our experience. But the starting point is we’re both humans.

22:18
And both you and I know that a chatbot that goes nowhere, whether you’re the most tech person or the least tech person, still goes nowhere. So that needs to be fixed. It might go somewhere farther for one than another. That’s interesting. And a few things that pop my mind. One is, again, some of these companies, Amazon is a tech company and they’re focusing, and this company that you documented is focusing on the human experience.

22:47
And they’re not normally interacting with the human like a dental practices. You have to touch them right now. Maybe in a thousand years or a few hundred years, the AI will do all that. Who knows? It will be a new overlords. But for now, it’s a human interaction. And we’re not getting rid of millions of years of evolution that we need that. And so I think that’s very important. And you made another good point too, is when you’re… Because you’re a researcher, dentists don’t think this way.

23:17
but that, and a professor, but the, you’re looking at making a decision about the human component is it’s not just what you think it’s different generations. Like newer generations, they want texts. Even myself. don’t want to, I like texts. That’s cool. It’s convenient. Some don’t. And you have to figure out what is your population base. Also, where do you, where are you in the country and, customizing, um, that experience for your constituents or who you’re trying to attract.

23:47
Yeah, I think we’re almost all going mobile first. think we know that even some of our older demos are still going mobile first because they’ve come to the ease of the smartphone. Like remember your first tablet and just, wow, you didn’t need a whole bunch of instruction no matter what age you were. It kind of was intuitively designed. That’s what human centered design does. takes, it makes it so that people are willing to use things that they might not have thought they were going to use because it really was intuitively created, created with them in mind. So I,

24:17
I think it’s really important for us to consider different demos as we evolve. But it’s also important to just kind of get a pretty ubiquitously good experience to start with for everybody and then start refining those subsections of your personas and your customer segments. So I’m ask you one last question here and then there’s anything else you want to add. So be it. And then I want to know where people learn more about you, get your books, all the stuff you have, your lectures and so on. And for those that are listening, I also have a lot of

24:47
lot of dental consultants and so on and other organizations that we partner with that are listening. As I mentioned before, this guy’s a keynote. He’ll draw. This is great stuff to learn about systems and customer service. So I want to put that out there. I know you’re so humble, but I’m not, so I’ll promote. So with respect to that. So in terms of this book, and I like this question here, in the world of automation and AI, and you may have touched on it, but I think it’s a good kind of summarizing all this.

25:16
What does all businesses personal really mean to all leaders today? So we have dentists, have consultants, we have, and so on that are listening, and just human beings being a leader. What’s the take home message for all that are listening? Care for me in the way that I need with my presenting problem. Create a great clinical outcome because it’s gonna matter to me.

25:42
a lot more than it even does to you because you create lots of clinical outcomes. This is my one mouth, right? And then I think the other level of it is care about me, care about the impact of what’s going on in receiving care from you. The way it happens, I could have a terrific clinical outcome and a terrible experience. And the reality is everyone in the organization should be aspiring to both. Personal care means your outcome is going to be extraordinary.

26:12
And the way we treat you is going to be extraordinary because you are a person who deserves that. Wow. You are so articulate. Oh, that’s what you do. Thank you, Joseph Michelli. If for those that are listening that and what are watching on YouTube or so on and want to learn more about you purchase books, attend speaking events, where can they find all your great stuff? I am shamelessly all over the internet. This was my name, you know, you’ve got my name in the

26:41
Show notes. I am Joseph Michelli. That’s what I am on LinkedIn. And that’s my website address, josephmichelli.com. So you get to any of those places, I promise I will personally respond, won’t have a chat bot involved in our interaction. I really appreciate that. No evil twins or doppelgangers out there, not in this universe. Many, many days I wish I had one of those, but I’ve kind of resorted to just leaving the world to me. Thank you. Well, thank you, Dr. Joseph Michelli for joining us.

27:09
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27:24
We hope you enjoyed this episode of Dental All-Stars. Visit us online at AllStarDentalAcademy.com.